The 5 Best Budget-Friendly Tools Worth Buying From Walmart
Stocking your home with helpful tools can be an expensive endeavor. If you shop exclusively at stores like Home Depot, Lowes, and Ace Hardware, you could walk away spending hundreds upon hundreds just for the bare necessities. Sure, you may find some cheaper options among the selection of premium brands, but all in all, you're not walking away ahead of the game.
Thankfully, you can typically turn to Walmart when you're looking for a good deal. Granted, it may not be a hardware store, but Walmart is well stocked with some very helpful, underrated household tools, especially when you shop online. Even better, you can find essentials without breaking the bank.
To save you some trouble, we dug through Walmart's digital tool chest and came up with a few budget-friendly options. We didn't just randomly pick cheap tools though. Each option below should serve most homeowners, DIYers, and hobbyists well across a bevy of projects. We'll talk more about how we landed on these five at the end of the article — but until then, let's go shopping.
Hyper Tough 44-Piece Precision Multi-Type Screwdriver Set
Let's kick things off with not just one tool but a set of several. For under $10, you can walk away with a 44-piece set that essentially nets you a Phillips and flathead screwdriver, as well as an Allen wrench. You never understand how important having all three on hand is until you start working around the house or putting together furniture.
The Hyper Tough 44-Piece Precision Multi-type Screwdriver kit comes with one screwdriver handle and dozens of interchangeable bits. With everything included in the hard-shell plastic case, you'll be hard-pressed to find a job that requires a screwdriver that you won't have the answer to. The precision driver is definitely not for heavy-duty jobs, but if you just need to keep things together around the house, it's perfect.
Along with 42 precision screwdriver bits, the kit also comes with an extender that helps get to those hard-to-reach screws. This set is a household essential, especially considering the low price tag.
Hyper Tough 12V Cordless ⅜-inch Drill Driver
Hyper Tough isn't a well-known brand like Ryobi or Craftsman, but it serves its purpose as a low-cost alternative. Case in point – this ⅜-Inch Drill Driver for only $20. It's a very, very simple drill, complete with a 12V 1.5Ah battery, wall charger, and five different 2-inch screwdriver bits.
For a fairly simple and affordable option, the Hyper Tough ⅜-inch driver is not short on features. You'll get access to a decent max torque of 130-inch pounds across 18 settings, which should be more than enough for DIY or home improvement projects. An LED work light, magnetic top, belt clip, and variable speed trigger round out the added perks included with the ⅜-inch drill driver, ensuring you can work in a range of conditions.
There aren't many comparable models, as most of the bigger name brands dish out way more power for a much higher price tag. However, Bosch's ⅜-inch 12V is a very close alternative that will cost you about five times more.
Hyper Tough 6-Inch Digital Caliper
For just under $11, you can take home a fairly versatile tool that may come in handy in ways you wouldn't have initially thought. The Hyper Touch 6-Inch Digital Caliper works across a number of applications and can help you complete some of those pesky home improvement projects.
Capable of taking several different measurements, the digital caliper is great for finding diameter, depth, and even length. It's a plumber's dream tool — helping immensely with determining the right fitting and pipe sizes — but even if you're not working on your home's water system, you can find a use for a caliper.
If you're a woodworker or metalworker, a caliper can help accurately measure small pieces more precisely than a tape measure. Even if you're just trying to hang a photo, a caliper can help measure depth so you don't accidentally hit something vital like a pipe or cable. A caliper is also one of those tools you didn't know how bad you need it until you own it. Then you start to find all these little uses for it that help make life or your hobbies a little easier. For example, if you're into ceramics, a caliper makes it so much easier to craft a matching lid and cup. It's also a good tool on hand for 3D printing.
Excited Work 169-Piece Premium Hand Tool Set
The concept of budget-friendly is subjective. However, when you consider that you can spend more than $30 and only walk away with a simple branded screwdriver set, suddenly $40 for 169 useful household tools and accessories is hard to pass up. The Excited Work 169-piece set is a wonderful starter kit for new homeowners or amateur DIYers, thanks to its versatile assortment of tools and included durable tool bag.
Every household should have a claw hammer, screwdriver set, a variety of screwdriver bits, standard wrenches, and a box cutter. All of those are included in this set, along with a few extra household musts like different hex key sizes, a box cutter, 10-foot measuring tape, and an assortment of screws and wall anchors.
Rounding out the robust assortment of tools is a plier wrench, adjustable wrench, wire cutter, three-point level, mini hand saw, clamps, a flashlight, voltage tester, insulating tape, and needle-nose pliers. It's definitely a lot, and there's a chance you may not use some of it, but for $40, this is a collection of tools you're better off having and not needing than needing and not having.
G-Plus Laser Level Ruler
If you've ever hung a picture or poster in your life, you can already tell how useful the G-Plus Laser Level Ruler will be. For only $12, you get a multi-use device that's great for ensuring you never hang something crooked or off-center again.
The most obvious use for this device is the three-point level, with guides for horizontal, diagonal, and vertical leveling. Once the device is level, you can use the red laser as a guide to start hammering in nails — but not before you use the built-in 8-foot tape measure to make sure everything is spaced evenly apart.
In other words, it's four useful tools in one that will surely keep you from playing the guessing game when it comes to hanging art or other decor on your walls. For only $12, you can finally achieve that perfectly clean aesthetic and have everything looking nice and uniform. It's a very small price to pay in order to simplify what could be an otherwise frustrating process.
Why we chose these Walmart tools
Whenever we build a list like this, our first concern is whether what we're choosing is actually helpful to our readers. That's usually answered through personal experience and thinking back to some of the most commonly used tools as homeowners (or even renters). To ensure they were worth buying, we heavily weighed their practicality and the types of binds they could get a fellow homeowner out of.
Then we looked at the price. Being budget-friendly is more than just finding the cheapest option. It still has to be a quality product for us to recommend it, and to determine that, we looked at the brand's history and any reviews left on the product itself.