Best BBQ Sauces for 2024
Whether you use it as a dip or as part of a marinade, a sauce can add a lot of depth to your meal. With summer well underway and weekend barbecues the norm in most places, it’s important to find a great barbecue sauce.
We believe the best BBQ sauce will satisfy your taste buds. best pieces acidity along with smoke — and other flavors to perfect your meal. But in your search for that perfect sauce, you’ll find dozens of spicy and sweet ones, many of which are available from smaller producers online.
To make it easier for you to find the best BBQ sauce of 2024, I’ve rounded up 15 bottles of spicy, smoky, vinegary, sweet, and tangy sauces, along with some avid BBQ-loving friends, for an ultimate sauce showdown to find the best BBQ sauce on the market.
What makes a good barbecue sauce?
It’s all relative, but most pitmasters agree that balance is the key to great barbecue sauce. Most sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, some sweetener like honey or molasses, and an element of heat. From there, sauces are enhanced with spices and flavors like mustard, garlic, fruit, and smoke. A sauce that’s too overpowering in one direction usually doesn’t work well. Super-simple sauces without much spice or complexity often fall flat.
We tasted a lot of traditional Kansas City-style sauces for this list, a bunch of vinegar-heavy Carolina-style sauces, some keto-friendly sauces, Bachan’s cult-favorite Japanese-style sauce, and a few Alabama white sauces to see which ones really tickled our taste buds. We tried them all with plain, unseasoned chicken breast, since it’s a pretty blank slate as far as classic grilled dishes go. When tasting, we noted things like overall balance, heat, sweetness, overwhelming flavors, or something else that jumped out at us, both good and bad.
Read more: Best Meal Packages of 2023
A quick note: Up north, sweet varieties dominate the sauce market, but my taste testers and I all love vinegar-based sauces, too. So we’ve included several Carolina BBQ sauces (along with other styles, like a Japanese BBQ sauce for umami, or brown sugar-based recipes for that iconic sweet flavor) to make this list as inclusive and unbiased as possible.
It took a lot of napkins to find the best BBQ sauce of 2024. Here they are.
Full Moon is a regional barbecue restaurant chain in Alabama and Mississippi that has been around since 1986. You probably won’t find Full Moon’s incredible sauce on store shelves, but you can find it online for $7.49 a bottle. And that’s a good thing, because this classic sauce strikes a near-perfect balance of sweetness, smokiness, heat, and spice.
If you prefer to get your BBQ sauce from the store, Stubb’s can be found in most grocery stores and is a great alternative to Full Moon. Like the winner above, Stubb’s strikes a nice balance without any one flavor dominating. It’s thick but not cloying, and gets its sweetness from brown sugar (not corn syrup) with a nice kick from lots of black pepper.
I’ve been a fan of Bachan’s for a while now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon. Bachan’s is atypical compared to classic barbecue sauces because it’s infused with Japanese flavors, which gives it a huge umami punch. You can taste the soy sauce right away, along with sesame, ginger, and a subtle sweetness. This is one of the thinner sauces, so it might not cling to ribs and chicken or caramelize as well as some other sauces, so it’s probably best used as a finishing sauce.
Bachan’s is also pricey: $13 for a single bottle, but you can save a few bucks if you order several at a time. (Trust me, you’ll want more than one bottle.)
This rich, dark, smoky sauce is made by a small producer in North Carolina. It’s probably the most flavorful sauce we’ve tried, with a big sweetness that’s balanced with rich, smoky hickory and lots of heat. There’s a lot going on here, but it all harmonizes nicely to create a very flavorful sauce.
At under $3 a bottle, this was a favorite of the “cheap” BBQ sauces, and it’s one you can easily find in most grocery stores or on Amazon. Bull’s-Eye has a formidable sweetness, but gets a great balance from the mustard, garlic, and natural hickory smoke. If you go through sauce like water, this is a great sauce to stock up on for ribs, chicken, and burgers.
If you’re a hot sauce junkie looking for a barbecue sauce, Texas Pete’s Eastern Carolina sauce is the one for you. Texas Pete is a hot sauce maker first and foremost, and so this version of the vinegar-heavy Carolina-style sauce tastes a lot like hot sauce, albeit with a subtle sweetness and tomato flavor. It’s made with just five ingredients and no corn syrup. At 15 calories per serving, it’s probably the “healthiest” barbecue sauce on this list.
I’ll be honest, this wasn’t one of Mine personal favorites, but some other tasters with a penchant for sweeter foods really loved it. Sweet Baby Ray’s (hey, it’s in the name) is made with corn syrup and pineapple juice and is so sweet that it can be overwhelming. It’s also quite thick, almost like barbecue jam or jelly. If you’re a barbecue lover with a sweet tooth, this is the sauce to stock up on. Plus, it’s cheap, about $2 a bottle.
Other BBQ sauces we tried that didn’t make the cut
- Full Moon Alabama White Sauce: This sauce was absolutely addictive, but calling it BBQ sauce might be a bit of an exaggeration. I know Alabamans may not like to hear this, but Full Moon White Sauce is more like a really rich and flavorful ranch with lots of mustard, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce.
- Jack Daniels Original BBQ Sauce: This is another one we all liked. It has a nice balance and strong spice, but in the end some others just pushed it out of the top.
- Good For Food Keto BBQ Sauce [out of stock]: At only 10 calories and 3 grams of carbs per serving, this sauce was edible, but not one of our favorites.
- Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce: This one lacked depth and tasted more like a slightly smoky ketchup than a good barbecue sauce.
- Heinz Carolina Vinegar BBQ Sauce: This sauce wasn’t terrible, but it had too much vinegar for most of us.
- Heinz Carolina Mustard Sauce: This tasted more like honey mustard than barbecue sauce. Not bad, but it didn’t meet our standards for this round of testing.
- Kings Delight Bar-B-Que sauce: This Carolina-style sauce is tasty, but the amount of vinegar makes it seem more like a thin pulled pork sauce than a traditional barbecue sauce.
