29 Snack Crackers Ranked From Worst To First

When it comes to snacking, there are certain times you want something light, something that's not going to really impact your appetite one way or another, but will keep your jaws working and your taste buds electrified. Sometimes you want something heartier, like chunks of steak dipped in jalapeño cheese sauce, to fill the real and metaphorical emptiness inside you while you tempt your taste buds. But there's a third category of snacktime craving, when you want some hearty crunch, but that will also swell in your stomach and keep you satiated until your next proper meal. And that, friends, is where snack crackers come to the rescue. 

Whether you get all fancy and top them with whipped ricotta and delicate fennel fronds at a sophisticated cocktail hour (as the back of the Triscuit box optimistically suggests), or shovel them by the fistful into your lonely, gaping maw in between "Fortnite" respawns in the bedroom you share with your brother, a box of snack crackers satisfies afternoon or late night cravings like nothing else. Here's our rundown of 29 widely-available snack crackers, ranked from worst to first.

When you feel the snacktime itch start crawling around the deepest corners of your lizard brain, do you often wish you could reach for small, cracker-sized portions of paper-coated drywall? If so, Wasa Crisp Bread is here to answer your prayers. While calling this product "bread" is an insult to freshly-baked loaves everywhere, this dense cracker sports a spectacular, shattering crunch that also manages to be completely flavorless. Each bite swells and fills your mouth to the choking point, making an accompanying beverage (or frankly, anything that can wash the taste of Wasa Crisp Bread out of your mouth) a must.

You likely associate water crackers with the classic charcuterie plate. Their light, inoffensive, barely-detectable neutral flour flavor is what makes them the preferred platform on which to sample your chosen assortment of upscale cheeses and cured meats. Carr's is now the de facto king of the world's water cracker supply, with its closest competitor Jacob's now far behind in market share after a long and arduous labor dispute at the latter's plant in western England. Carr's absolutely excels at making a product that tastes like nothing, but inoffensively. Not even the salt the crackers definitely contain registers on a human tongue of reasonable sensitivity, which makes them a perfect delivery method for a slice of sodium-laden salami.

These little discs have their job, and they do it well. Just don't expect to get any satisfaction out of snacking on them on their own. They're there to hold up whatever you put on top of them, which also means that maximum enjoyment is going to come from making sure that whatever you're eating them with has some punch, so the milder options of cheeses are likely going to leave you wanting. A sharp or tart spreadable chèvre or an herb-spiced Gournay will go great, but something milder like a Brie on the less-mature side will leave you wanting unless you're really trying to hone in on its delicate flavor without any frills.

With the entire landscape of interesting, flavorful snack cracker options spread out before you, why, oh why, would you reach for a box of Keebler Club Original crackers after the age of seven? While the crackers earn high marks for their weird butter flavor and even more unexpected saltiness, the insipid light, crispy texture makes for an insubstantial, unsatisfying cracker. Sure, you can top them with a few slices of sharp cheddar cheese or some sliced salami and ratchet up their desirability, but then again, you could just eat the cheese and meat by itself and skip these dumb crackers altogether.

The only thing that moves Keebler Club crackers up the list even a little bit, is the "sandwich" version that adds a bright yellow swipe of "real cheddar cheese" to the operation. While it doesn't do much to improve on the flavor of the crackers themselves (they're still crumbly and taste like food for babies), it's hard to think of a product that isn't improved by the application of cheese-flavored frosting, and the sharp tang of the cheese balances the peculiar butter-flavored sweetness of the cracker itself nicely. If you have to eat Keebler Club crackers, these are the ones to reach for.

This is one of the few entries in our ranking that comes from the "sweet" category... if you can even call graham crackers sweet. Their genre-busting indecisiveness is what earns low marks for graham crackers; they're certainly not a savory snack, but they also aren't something we'd reach for when our sweet tooth needed massaging. Graham crackers are weirdly gritty, taste a little bit like the cloud of dust you get when you clap two chalkboard erasers together, and not good for much other than covering in chocolate and burnt marshmallows. Graham crackers, you're fine, but you're never going to be our go-to snack.

