EGO LM2135SP vs Ryobi RY40HPLM01B: one big pack or two smaller ones

These are the two flagship self-propelled walk-behinds on the two broadest cordless platforms a homeowner can buy into, and the published figures put them a hair apart on energy and a long way apart on how you get at it. Ryobi ships more watt-hours and claims more minutes. EGO ships fewer of both in a form that does not ask you to stop mowing.

The verdict, first

Every published figure, side by side

Count the "not published" cells and you have the second finding on this page. EGO fills nine rows that Ryobi leaves empty; Ryobi fills one that EGO leaves empty. On energy they are close. On documentation they are not.

The 80 minutes, and what it costs you to collect

Ryobi's claim is the better one and it is better in two ways at once — more total minutes and fewer watt-hours spent per minute. Both are worth having. Neither is free.

Who each one is for

Buy the EGO if: your lawn takes 40 to 60 minutes and you want to walk it once; you care about setting cut height precisely (eight positions from 1 to 4 inches, the widest published range in our mower registry); you want a 5-year tool warranty in writing; or you want the pack to be useful across the broadest published tool range in the EGO lineup. 420 watt-hours also runs an EGO trimmer or blower for far longer than their own kit packs do — the arithmetic is in the half-acre kit.

Buy the Ryobi if: you want the most watt-hours for one purchase; you are content to swap a pack mid-lawn; you already own Ryobi 40V tools and packs, which makes this the cheapest real upgrade on this page; or you want two packs so one can be charging while the other works. Two packs is also the only configuration here that survives a dead battery without ending the job.

Skip both if: your lawn is under about a quarter acre, where a push mower does the job for less — see best mower for the money — or over about three quarters of an acre, where neither claim reaches and a rider is the real comparison.

#ad Check the EGO Power+ 21" Select Cut LM2135SP price on Amazon — how we're funded.

One thing we cannot show you on the Ryobi

There is no verified live Amazon price for the RY40HPLM01B in our data. We search for one daily and no listing has come back whose title matches the brand and the model, so its buy link goes to a tagged Amazon search rather than a product page and no number appears beside it. That is deliberate: a price we cannot verify does not go on the page. Ryobi's own product page, cited below, is where the specs in the table come from.

#ad Search Amazon for the Ryobi RY40HPLM01B — how we're funded.

The decision that actually comes first

Neither of these mowers is a mower purchase. Each is the first payment on a battery platform you will probably own for a decade, and the platform question is not settled by which machine cuts grass better. EGO 56V and Ryobi 40V differ on published tool count, warranty length, pack sizes and how the packs are sold.

• EGO 56V vs Ryobi 40V — the platform comparison, which should be read before this page.
• The EGO 56V platform guide and the Ryobi 40V platform guide.
• How many batteries do you need — the page that makes the one-pack-or-two question general rather than specific to these two mowers.

What we cannot tell you

We have not cut grass with either machine. Both runtime claims are the makers' own, made under conditions neither describes, and they are not comparable in the way a measured figure would be. Neither maker publishes a weight, so we cannot tell you which is harder to push when the drive is off or to lift into a truck. Neither publishes a charge time, so the wait between Ryobi's two sessions is unknown. Ryobi publishes no cut-height range, no cutting torque and no warranty term on the page we cite, and does not state whether its two packs discharge together — the single fact that would most change the verdict above. And we have no verified live price for the Ryobi at all, so the value half of this comparison is one you will have to finish yourself.