The Best Bike Brands of 2025 are On This List (In Theory)
Behind the scenes of my first 2025 byline.
Leg Day is a newsletter about pursuing joy as a city cyclist.
In the final working hours of January 3, my editors at GQ published a story they assigned me way back in the summer: The Best Bike Brands for Every Kind of Rider.
I was a bit hesitant to accept the job. I didn’t have a ton of pre-existing knowledge about all the bike brands that were out there, and couldn’t really figure out how I could go about developing in time to file a story by the end of the fall.
More importantly, choosing a bike based on the brand name painted on its tube seemed … suspicious. This was quickly confirmed to me by all the people I spoke to for the story. The main thing that determines the kind of bike you should buy is the type of rider you want to become. And given that most of the mainstream bike companies sell a staggeringly wide range of bikes, each dialed for the needs of distinct, imagined riders, it is actually kind of hard to just say something as simple as “Santa Cruz makes the best mountain bike.”
Especially since, as I learned reporting this story, bike brands are not always manufacturing the bikes they sell. I knew that companies like Cannondale and Specialized and Trek get their components from companies like SRAM and Shimano, but I did not realize that most bike brands also have their frames produced in factories they do not own. They usually just design them. Mind blown!
At the end of the day though, the assignment is the assignment. I’m immensely grateful to the experts who helped me come up with a list of decent bike brands, including Robin Graven-Milne, owner and mechanic at Bike Plant in Bed Stuy, Ilya Nikhamin, owner of Redbeard Bikes in Dumbo, Dave Rome, senior tech editor for Escape Collective (where I am now a contributor), and Eben Weiss, author of The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual and Bike Snob NYC.
I hope you’ll look at the picks and yell at me about my characterizations, but also that you scroll down to the FAQ section at the very end of the story. This is where all the best advice about bike buying is buried1. Here, you’ll hear why I’m weary of direct-to-consumer brands like Canyon and also why mechanics hate bikes from Amazon. Actually, that last bit is so fun, I’m just going to quote it here:
The experts we spoke to for this story cautioned against buying any bikes from big box stores and online warehouses, especially in the below $500 price range. These kinds of bikes, which Graven-Milne says mechanics often refer to as “bicycle-shaped objects,” often arrive with signs they were welded together poorly and fitted with counterfeit components. “It will look like a bicycle to someone that doesn’t really know about bicycles. But it’s more like if you were trying to buy a car and you ended up with a golf cart.”
The last section of the story is about vintage and secondhand bikes. Though I have had the chance to ride a few, I’ve still never actually bought a new bike. Everything I have owned I have bought secondhand, either through Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or a guy a friend of a friend found through Craigslist. Finding an excellent secondhand bike requires work and some knowledge, even with the help of bike-specific marketplaces like Buycycle and The Pro’s Closet, just recently relaunched. Usually, your efforts are rewarded.
Maybe unsurprisingly, learning more about all these new bike brands has made me way more interested in new bikes. Riding as much as I have been has made me kind of embarrassingly particular of what I actually want. I want something light, something with enough clearance for nubby tires, something with mounts for bottle cages and front and back mount. Something that is sturdy enough to withstand bumpy rides round town, but also with geometry that will let me zoom up all the hills in my future.
I have been struggling to find a vintage bike that fits this description. But all my current favorite bike brands—Surly, Brompton, Rivendell, and Salsa2—have a bike that does. Actually, most have a few.
Will my next bike be a new bike? If you had asked me three months ago, I would have said no. Today, I’m not so sure.
Just a reality of SEO-driven commerce writing. You have to get to the product links as soon as you can for the sake of your click through rate. Google doesn’t actually care if a reader learns anything.
Which probably should have made the list.
Having personally put thousands of people on bikes over the last 30 years, I've come to the belief that the brand is the *least* important consideration in making your bike selection.