Speed Up Your Next Project With These Cordless Nail Guns

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A cordless nail gun is a quick and easy tool to fasten trim. It fires the nail and sinks the fastener’s head below the surface in one operation, making it the ultimate mobile trim tool. You can see why finish carpenters and DIY woodworkers have taken to these tools. Not only are cordless nail guns an upgrade over a hammer, they’re also more convenient than pneumatic nail guns. With a cordless nail gun, you don’t need to lug an air compressor with you, or drag a hose behind as you work.

Cordless nail guns easily and rapidly nail up trim and molding, and handle miscellaneous fastening on repairs and furniture projects. They come in two types: brad nailers for attaching baseboards and trim, and finish nailers that fire longer, heavier gauge nails for securing thicker molding setups or working with dense hardwoods. This buying guide covers everything you need to know about both types, along with our reviews of the best cordless nail guns we recommend.

The Best Cordless Nail Guns

• Best Overall: Metabo HPT 18V MultiVolt Cordless Brad Nailer
  

• Best Value: Ryobi P320 Cordless Nail Gun

• Most Powerful: Milwaukee M18 Fuel 18-Gauge Brad Nailer

• Most Reliable: DeWalt DCN680D1 Cordless Nail Gun

• Most Improved: Craftsman CMCN616C1 Cordless Nail Gun

What to Consider

Most of the nailers in our test were 18-gauge nailers (Metabo-HPT, Ryobi, Milwaukee, DeWalt, and Craftsman). However, we also tested one 16-gauge nailer ( the Makita) and even a headless 28-gauge pin nailer by DeWalt. This DeWalt is also a 2023 Popular Mechanics Tool Award winner.

Type

Finish Nailer

Tools that fire 16-gauge nails (and 15-gauge) are known as finish nailers. A 16-gauge nail is thicker and fires more reliably into hard materials, and tends to fire more reliably when the fastener is longer. Their head is more difficult to conceal, owing to the larger diameter of the piece of wire from which the fastener is made.

The length and thickness of these nails make them suitable for attaching thicker materials, such as 5/8-inch thick baseboards, crown molding and tougher materials, such as oak and other hardwoods.

Brad Nailer

Brad nailers fire 18-gauge nails. These fasteners are thin and their head is easily concealed with a tiny dot of filler. However, the longer the nail, and the tougher the material you are driving it into, the more risk that an 18-gauge nail will misfire and bend—or even jam in the nailer.

Their shorter length and thinner gauge also give them less holding power than a finish nailer. Brad nailers are typically smaller and more lightweight than finish nailers. They’re also capable of holding more nails, extending the time between reloads.

Weight and Size

The key to any nailer is that you have to place it quickly and easily where you need to fire. This is especially true with trim work, where every nail has to be perfectly fired. One misfired nail can wreck a piece of trim, which leads to tearing it off and cutting and fastening a replacement piece.

The more weight and size you add to a nailer, the more difficult it becomes to place on its target—which means you’re more likely to misfire a nail. With that in mind, look for a cordless nail gun that’s around 6 pounds, including the battery, and with evenly distributed weight. The nailer should also be slim enough to easily see its nose for accurate positioning.

Depth Controls

Nail guns vary in how deeply they drive fasteners into different materials. It requires more force to drive a nail into hard red oak than it does soft pine. Any nailer worth its salt has a tool-free adjuster that allows you to control the amount of force it applies to the nail and hence how deep it drives the fastener into the wood. Being able to control the nail depth prevents you from driving nails through thinner and softer woods or leaving nails protruding out of harder or thicker materials.

Dry Lockout

Firing an empty nailer into wood leaves a small dent in the wood but without the nail to secure whatever it is your nailing in place. Since you’re often working quickly when attaching trim and driving in nails that are embedded below the surface of the wood, you likely won’t notice your firing blanks until you’ve left a row of empty holes in a piece of trim.

Not only do these blanks force you to go back and reattach the trim, they also require you to cover twice as many holes with wood filler. That’s why a dry lockout feature is a must— it locks the nailer’s nose when you’re out of nails or brads.

Why Trust Us

Every nail gun on this list has been thoroughly researched, evaluated, and tested. Additionally, we survey user reviews and speak with product managers and designers.

Once we had our pool of nail guns ready, we wanted to be sure our protocol was tougher than what these guns would typically encounter in a day’s work. For example, when testing for nail-sinking capability, we fired slowly and methodically into red oak, both 3/4-inch thick and 1.5 inches thick. When we increased the length of the nail, we doubled up the oak so that the gun was firing into either oak that was 1.5 inches thick or 3 inches thick (to ensure that guns rated for longer nails could indeed countersink the fastener when the fastener was longer than 2 inches).

For rapid-fire simulations, we prepared strips of various materials, such as white pine, radiata pine, birch and fir plywood, and MDF (medium-density fiberboard). In these cases, we were more concerned with the tool’s precision and speed than its raw power.

However, just to be on the safe side, anytime that we simulated a test in trim or built-in cabinet construction, we positioned our test materials (either as a single layer or as a sandwich of various materials) over Douglas fir, a common and tough framing material. That way, we could be sure that the nailer was capable of not only firing through the test materials on the front of the wall, but also the framing in the wall itself.