Think about it for a minute, and you'll probably realize that the last time you voluntarily ate Saltines was during a bout with the stomach flu, after you spent the day half-asleep on the couch watching The Price is Right while your mom brought you Pedialyte popsicles and you prayed for a swift death. No one eats Saltines on purpose; in fact, they're at their best when they're used as either an ingredient for something else (like crumbled on top of a cup of corn chowder) or a vehicle for transporting other, better, messier foods (like raw oysters) from your plate to your mouth. The Saltines slogan should just be, "Yeah, here are Saltines, I guess" because that's the only time anyone ever eats them: When they're there.

The greatest trick the Annie's corporation ever pulled off was taking products that already exist, like boxed macaroni and cheese or Goldfish crackers, repackaging them in hippy-looking boxes touting their organic ingredients, and convincing moms the world over that they were somehow feeding their kids a healthier alternative to the junk they themselves were raised on. Sure, Annie's Cheddar Bunnies may not have any artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, but in removing those elements, Annie's has also removed any flavor whatsoever from their snack crackers. They're grainy, dusty, chalky, and would taste much better with a heaping scoopful of MSG and some good old fashioned artificial cheddar flavor.

How do you eat Ritz Bits Cheese, those shrinkified buttery Ritz crackers spread with gritty fake cheese and pressed into adorable little sandwiches? Do you nibble on them one at a time with pinky firmly extended, taking demure little bites? Or do you crack open a single-serve package, open your mouth as wide as it will go, and see if you can manage to shoehorn the entire bag into your mouth in one shot? This is important, and will dramatically affect your enjoyment of Ritz Bits Cheese crackers. However, we're not going to tell you which technique is the correct one.

Cheese Nips always appear at the wrong end of a bait-and-switch. Like, you'll be at your grandmother's counting doilies, or doing whatever else it is retirees enjoy, and she'll offer you a snack. "Let's see," she'll say, "We have pickled beans, Starlight mints, or cheese crackers, would you like some of those?" Your spirits lifted for a moment, you ask for the cheese crackers, only to be ridiculously disappointed when she reappears from her kitchen with a box of Cheese Nips, the also-ran of the cheese-flavored cracker market. Take everything you love about Cheez-Its, then strip away most of the cheddar flavor, add a rounded tablespoon of some weird bitter flavor, and then smash what's left into sharp, mouth-destroying shards. That's Cheese Nips.

If the shape and ridged edges didn't clue you in, these things are organic, non-GMO stand-ins Ritz. The "healthy-style" alternatives to mass-market snack items can be hit or miss, but surprisingly these things hold their own to the Nabisco version. That buttery flavor of Ritz despite being wholly vegan? Yeah, Back to Nature does it better. That said, a better Ritz is still a Ritz, and it's hard to imagine anyone actually wanting a Ritz cracker who isn't in elementary school, eating them in a small sandwich with a cheap peanut butter or a suspicious spreadable cheddar impostor mechanically injected between them.

There was a time that Ritz boxes– playing off the "Puttin' on the Ritz" pun– would offer ideas of toppings one could place on top of them to make an easy and unpretentious hors d'oeuvre, but who in the 21st Century is going to go out of their way to fancy up a Ritz? Nobody above the age of 16 has eaten a Ritz cracker on purpose without feeling a warranted twinge of existential shame. However, Back to Nature's substitute might make it worth your while to actually spread some peanut butter and drop a slice of apple on top of one of these things. Maybe even the good peanut butter that you actually have to stir.

Fun fact: No one has ever bought a package of Ritz Crackers on purpose. They've sort of just always been there, in the forgotten back reaches of your pantry, waiting for the moment when your house is suddenly visited by a horde of hungry toddlers, who will stuff their mouths full of the buttery crumbs and then laugh uproariously at an episode of Paw Patrol, blowing a soggy spray of chewed up cracker all over the front of the high-definition television that cost more than your car. There's no room for Ritz Crackers in the lives of grownups, even though eating an entire sleeve of them in one sitting is oddly satisfying and delivers a weird sense of accomplishment. If you think you've done nothing with your day, eat a sleeve of Ritz Crackers.

When you moved out and got your own crummy studio basement apartment for the first time, you probably bought a box of Toasteds to mark the occasion. After all, you're an adult now; no more crappy kid's crackers for you, you budding sophisticate. Toasteds are thinner and lighter than other mass market crackers, and come in an array of totally-not-a-kid-anymore flavors like "Savory Onion" and "Whole Wheat." Squint hard enough at the surface of a Toasted, and you'll probably be able to make out little flecks of grain, which is how you can tell that these crackers are basically medicine.

