Top pick
We were impressed with this grill’s precise temperature control, straightforward app, cold-smoking capabilities, accessory options, and, most of all, its delectable results.
The Camp Chef Woodwind Pro 24 checks all the boxes for what we want in a pellet grill: It’s easy to use, provides lots of useful features that let you dial in your cook, is Wi-Fi–connected so you can keep tabs on your brisket from the comfort of your couch, and, most of all, it makes delicious barbecue—the best we’ve ever made at home.
It costs more than other grills we tested, but you get more for your money—more cooking area, more control, and more features. The only real downsides are a complicated assembly process and a slightly barebones app, but these are a small price to pay for everything this smoker does well.
It makes deliciously smoky barbecue. The food that came out of the Woodwind Pro 24 was our tasting panel’s clear favorite in three of our four cooking tests, and it was a close second in the fourth. This grill consistently produced the smokiest results, without veering into acrid or ashy territory.
It also created the most photogenic barbecue—a dark bark and thick smoke ring on the pulled pork shoulder, beautiful mahogany chicken drumsticks, and bright pink-orange salmon. And meat tended to be juicier after cooking on the Camp Chef compared with what we got from our other contenders. The skin on the chicken even came out crispier.
This grill held the most stable temperatures of any we tested. This was especially true at lower temperatures, where most of your low-and-slow smoking will happen. It performed extremely well in the biscuit test, too, with evenly cooked biscuits throughout. Only the right-rear biscuit was slightly less browned than the rest.
The control panel is easy to use. The Woodwind Pro 24 has a large, full-color control screen that’s driven by a rotary dial. You use the dial to select the menu you want, or to adjust temperature and other settings, then press it in to confirm your selection. The menu itself is straightforward and easy to understand, without too many distractions. The screen is protected by a flip-up cover, too.
It’s the only grill we tested that gives you control over how much smoke it produces. Where most other grills simply let you select a cooking temperature, the Woodwind Pro 24 goes deeper with a smoke setting that adjusts the grill’s auger and fan algorithm to produce more or less smoke—on a 1-to-10 scale—to better suit your preferences.
It really works, too: Our results at a setting of 8 were noticeably smokier than what we got at 1. The downside to a higher smoke number is that you get larger swings in temperature, but over a longer cook, these largely even out, and we didn’t notice any negative effects on our barbecue.
Its cold smoke functionality is one-of-a-kind. While you can cold smoke on any pellet grill by adding a smoke box of your own, the Woodwind Pro 24 is the only pellet grill we’ve come across that comes with one built in (video), and its design is pretty ingenious.
It slides in directly above the firebox, and a butterfly valve on the front of the grill lets you use the flame from the pellets to get your wood chunks going. The Woodwind Pro 24 also has a unique fan-only setting (with a five speed settings), so that once the wood is smoldering, you can close the valve, turn off the auger, and let the fan circulate smoke and feed the pellets oxygen. (Alternatively, you can simply use a torch to get the wood going and avoid going through the process of lighting the pellets in the firebox.)
We used this feature to cold smoke a deli-sized chunk of cheddar cheese, and while we overdid it a bit (hey, cut us some slack, it was our first try), the results have aged well after a couple months in the fridge.
There are lots of other thoughtful features. This grill is the only one we tested that comes with an insulated, gasketed door for improved temperature control. It’s also the only one that uses a downdraft design, without a chimney. In theory, when paired with a good convection fan, this means that the smoke circulates more effectively around the food you’re cooking—and it may be why the Woodwind Pro 24’s barbecue had the best smoke flavor we’ve experienced.
In addition to a well-designed pellet dump door (helpful when you want to change from hickory to apple pellets, for instance), this grill also has an ash dump valve. This makes it much easier to remove the bulk of the ash from your grill after each cook, though you’ll still want to use a shop vac to give it a thorough cleaning once in a while.
The pellet hopper can hold 22 pounds of pellets—4 pounds more than the other grills we tested—and its lid is held down by magnets that are strong enough to resist wind and casual bumps, but not strong enough to make it a pain to open.
