4 Home Depot Finds That Outshine Walmart In Price And Quality

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Chances are that if you do a lot of shopping at Walmart, it’s not because of their deals on DIY and home improvement equipment. You’ll find a lot at Walmart, from tech products like phones and speakers to surprisingly budget-friendly TVs, but it’s hard to recommend this retailer for its power and hand tool selection. If your DIY needs are limited to building Ikea furniture walls and hanging a couple of shelves, you could probably get away with Walmart’s own Hart — at least until Hart is discontinued for good. Hopefully Hyper Tough, the other tool brand sold by Walmart, won’t go the same way.

If you have niche DIY needs, there’s a lot you just won’t find at Walmart, but in the categories where both stores offer a number of products, the competition is tighter than you might think. Home Depot almost always has more choice, especially in the high price range, but Walmart often wins when it comes to budget solutions. These four products are exceptions to the rule, because with them, Home Depot beats Walmart both in price and quality.

Both Walmart and Home Depot have some ToughSystem tool boxes, but you should get yours at Home Depot. There are two reasons for this. The first and most obvious reason is that Home Depot sells many of these same toolboxes for cheaper. For example, Walmart sells the Rolling Toolbox 2.0 for $167.99, while Home Depot has it in store for $125 — and it’s currently discounted even further, to $109.

If you need a reason beyond the lower price to avoid Walmart for these toolboxes, there’s the fact that Home Depot has way more ToughSystem products for sale. This is relevant because ToughSystem is DeWalt’s line of modular storage solutions, meaning it’s at its strongest when you buy more than one box. ToughSystem boxes stack on top of each other, and a locking system makes them stick to one another. They don’t have to sacrifice space for this, either, and include some of DeWalt’s biggest toolboxes.

These storing solutions mostly share the same width and depth, and many are compatible with the same ToughSystem tool trays. These trays are among the ToughSystem products available from Walmart, but they’re only offered by third-party Marketplace sellers (meaning you won’t find them in store) and they’re significantly more expensive than at Home Depot.

Even Walmart’s highly rated Hart combo kits won’t be very useful without a set of bits to stick onto those drills and impact drivers. If you do most of your shopping at Walmart, it might make sense to stick with what you can find there, especially if you can take advantage of Walmart’s seasonal deals. Otherwise, you’re better off picking your bits at Home Depot. One of the best affordable options is the $30 95-piece Ryobi Drill and Impact Drive Kit. Considering how expensive power tools can be, $30 is a very reasonable price for pretty much every standard driver and drill bit you’ll need, many in multiple copies.

Walmart’s closest equivalent is Hart’s 60-Piece Impact Drill & Drive Bit Set, which is about as expensive as the Ryobi but includes far fewer bits. Even if you think it’s worth leaving 35 bits on the table to save a few dollars, the 95-piece Ryobi kit is less expensive than Hart’s and includes a few wood-boring bits on top of the brad point bits also present in the Walmart set.

As one can imagine, as we get closer to specialized, expensive products, Home Depot becomes more and more often the best choice. Walmart sells some good, affordable tools for homeowners, but it can’t sell both Swiss Rolls and forklifts. Even though Walmart has a surprising amount of choice in its mobile tool chest section, it can’t compete with what Home Depot has in store, like the (relatively) affordable $403 Husky Tool Storage 9-Drawer Mobile Workbench, which comes with lockable wheels and an integrated power strip with six power outlets and two USB ports. The closest Walmart gets is with Hart’s well-reviewed $449 36-inch Mobile Tool Chest, but a closer look reveals a few important differences.

The first difference is the price. Husky is a respected brand of tool chests and workbenches, so it’s surprising to see this product sold for cheaper than the Hart equivalent. Then, there’s the fact that the two are not equivalent at all: the Husky is 46 inches wide, a whole 10 inches more than the Hart. Finally, Home Depot will sell you this workbench cabinet in a bunch of different colors for more or less the same price. With Walmart, you’re stuck with a light brown wooden top on black painted metal, with ugly blue accents on the drawers’ handles.

You might expect Walmart to win out against Home Depot when it comes to cheap tools, and you’d be right. For the most part, the superstore beats the dedicated home improvement warehouse when it comes to broad appeal goods — no surprise there. What makes the Wen 1Amp Variable Speed Rotary Tool special is the fact that it (barely) beats Walmart’s closest equivalent in price and quality. For $16.28, it’s very affordable but decently powerful, with a max speed of 32,000 rpm and a minimum of 10,000. It also comes with a whole lot of accessories, including plenty of spares. It won’t do any of the heavy lifting, but all things considered, it’s a versatile tool for many jobs that require accuracy.

The closest product from Walmart is the Tracklife Multi-Function Rotary Tool, which is more expensive, at $19.99, and doesn’t have as good a selection of accessories as the $20.78 version of the Wen that comes with a case and numerous accessories.

Walmart has many cheaper rotary tools available, but some don’t come with any accessories (which, unlike what the name implies, are essential) while others — especially the battery-powered, USB-charged ones — are really underpowered.

To select four products where Home Depot wins over Walmart on price and quality, we started by comparing the two stores. Being a specialized hardware store, Home Depot has more of an edge when it comes to specialized tools. However, we decided not to overrepresent these niche, expensive products in our list, because $2,500 rebar cutting tools are not the sort of items a reader comparing Walmart to Home Depot expects to see.

Once we had an idea of which kind of tools to look for (small power tools, hand tools and accessories, budget tool boxes and chests), we picked Home Depot’s best money-to-value proposition and compared it to Walmart’s best offer.