If the gluten-free craze has done anything for us as a society, it's forced snack food manufacturers to consider new ways to present familiar products in innovative new ways. Blue Diamond Almond Nut Thins are made with nuts and rice, and contain no grain whatsoever, which results in a product that's similar to those airy, crunchy Asian snack blends that also contain dried wasabi peas and crispy seaweed poofs. They're weirdly addictive, mainly because the whole time you eat them, you think, "Do I like these? Do I think these are crackers? If my body didn't know how to process wheat gluten, would eating these make me feel less mad about it?" For innovation and interest alone, we had to include these crackers in our roundup.

The appeal of Carr's Rosemary and Olive Oil Crackers can be tricky to pin down. Is it their unusual octagonal shape? Their light, buttery texture? The sheen of olive oil on the surface? The faint hint of visible rosemary flecks that manages to complement almost anything you can throw at it? These are crackers made to be topped with other things, from goat cheese and fig to thick spreads of savory cream cheese-based dips, and are equally suitable for entertaining as they are sitting and eating by yourself. Carr's Rosemary Crackers feel fancy, and make you feel more like you're having a party, even when what you're really doing is "drinking alone."

Wheat Thins probably seem like they're arriving a little bit high on this list, don't they? But have you actually HAD a Wheat Thin lately? The long-forgotten snack food of '80s-era moms everywhere, who spent all of their spare time working out to aerobics VHS tapes and wearing white Reeboks with smart gray flannel pants suits, Wheat Thins are often overlooked in favor of flashier, more intensely-flavored crackers. We love how little and thin they are, with just a slight slick of grease and that unmistakable flavor that's nutty and salty, with just the faintest hint of sweetness poking through all of that whole grain goodness.

The craze of self-diagnosed gluten sensitivity has waned somewhat in recent years, but celiac disease is still a reality for about 1% of Americans, so it doesn't hurt to explore gluten-free options. Almond flour emerged as one of the most popular gluten-free wheat flour substitutes, and Simple Mills' almond flour crackers are best compared to Wheat Thins in flavor, texture, and size. Even if you're not concerned about gluten, Simple Mills' crackers may still be a worthwhile substitute if you're a Wheat Thins nut, because as Healthline points out: Wheat Thins have added sugar – a bit of a bizarre addition for a cracker that's supposed to have a lightly salty, lightly savory flavor. Simple Mills' offering has a 0 grams of sugar. Cost, however, is also a factor to consider. The standard box of Wheat Thins retails for about the same as Simple Mills, but contains almost double the number of crackers.

If you're somebody who just absolutely needs to chase that Wheat Thins dragon, but you have health concerns you're not afraid to pay double to assuage, then Simple Mills has you covered. For the rest of us, they're a perfectly fine and unassuming cracker, but not much to write home about.

These are probably going to be one of the most divisive entries on this list. Another gluten-free standout, Mary's Gone Crackers Originals are made primarily of seeds and grains: flax, sesame, brown rice, and quinoa. If you want "hearty", you're going to love the seedy, grainy, slightly-smoky flavor, probably best compared to Ak-Mak sesame crackers. The have a pretty pleasing crunch to them, strong but with just enough give, almost as if the quinoa and rice in them was cooked, molded together, and then dried with tiny air bubbles trapped inside to keep them from feeling like biting into a half dollar-sized uncooked grain of rice.

User reviews on Mary's Gone Crackers' own page for the cracker show plenty of five star user reviews, but one user emphatically called them bland, and desperately in need of some kind of dip or spread on them to give them flavor. They're no-frills — not even perceptibly salty — and if anything they really rely on you appreciating the unadulterated taste of seeds and grains. Imagine your ancestors who lived when agriculture was still a brand new invention, eating the prototype for what would eventually become bread, made from whatever grew nearby that could be ground down with a rock. If that sounds appealing to you, you'll love these things. If you're just too much a child of modernity, skip them.

Whether you mainline them straight from the paper bag, or pack them in tiny plastic Ziplocks for on-the-go playground snacking, Goldfish crackers always satisfy. And while they're available in a variety of "Flavor Blasted" flavors from Parmesan to Pizza to something called "Princess," it's the Cheddar variety that keeps us coming back, handful after handful. They're perfectly light, airy, and crunchy, with flavor that never overpowers and that won't cause palate fatigue, even after eating a whole bag. Goldfish has even managed to convince us that eating a pile of their smiling crackers is somehow more virtuous and healthy than, say, a can of Pringles, which means that Goldfish are essentially good for you. 

