I Tried 17 BBQ Sauces. These 7 Are So Good You'll Find Excuses to Use Them

I put more than 15 sweet, spicy and smoky BBQ sauces to the test. Here are seven I'll be eating all summer.

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Written by

David Watsky

Article updated on June 25, 2026 at 3:01 AM PDT

David Watsky Managing Editor / Home and Kitchen

David lives in Brooklyn where he's spent more than a decade covering all things edible, including meal kit services, food subscriptions, kitchen tools and cooking tips.

David earned his BA from Northeastern and has toiled in nearly every aspect of the food business, including as a line cook in Rhode Island where he once made a steak sandwich for Lamar Odom.

Right now he's likely somewhere stress-testing a blender or tinkering with a toaster. Anything with sesame is his all-time favorite food this week.

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I Tried 17 BBQ Sauces. These 7 Are So Good You'll Find Excuses to Use Them

Best BBQ sauces for 2026

Best overall barbecue sauce

Best grocery store barbecue sauce

An umami bomb worthy of a taste

Best BBQ sauce for hot heads

Best smoky barbecue sauce

Best barbecue sauce for hot sauce lovers

Best sweet barbecue sauce

Other barbecue sauces we tried

What makes a good barbecue sauce?

When it comes to summer condiments, barbecue sauce stands alone. Ketchup and mustard have their place all year, but smoky, sweet, and tangy barbecue shines when the grills come out; over ribs, on wings or straight from the bottle when no one's looking.

The real challenge is picking a sauce from the grocery store aisle: a smoky, spicy sprawl of big promises and regional pride. The bottles worth buying are the ones that get the balance right, whether that means hitting the sweet spot between tang, smoke and sweetness or doubling down on heat or molasses depth. The only way to find your favorite is to taste your way there -- and that's a pretty good problem to have.

To find the best BBQ sauces available, I gathered more than 15 bottles of sauce and some hungry friends to help me taste. It took a lot of napkins to find the best barbecue sauce in 2026.

Best BBQ sauces for 2026

Full Moon is a regional chain of barbecue restaurants in Alabama and Mississippi that's been in operation since 1986. You likely won't find Full Moon's incredible sauce on store shelves, but it can be purchased online for $7.49 a bottle. Thank goodness for that, because this classic-style sauce has a near-perfect balance of sweetness, smokiness, tang and spice.

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If you prefer to scoop your barbecue sauce up from the store, Stubb's stuff can be found in most supermarkets and it's an excellent alternative to Full Moon. Like the winner above, Stubb's has a good balance with no single flavor taking over. This one is thick but not gloppy and gets its sweetness from brown sugar (no corn syrup) with a good kick from lots of black pepper.

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I've been on the Bachan's bandwagon for some time now and I don't plan on hopping off. Bachan's is atypical compared with classic barbecue sauces in that it's laced with Japanese flavors, giving it a huge umami punch. You'll notice soy sauce immediately, along with sesame, ginger and a delicate sweetness. This is one of the thinner sauces so it might not adhere as well to ribs and chicken or caramelize as others do, so it's probably best used as a finishing sauce.

Bachan's is also pricey for one bottle, but you can save a few bucks when you order multiple at a time. (Trust me, you'll want more than one bottle.)

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If you like your sauce with warm spice and fiery heat, Tamarind Heads' sauce will scratch both itches -- and then some.

This sweet and spicy sauce is made from a tamarind base with no tomato or vinegar. The recipe doesn't slouch on chili and even the "medium" will have you loosening your collar after a few bites. Despite its higher Scoville score, the tamarind spice and chili heat are balanced nicely with some sweetness from brown sugar and toasted notes from sesame.

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This rich, dark and smoky sauce is made by a small producer in North Carolina. It's probably the most flavor-packed sauce we tried, with a big sweetness that's cut with rich, smoky hickory and lots of heat. There's a lot going on here but it harmonizes nicely to create one very tasty sauce.

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If you're a hot sauce junkie looking for a barbecue sauce, Texas Pete's Eastern Carolina sauce is the one to get. Texas Pete is a hot sauce maker, first and foremost, so this take on vinegar-heavy Carolina-style sauce tastes quite a bit like hot sauce but with a subtle sweetness and tomato tang. 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.

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I'll be honest, this wasn't one of my personal favorites, but some of the other tasters with a penchant for sweeter foods were really into it. Sweet Baby Ray's (hey, it's right there in the name) is made with corn syrup and pineapple juice and is so sweet that it can be overwhelming. It's also rather thick, almost like a barbecue jam or jelly. If you're a barbecue lover with a sweet tooth, this is the sauce you should stock.

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Full Moon Alabama white sauce: This sauce was positively addictive, but it might be a stretch to call it barbecue sauce. I know Alabamians may not love to hear this, but Full Moon white sauce is more like a really rich and flavorful ranch with loads of mustard, garlic, and Worcestershire.

Jack Daniels Original BBQ sauce: This is another one we all liked. It has a nice balance and strong spice but ultimately some of the others just nudged it out of the top.

Good for Food Keto BBQ sauce: At just 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 had very little dimension and tasted more like slightly smoky ketchup than a good barbecue sauce.

Heinz Carolina Vinegar BBQ sauce: This sauce wasn't terrible but had too much vinegar for most of us.

Heinz Carolina Mustard sauce: This was more like honey mustard than barbecue sauce. Not bad, but it didn't fulfill our requirements for this round of testing.

Kings Delight Bar-B-Que sauce: This Carolina-style sauce is tasty but with so much vinegar, it's less of a traditional barbecue sauce and more of a thin finishing sauce for pulled pork.

Stubbs Dr. Pepper sauce: This sauce was far too sweet for most of us.

Most pitmasters agree that achieving balance is essential for a great barbecue sauce. Typically, these sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, a sweetener like honey or molasses, and a heat component. From this foundation, sauces can be enhanced with a variety of spices and flavors, including mustard, garlic, fruit and smoke. If a sauce becomes too dominant in one flavor profile, it usually doesn't work well. On the other hand, overly simple sauces lacking spice or complexity often fall flat.

We tasted many traditional Kansas City-style sauces for this list, a host 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 each one with plain, unseasoned chicken breast, since it's a rather blank slate for classic grilled foods. When tasting, we noted things like overall balance, heat, sweetness, overwhelming flavors or anything else that jumped out, both bad and good.