And yes, like many other pellet grills, this one comes with a built-in bottle opener so you’ll never be without a cold beer (or soda) while grilling.
It comes with lots of probes and plenty of cooking area. The Woodwind Pro 24 comes with four meat probes (the most of any grill we’ve tested) and has four jacks so you can use all of them simultaneously. That’s important, because this grill also has a ton of cooking space, despite its compact design.
Between its two racks, it has a combined 811 square inches, which is 30% more than the Traeger Pro 575 and nearly twice as much as the single-level Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0. If you need even more space, the Woodwind Pro 36 is functionally identical but offers a whopping 1,236 square inches of cooking area.
The top rack on the Woodwind Pro is actually two half-size racks, so you can choose to use one or both depending on how much stuff you need to cook. The racks slide into a slot, which keeps them more securely in place than the upper rack on the Traeger Pro 575.
Its app works well enough, but it’s missing some features. The Camp Chef Connect app (iOS, Android) isn’t going to blow you away with its looks or features, but it’s a perfectly functional way to monitor your cook from the comfort of your couch.
In addition to setting and monitoring your grill’s temperature, smoke setting, and fan speed, it has readouts for each of the four probes, plus a detailed cook history with temperature graphs and optional notes (so you can remember what you did and hopefully replicate it). You can also set timers for your cooks.
Unlike Traeger’s app, Camp Chef’s doesn’t try to sell you more products, and it doesn’t contain a library of recipes. And unlike the Green Mountain Grills app, it doesn’t allow you to calibrate your meat probes or the probe in the main body of the smoker.
It’s a pain to assemble. The Woodwind Pro 24 had the longest assembly of any grill we’ve tested: a grueling 2 hours 10 minutes. As with the other grills we tested, we assembled this one with just one person, rather than the two recommended, and this is a case where an extra set of hands really would have helped.
This grill comes in several boxes, and unlike the Traeger Pro 575 or Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0 (which was the easiest to assemble, taking us just 50 minutes solo), its auger and pellet hopper aren’t already attached to the cooking chamber. It uses a wide range of bolts, nuts, and tools, and unfortunately the printed instructions didn’t correspond exactly to what was in the boxes. We got it together in the end, but it was a frustrating process.
There are lots of useful accessories. This grill comes with a metal side shelf, but if you prefer, you can buy a 30,000 BTU Sidekick propane burner to put in its place. It comes in a kit with either a Blackstone-style flat top or a cast-iron searing grate, and you can add a pizza oven if you like. You can also get other extras like an insulated blanket for cooking or an all-weather cover, plus a lot more.
It comes with a generous warranty. The Woodwind Pro 24 is covered by a six-year warranty on rust, a three-year warranty against material and manufacturing defects for the main grill body parts, and a one-year warranty on the same for everything else.
Flaws but not dealbreaker
- Our test unit arrived damaged. When we unpacked our Woodwind Pro 24, one of its four leg mounts was bent despite some seriously impressive packaging. That didn’t help with its already grueling assembly process. But we were able to install the leg anyway, minus one bolt, and it has proven to be perfectly stable even on three and a half legs. We reached out to Camp Chef to let them know, and they immediately offered to send a replacement grill body. We declined, in an effort to avoid waste, but it’s good to know that the company stands behind its product.
- The grill sits on tiny casters that are hard to move across uneven surfaces. While the other grills we tested had at least two larger wheels, the Woodwind Pro 24 uses four small casters. On a smooth surface, like concrete, that’s totally fine (and it’s nice to be able to lock all four wheels). But if you need to move your grill across gravel, grass, or other less-than-perfectly-flat terrain, you’re going to need some muscle (and help) to get it done.
- It lacks a front shelf. While the grill comes with a side shelf, and the pellet hopper lid on the other side can be used as a small secondary shelf, it doesn’t have a front shelf and there’s no option to add one. This is something the Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0 includes that we’d love to see on a future version of the Woodwind Pro 24.