For most of our testing, we focused on 18-gauge brad nailers for the simple fact that these tools are light, comfortable in hand, and provide excellent fastening power for baseboard trim, door trim, window trim, shoe molding, and small crown. To attach heavy crown molding or built-up molding assemblies, use a finish nailer.

The Metabo-HPT sailed to placement atop our rankings thanks to its comfortable handling, and ability to sink a fastener in the toughest wood. It fired all of its nails in our maple and red oak tests with ease. A brushless motor maximizes the tool's longevity just as it does its (already impressive) firing speed. With this power tool, you get a brad nailer that’s as light as a pneumatic tool, but without the air hose. It’s 30 percent lighter than its predecessor, and its narrow handle creates a good line of sight to its tip.

The compact and lightweight design makes it a breeze to handle at floor height, mid height and over your head, reducing the chances that you’ll misfire a nail, speeding up your productivity. And since it uses small 18-gauge nails, you can fire more nails before you have to reload. The Metabo cordless nail gun is powerful and easy to handle, plus it takes full advantage of the potential locked in 18-gauge fasteners by delivering a tool well engineered to fire them.

The Ryobi 18-gauge brad nailer is a do-it-yourselfer’s nailer. It lacks the long-nail driving power of our test’s top finishers. But it’s inexpensive and effective for most household jobs, including attaching shoe molding, installing softwood door and window molding, attaching baseboards, and putting up small crown molding.

Hobbyist crafters and DIYers will appreciate the tool’s lack of bulkiness. It’s a bit shorter and slimmer than professional-duty nail guns, though we wish it were a bit lighter. The dial at the back of the tool makes it a snap to adjust output air pressure to control nail depth. Turning the dial clockwise increases air pressure and driving power, while turning it counterclockwise has the opposite effect. Simple and intuitive.

With decades behind us testing Milwaukee electric tool products, we know the brand isn’t given to hyperbole. Yet we looked askance at its claim that this 18-gauge nailer can fire reliably into 2-inch oak. Well, not only does the 2746 do this, it also sets each nail with an impeccable and crisp cavity above the head, perfect for accepting filler. And there ends our brief career as Milwaukee skeptics.

Other notable features of this tool include its mechanism that opens the entire top of the nailer’s nose for full access to clear jammed nails (which we didn’t experience, by the way), and the ability to rapid fire three nails per second. Its light weight, slim profile, and well-shaped grip contribute to its easy-handling nature. In short, the 2746 makes nailing trim a pleasure.

Eighteen-gauge nails are finicky. The longer a nail is, the harder it is for a nail gun to reliably sink it into hardwoods without either misfiring and jamming in the nose or firing the nail into the material but not properly setting it below the surface. This DeWalt is different, consistently firing one nail after the other into red oak without a problem.

Its slim handle, weight distribution, and balance are outstanding, improving our productivity, which was also enhanced by the tool’s stout drive mechanism and a lack of recoil. There’s a lockout to prevent dry firing, and we also liked the gun’s small nose, that made it easy to hit our target. Place the gun and fire, then move on to the next nail. With the DCN680D1, it’s that simple.

The Craftsman’s CMCN616C1 has great nail-driving power, is comfortable to handle, and there’s a sight line to its tip, as well as a comfortable handle. We reliably fired nails into softwood up to 2.5 inches thick and oak up to 1.5.

Just be warned, when we fired 2.5-inch nails into harder red oak, the majority of fasteners had their heads flush or nearly flush to the surface, not set just below the surface as is ideal. These nails, with their heads standing “proud” off the surface, required an old-fashioned nail set and a hammer for us to finish driving them. That aside, this is a good, sturdy, and reliable nailer at an affordable price.

The XNB02RJ’s slimness helps it excel in small spaces and at awkward angles, like when you’re nailing trim at floor level. And much of its surface area—especially its base and sides—is covered in rubber, protecting both the tool and the surface against which you place it. This finish nailer drives in large 16-gauge nails up to 2-1/2 inches long, giving it more fastening power than a brad nailer.

There’s also a dry lockout, so you don’t have to worry about firing a row of blanks. The kit version of the tool comes with two 2-Ah batteries that provide more than enough power for a day’s work while keeping the tool well balanced. We tried the tool with a larger battery and noticed a rear weighted bias.

Given how light and small this tool is, you might think this 20-volt, 23-gauge pin nailer can’t cut it. Think again. While it’s true that it fires a headless wire pin that is so fine, you have to double check that it’s there, it does fire the fasteners just about as fast as you can pull the trigger. In our test, we fired 1-inch headless pins into Douglas fir framing; the tool works with fasteners as short as 5/8 in. to as long as 1-1/2 in.

And since the nails are smaller, more of them fit into the gun, so you can fire more nails before having to reload. It also weighs just 4.5 lbs. without a battery, so it’s simple to line up shots accurately and avoid misfires.

Ridgid makes quality cordless power tools that are more affordable than what you find from some of the premium brands out there, and this cordless nailer is a great example of that. It uses a powerful brushless motor to fire 16-gauge finish nails up to 2.5 inches long, making it suitable for thicker crown molding or baseboards or carpentry projects.

And when loaded with a 4 Ah battery, it’ll drive in up to 1,450 nails on a single charge, plenty for most projects. It’s also got all the features you want out of a nailer, including depth adjustment, two firing modes, tool-free jam release, and a dryfire lockout. It’s the perfect finish nailer for weekend warriors.

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