Crunchy pretzels are delicious, but they can be a tad overwhelming; all of that salt and heft from the dough makes them satisfying but hard to eat more than just a few of. Snack Factory has addressed this problem by boiling pretzels down to their most delicious elements: The toasty outside, and the salt. They've done away with the bulk of the pretzel middle, resulting in a crispy, crunchy, chiplike product that's perfect for eating by itself (in a variety of flavors, from Garlic and Parmesan to Salt and Pepper,) or using as a vehicle for scooping up cheese spreads and dips.

Better Cheddars get kind of a bad rap, often portrayed as just another pretender to the Cheez-It cheese cracker throne that somehow falls short. But we think Better Cheddars are more than just another Cheez-It competitor; it's a cracker that stands all on its own. Packing tons of cheddar cheese flavor into a slim, crunchy profile, Better Cheddars taste like what would happen if you ran over a dump truck full of Cheez-Its with a steamroller, saturated the crumbs with salty seawater, stamped the resulting mash into thin rounds, and baked them until toasty and crispy which, now that we think about it, we're pretty sure we saw on the Better Cheddars episode of How It's Made.

These rounds from your favorite homey grocery chain with the impossible parking lot are great if you're a seed flavor nut, but probably are going to leave everybody else a bit cold. The fan bloggers at What's Good at Trader Joe's rated these a 6.5 out of ten, and marked that their flavor was closer to a standard corn tortilla chip than anything resembling sweet potato. They're also a summer-autumn seasonal product, so it's anyone's guess if or when they'll return to Trader Joe's shelves, or what they'll taste like if or when they do.

Assuming the 3-Seed Sweet Potato crackers come back just as they used to be, they have enough flavor to stand on their own, but that limits their options for what they pair well with as a topping. They'd likely work best as an analogue for oyster crackers thrown in a butternut squash soup. Otherwise, they may hold their own for a health nut's novelty stand-in for a standard tortilla chip, with their heartier ingredients and smaller sizes giving a feeling of cleaner eating with better portion control than your typical helping of corn chips dipped in queso.

There are two products that share a texture unlike anything else on Earth: Shredded Wheat cereal and Triscuit brand snack crackers. And chances are, you probably feel pretty strongly about the texture of these crackers, one way or the other. In a food manufacturing process that makes the United States the envy of the world, wheat is softened by water and steam and pushed through a shredder, until it piles up in little haystacks of grain perfect for topping with a slice of cheese or a piece of pepperoni. The finished product, those little salty area rugs of whole grain deliciousness, stand alone in their category, and for that, we salute them.

With a thin profile and a hearty crunch, the Flatbread Crisps lineup takes a standard-issue snack cracker and makes it new again. These crackers are perfect for swiping through a pool of hummus or spinach dip, and are equally suited for topping with cheese (or anything else you find hidden in the back reaches of your fridge). While all of the flavors are winners, we're partial to the simple Sea Salt and Olive Oil variety; there's plenty of salt, and the olive oil lends plenty of moisture to the proceedings. When it comes to a single cracker that can do it all, from late-night binge eating to more sophisticated entertaining, this is the cracker.

It may not taste like chicken OR biscuits, but there's something about this cracker that's got us smitten. In the same way that we occasionally get a craving for three-for-a-dollar packages of dollar store ramen noodles that provide 1400 percent of the recommended daily allowance of sodium, Chicken in a Biskit seems to feed a craving that happens on the chemical level. You won't mistake "eating these crackers" for "eating a roast chicken dinner" anytime soon, but if you've ever sampled the forbidden fruit of "licking a bouillon cube," you'll find a lot to love in this cracker classic. While the ingredients panel lists "dehydrated cooked chicken" among the flavor components, we're willing to bet the addictive quality of these crackers has more to do with the heaping helpings of taste-enhancing MSG. Mmm... glutamatey.

