Our panel of testers at the Wheeler Gorge Campground deemed the Everywhere Chair to be the most comfortable of the three low-to-the-ground chairs we tested. After six months of regularly using the Coleman Cooler Quad Chair, we think it’s the best choice for most people who are seeking an upright chair for car camping, tailgating, and outdoor ozark trail cooler gatherings. We noticed during the first of our three camping trips—a weekend in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, with a total of seven families—that, given the choice, campers prefer to take the biggest seat. When we set up a dozen chairs around the campfire without comment, people consistently claimed them from largest to smallest.
We think the REI chair functions better and will last much longer than the similar chair from Walmart. But the price difference is significant—and after six months of near-constant outdoor use, the Walmart chair was still in decent shape. If you are looking for an ultracheap choice, the Walmart chair is one. Select a chair with a built-in canopy, which will give you a little patch of cool at any campsite or cookout.
We like this durable, well-constructed chair that has a frame that makes you confident to sit. Sign up for our T+L Recommends newsletter and we’ll send you our favorite travel products each week. You can stow this featherlight, compressible chair in a backpack or even a work bag. We recommend these ozark trail canopy products based on an intensive research process that’s designed to cut through the noise and find the top products in this space. Guided by experts, we spend hours looking into the factors that matter, to bring you these selections. Unbeatable deal if you’re looking to buy several chairs at once.
It comes in gray or blue, and as of this update it gets 4.7 out of five stars from reviewers on the REI site. A close-to-the-ground chair is often the ideal choice for outdoor concerts, movies, theater performances, and other events where you will be concerned about blocking other people’s view. Each comes with a convenient carrying bag that you can sling over your shoulder. Made from an easy-to-clean polyester fabric and metal frame. Because people use outdoor chairs for an array of purposes and have different preferences when it comes to comfort, it was almost impossible to choose just one best chair. We did select our favorite upright chair for car camping and tailgating, and then additional low-to-the-ground, ultra-lightweight, and canopy picks, as well as a great chair for kids.
“This is the Platonic ideal of your camp chair,” one of our campers gushed. The cupholders on the L.L.Bean Kids’ Base Camp Chair aren’t as roomy as those on our picks, and they are not as adept at holding stubby water bottles or mugs of hot chocolate. We found the Coleman Kickback Breeze Chair to be a simple yet very comfortable seat, though women liked it more than men did (many of them judged it to be too snug). Anecdotally, we found that this chair category in general is more popular among women than among men, who generally prefer a higher, upright seat.
After six months of sitting mostly outside in the Southern California sun, our gray Coleman chair was noticeably less faded than our Walmart and Renetto chairs, the latter of which had bleached from bright red to pink. Are you a car camper or do you plan on socializing in friends’ backyards? Perfect for cold-weather campers or parents sitting on the sidelines for early-spring and late-fall games.
We also let two boys, ages 1 and 5, play with them and sit on them in the backyard for six months. After all that, we concluded that the REI Co-op Camp Chair – Kids’ is the best choice for anyone who wants to buy a practical, portable outdoor chair for a small child. The Helinox Chair One weighs about 2 pounds, compresses smaller than a 2-liter bottle of soda, and is the most comfortable and easy to stow of the three top backpacking chairs we tested. Like competing chairs, the Chair One has a nylon and mesh seat and aluminum legs, which are linked with shock cord (the chair legs are made out of the same material as high-end tent poles). A low-to-the-ground chair can be ideal for outdoor movies, concerts, theater performances, and other events where you want to avoid blocking other people’s view.
Made with a steel frame and rated for up to 300 pounds. Living in the south, spending time outside is practically second nature. Between barbecues, crawfish boils, and annual family reunions, the great outdoors sort of feels like my second home.
Our not-too-discriminating underage testers liked all the kids’ chairs, though over time we found several reasons to declare the REI Camp Chair the best of the bunch. The REI chair’s polyester seat material feels both more forgiving and more durable than the thinner material on the Ozark Trail Kids’ Folding Camp Chair from Walmart. The box-shaped cupholder is a little roomier than the round cupholders on the Coleman and the L.L.Bean Base Camp chairs—better for stubby water bottles or mugs of hot chocolate around the campfire. We found that the cheaply constructed Walmart chair had a cupholder that was too small for a soda can, or any of the hard-plastic or metal water bottles that the kids we know brought on a camping trip. It will fit a Capri Sun pouch or a narrow, rectangular juice box, but that’s about it.