The ideal knife practically does the work for you, creating clean cuts with minimal downward pressure. In our testing, we found that thin knives usually got the job done best.

Your knife should have enough heft to cut through foods that have a firm exterior and delicate interior. A too-heavy knife, however, will be cumbersome to wield.

A serrated knife is defined by its toothlike edge, but there are a few variations on the design. A serrated knife can have rounded, scalloped teeth; pointy teeth; and even double serrations that feature a combination of the two. While scalloped teeth might seem like the least effective option, our testing proved that this is not always the case. In fact, knives with teeth that were too pointy risked snagging and tearing on bread interiors or tomato flesh.

We considered the knife as a whole—from the tip of its blade to the end of the handle. We looked for knives that had ergonomic handles that fit the natural contours of our hands and paid attention to the balance of weight between the handle and the blade. We wanted a knife that felt hefty enough to give us proper leverage when slicing hardier loaves, but not so heavy as to become unwieldy.

The ones we picked above were the most stable and comfortable to hold, the easiest to work with, and they made the cleanest cuts.

This bread knife from Made In is beautiful to look at, but wow is it heavy. The knife’s thick spine made it tricky to maneuver; it struggled to cut neat slices of tomato; and its scalloped teeth weren’t sharp enough to avoid snagging on thicker sourdough crust. Add in a premium price tag, and this knife is bumped out of our top picks.

Global’s great knives have won the hearts of many a BA staffer. That said, their metal handles are divisive—some people think they’re comfortable to hold and others find them too thin and slippery. While our testers say this knife is well-balanced and decently sharp, they ultimately disqualified it from our winners list due to its handle shape, short blade length (8.5″), and less-than-perfect performance in the tomato test, where its large teeth snagged just a bit on the tomato’s flesh.

The Opinel Intempora fell short—in some cases, literally—in a few areas. Its small 8″ blade doesn’t allow you to cut through sourdough boules without changing the slicing angle. Its teeth weren’t quite as sharp as we’d like either. The Opinel didn’t mangle the tomatoes (a win!), but we had difficulty keeping the blade straight—the knife snagged on the fruit’s core, creating wobbly, inconsistent tomato slices. We do like the round polyurethane handle and the high-quality high-carbon stainless steel, but we expect better performance from a knife of this price.

This is a beautiful knife (just look at that gorgeously curved handle grip), but the Lamson’s teeth weren’t sharp enough. The knife snagged on crusty sourdough boules and required a lot of force to make cuts. Its 8″ blade was also too short to cut through entire loaves, and it snagged slightly on tomato skin. Lamson does offer complementary sharpening for life, but for this price ($90 at the time of writing), we feel the bread knife should be sharper out of the box.

We struggled to make clean cuts with Zwilling’s entry-level Gourmet series. While it sliced tomatoes just fine, its teeth often caught on crusty sourdough loaves, interrupting the sawing motion and requiring more force to power through. During testing, its handle scales felt clunky, making the knife awkward to hold and even more awkward to wield, and it failed to perform as well as our two budget picks—both of which are significantly less expensive.

Considering it’s one of the most expensive bread knives we tested, we were hoping for better performance out of the Miyabi Kaizen 9.5″ Bread Knife. Instead, it crushed most loaves of bread instead of cutting them, and it got stuck on tomato cores.

The Shun Classic Master Serrated Knife has a unique wavy edge that adds to the overall serration pattern. It excelled at slicing paper-thin tomatoes and was comfortable to hold, but its edge shape didn’t consistently cut through bread well. Its blade was also on the shorter side, making this knife less well-suited for large loaves.

This knife has a lot going for it: The Shun Ultimate Utility looks almost like a toy shark and, accordingly, has plenty of bite—we loved how sharp its rounded teeth were. It flat sides and curved tip mean that this knife is able to both slice your sandwich toppings and spread mayo on a piece of soft bread. It also sliced tomatoes perfectly and slid right through the crust of the sourdough boules. But its tiny 6″ blade, which is more similar to a santoku than a typical bread knife, made it hard to cut even slices. And when you factor in the price ($140 at the time of writing), we just can’t recommend it.

This model from Victorinox, the makers of one of our favorite budget-friendly chef’s knives, performed pretty well overall. Testers found that while the plastic handle looks flimsy, the knife cut really well and felt sturdy. However, this is an incredibly light knife—so much so that it verges on too light—and at more than double (or triple, at some stores) the cost of our affordable picks, it costs more than we think is worth spending.

The Victorinox Swiss Army 8″ knife sliced bread okay, but it required more effort than most other models; worse, it crushed tomatoes. It was also too lightweight to maneuver comfortably.

Bob Kramer is a legendary knife maker, but the Bob Kramer Essential Bread Knife by Zwilling felt like overkill for a serrated knife. Its $400-plus price point is excessive for a tool with such a narrow set of uses (no matter how often you bake homemade bread), and because this knife is made from carbon steel, it’ll be prone to corrosion and rust. Does it work well? Definitely; it was one of the better tomato knives we used. But is it worth the sky-high price? In our opinion, no.

This knife from Wüsthof was sharp out of the box, but its short (8-inch) blade and lack of heft kept it from earning our recommendation.