Did you expect Lance Toast Chee, or for that matter any entry from the wide world of "nutritionally void traffic-cone-orange cracker and peanut butter sandwiches," to land this high on the list? We didn't either, until we started to lay out the candidates, and evaluate each cracker using a highly-scientific bracket system. But the results are in, and nine times out of 10, we'll reach for an inexpensive package of these junk crackers before almost any other candidate. They're crispy, they're salty, and they're dirt-cheap, making them an ideal snack for a road trip or an overnight hike through the mountains. Though let's face it: If you're the kind of person who hikes, you've probably never tasted a Lance Toast Chee cracker sandwich.

Trader Joe's really struck gold with the introduction of the fruit-and-herb cracker varieties now adorning the grocer's shelves. The Pumpkin Cranberry Crisps are the autumn seasonal corollary to the raisin-and-rosemary, and fig-and-olive varieties that rotate in and out of stock. The dried cranberries baked into each crunchy square gives a delicious tartness balancing out the subtle sweetness of the pumpkin dough, and the golden flax and sunflower seeds complement the textures and flavors well. If you're putting together a charcuterie plate these crackers, with their complex combination of flavors and colors will make you want to violate the old rule to not overshadow your meat and cheese selections, even though they save you having to add dried fruit and nuts yourself.

Soft cheeses and cream cheese-based dips are good additions, but honestly the Pumpkin Cranberry crisps stand incredibly well on their own owing to just how much is going on inside them. They're still a pretty dense cracker meaning that while they're flavorful to eat alone out of the box, and they're classy and adult enough that doing so won't make you look like you're having a depression meal, you'll definitely feel the weight in your stomach if you go through the better part of a box in one sitting.

They're not the first cheese-flavored cracker to enter our ranking, but if you expected any other snack cracker to top the list, you're just not taking your cracker game seriously enough. Cheez-Its tick every box in the satisfying snacking to-do list: They're topped with big, coarse granules of salt, packed with tons of perfectly balanced real and artificial sharp cheddar cheese flavor, and can be eaten by the heaping fistful. Members of our staff have been known to mow through an entire box in one sitting in a semiconscious fugue state, as the power of the Cheez-It takes over our sensibilities and sense of propriety and encourages us to eat more and more, until our stomachs are stretched taut with a mash of partially-digested orange cracker goo. Cheez-Its, to us, you are perfect.

Get ready. When fall rolls back around Trader Joe's Cornbread Crisps will fly off the shelves as soon as they land. Customers love these things, and even the reduction of their availability to the late-summer-to-early-autumn months prompted one Trader Joe's shopper on Twitter to cheekily demand that the entire brand be sent to jail, with a friend echoing that the limitation in supply was "a hate crime." As the bag says, they're sweet and salty and do in fact taste like cornbread, with Trader Joe's website attesting that they're made by baking actual cornbread, then cutting, flattening, and re-baking it into the golden squares, finishing each bag with the kettle corn-evoking stripes on top.

Do they pair well with dips and spreads? Yes they do. Do they crumble well into soups? Yep. Are they good enough to eat an entire bag just on their own? Friend, you're going to have a hard time stopping yourself from doing just that. The Cornbread Crisps do have a slight oiliness that will make them sit heavier in the stomach, though, so bear that in mind before you tuck into a whole bag. Maybe bring a friend to cut the dose while sharing the love.

Take a moment to consider the concept of fandom. Lots of things have fandoms attached to them: movies, books, TV shows, even restaurant chains. Do grocery stores have fandoms? No, of course not. Except for Trader Joe's. Nobody's making blogs to review and recommend Kroger store brand products, but there are multiple people still running websites catering to their fellow tradees. Mrs. Trader Joe's for instance is one such fan blog — and not in fact the grocery store's wife — and its author rated these Organic Garlic Naan Crackers a 10 out of 10. Trader Joe's does in fact sell its own store brand naan, the fluffy Indian flatbread, but it's anyone's guess if the naan crackers are produced by cutting and re-baking the bread a la the grocery chain's Cornbread Crisps. Either way, these seasoning-laden naan crackers were pitched by Mrs. Trader Joe's simply and enticingly: "Just imagine garlic bread in cracker form." Now who doesn't love garlic bread?

That garlic kick makes these naan crackers a great solo snack, but it really makes them shine when dipped in hummus. Yes, yes, we know that hummus is not intended to serve as a dip, and is traditionally a small entrée in its own right, but we're turning naan into a cracker, so we're already far afield of tradition. They're light, crunchy, slightly buttery, and wonderfully garlicky, so put them in or under whatever you want on their way to your mouth.