Nothing can make a dish taste 100 times better than a delicious sauce. Whether you use it as a dip, or a marinade for things like chicken or vegetables, a sauce really adds to any meal. One such sauce that you shouldn’t underestimate is BBQ. If you haven’t used the sauce before, you might see it as one specifically for meat, but that isn’t always true. BBQ excels an average cookout, enhancing your meats and giving them all that extra flavor, but there’s much more to this classic sauce than meets the eye.
The best barbecue sauce enhances your prime cuts with acidity, smoke and a blend of flavors. You’ll find an array of tangy, sweet and spicy options from smaller producers available online.
In our quest to find the best BBQ sauce, there was a lot of tasting and testing to be done. Thankfully, I rose to the occasion, and we’ve found the best BBQ sauces of 2025. I gathered 15 bottles of sauces, each packed with bold flavors and also invited a bunch of my sauce-loving friends to join in on the fun. Together we’ve narrowed down our absolute favorites.
What makes a good barbecue sauce?
Most pitmasters agree that achieving balance is essential for a great barbecue sauce. Typically, these sauces are made with a tomato base, vinegar, and a sweetener like honey or molasses, along with a component for heat. 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 as far as classic grilled foods go. When tasting, we noted things like overall balance, heat, sweetness, overwhelming flavors or anything else that jumped out, both bad and good.
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A quick note: Up north, sweeter varieties dominate the sauce market, but my taste testers and I all enjoy vinegar-based sauces too, so we included several Carolina barbecue sauces (among other styles, like a Japanese barbecue 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 barbecue sauce in 2025. Here they are.
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Full Moon is a regional chain of barbecue restaurants in Alabama and Mississippi that’s been in operation since 1986. You won’t likely 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.