Best Paper Shredder
Our roundup of the best paper shredders available today
- Last Updated May 29, 2021
Having a paper shredder for disposing of sensitive documents is more important than ever, with risks of identity fraud, financial fraud and cyber-attacks become more prevalent. Whether it’s documents with personal information at home or business documents in the workplace, you need a way to safely and reliably destroy documents containing sensitive information.
The exact type of shredder that will best suit your needs is going to depend on how you’re using it. If you have a large number of documents that you’re going to dispose of on a regular basis, you’re going to want a shredder with a reasonably fast shredding rate, and a large-capacity storage bin.
Here’s our roundup of the best shredders available today.
Products at a Glance
How We Picked
We’ve picked out good options for paper shredders in the three main categories of shredders. This guide includes Strip-Cut, Cross-Cut, and Micro-Cut shredders, which each offer different styles of shredding to suit different usage scenarios. These are all specced out at different shredding speeds and storage capacity, and some have extra features like compatibility with shredding CDs.
These are all good value options to pick from depending on your specific requirements.
How We Tested
We’ve compared the features and functionality of each of these shredders, and assessed how effective they are for different usage scenarios. Each of these shredders would be a good choice, and we’ve broken down what advantages and disadvantages they offer in detail. Read on for our guide to the best shredders available today.
Best Paper Shredder
This is a basic Cross-Cut shredder at a reasonable price. It can handle 8 sheets of paper at a time and can handle documents of up to 8.7 inch width.
The cross-cutting functionality is ideal for anyone who wants to have strong certainty that these documents cannot be restored once shredded, and this is a good price for such a shredder.
This shredder is designed to be able to handle shredding credit cards and has no problem shredding documents with paper clips or staples attached.
It’s nicely compact and weighs just 7 lbs. It’s handy for keeping in a home office or small business premises but would not be a good choice for anyone regularly dealing with huge volumes of documents on a regular basis.
This is a cheap lightweight shredder with pretty basic functionality. It only offers strip cutting, so this is not a good choice for highly sensitive documents that you absolutely need to be certain are destroyed, but it is a simple and effective way to perform basic shredding.
This also has support for CDs, so it’s a good way to destroy any burnt CDs with sensitive files stored on them.
The continuous run time of just 2 minutes will be plenty for destroying a small number of documents, perhaps in a domestic context, but your documents will start to stack up quite quickly if you are generating a lot of documents to destroy.
This shredder comes with AmazonBasics 1-year limited warranty, in case it develops a fault in the first 12 months of ownership.
This is a beast of a shredder, targeting professional and business uses. It’s a Micro-Cut shredder with a continuous running time of 60 minutes. If you have massive piles of documents that you need thoroughly shredded, this is a great choice, since you can keep feeding it with documents for an hour without interruption.
It supports up to 12 sheets of paper at once and can handle credit cards or CDs. The pull-out tray for emptying the wastebasket is a nice convenience for emptying it quickly.
We would recommend this shredder for any offices that are regularly generating a large number of documents that require being completely destroyed. It’s probably overkill for a small home office or domestic use, but anyone with more serious demands on shredding should consider this one.
This is a beast of a shredder, targeting professional and business uses. It’s a Micro-Cut shredder with a continuous running time of 60 minutes. If you have massive piles of documents that you need thoroughly shredded, this is a great choice, since you can keep feeding it with documents for an hour without interruption.
It supports up to 12 sheets of paper at once and can handle credit cards or CDs. The pull-out tray for emptying the wastebasket is a nice convenience for emptying it quickly.
We would recommend this shredder for any offices that are regularly generating a large number of documents that require being completely destroyed. It’s probably overkill for a small home office or domestic use, but anyone with more serious demands on shredding should consider this one.
Things To Consider
FAQs
Our Verdict
We’ve picked the Aurora AS890C as our top shredder. It’s an excellent shredder for the price, and for most users, Cross-Cut shredding is a good compromise between the basic Strip-Shredding and comprehensive Micro-Cut shredding. It’s nice and compact, and ideal for a home office.