The 8 Best Chromebooks For Students

Editor's Notes

August 19, 2020:

We upgraded the majority of models from our previous ranking to keep up with the latest releases from the top brands, though we kept the Lenovo C330 despite a slightly newer 300e model from the company that turned out to be inferior in a number of ways, perhaps most notably in its increased thickness and decreased screen real estate.

There are a lot of price points on a list like this, as models like the Google Pixelbook Go or the Samsung Galaxy K01 will be the kind of thing you get a high schooler or someone going off to college. That Galaxy boasts a lot of storage and 8 gigs of RAM, but its battery life held it out of the top spots.

Students just entering high school, or even some in the younger set than that would do better with a smaller investment, like the Dell Inspiron 11 or the HP 14A, which have slightly slower processors. That might be a good thing, though, as you don't want a device intended for schoolwork to be used as a gaming laptop. And bear in mind that no one brand will hold dominion over parental controls, as those are best implemented with the use of an app called Family Link, that Google created to let you keep your kids from browsing where they shouldn't, and that can be installed on any of these models.

December 17, 2018:

Chromebooks are not all created equal, and the rankings here are based on several factors that should be important to students, such as durability, versatility, and battery life. We were super impressed with the Acer Spin 13, which is powerful and tough enough to handle anything a student can dish out.