The best grill and smoker combo for most people is the Char-Griller Smokin’ Pro — a charcoal grill with a bolt-on side firebox, 830 square inches of total cooking area with 580 on the main grate, and cast-iron grates that sear properly. It is for the cook who grills most weeks and wants to smoke some weekends without owning two cookers. The budget pick is the Royal Gourmet CC1830S, the same idea in thinner steel: 811 square inches total and a real offset firebox for a fraction of the money, with the learning curve that comes with budget-gauge metal. Every price on this page is read live from the current listing — 5 of 5 picks had a buyable offer as of November 12, 2026, with that date beneath each button.
Combo cookers get sold badly. The pitch is “two cookers in one,” and the useful question is almost always which job is it actually good at, and how bad is it at the other one? Almost every combo is a competent grill with a smoker attached, or a competent smoker you can grill on in a pinch. Very few are genuinely both. So this page ranks on the honest version: how well each one does the second job, and what it costs you in the first.
There are three different ways to make one cooker do both, and they are not interchangeable. The first is grill plus offset firebox: a charcoal barrel or box with a smaller firebox bolted to its side, so you burn wood and charcoal off to one side and draw smoke across the chamber. That is the Smokin’ Pro, the MFSTUDIO and the Royal Gourmet. It grills like a charcoal grill because it isone, and it smokes like a cheap offset — which means it works, and it wants a few cheap mods and some attention to hold a line. Read how to use an offset smoker before you commit to this shape.
The second is a drum with a grate. The Oklahoma Joe’s Bronco hangs meat on nine hooks and three hangers for smoking, and takes a porcelain-coated grate over 284 square inches for grilling. Unlike the Pit Barrel, it has an adjustable airflow system and a diffuser plate, so you choose the temperature rather than accepting the one the barrel wants — which is exactly what makes it usable for both jobs. Its grate sits close to the coals, so it sears well; its chamber is tall, so it smokes well. The limit is capacity: 284 square inches is a two-to-four-person grate. The drum smoker roundup has the field.
The third is a thermostat-controlled charcoal cooker, and it is the only shape here that does both jobs without asking you to learn anything. The Masterbuilt Gravity Series 800 feeds charcoal from a vertical hopper and holds your set temperature with a fan: 225°F in about eight minutes for smoking, 700°F in about fourteen for searing, 800 square inches of reversible cast iron, and a griddle insert in the box so it is really three cookers. That is the widest span on this page by a distance. The trades are mains power, a one-year warranty, a 15.9 lb hopper and the highest price here. Our Masterbuilt Gravity Series 800 review goes through it in full, and the gravity-fed roundup covers the family.
Cooking areaneeds a word of explanation, because makers in this corner of the market publish it two different ways. Some give the main grate, some give a combined total across the main grate, the warming rack and the firebox grate — which is why the table below has two columns rather than one. The MFSTUDIO publishes the most total chamber here at 941 square inches, which is within reach of the heavy Oklahoma Joes for considerably less, and it is the pick if you want the biggest barrel you can get in this shape. The Smokin’ Pro’s 580 square inches of primarygrate is the most usable grilling surface. Where a maker publishes only one of the two figures, the other shows “—” and we do not convert between them.
What to be realistic about.None of the offset-firebox combos here has heavy steel, so all three swing with the weather and leak at the doors until you seal them — that is the price of a sub-$500 chamber, and the buying guideexplains why gauge matters. None of them is as good a smoker as a dedicated reverse-flow offset, and none is as good a grill as a 22-inch Weber kettle. A combo is a compromise by definition. The question is whether one cooker that does 80% of both jobs beats two cookers that each do one — and for a small patio, a single budget, or a cook who smokes six times a year, the answer is usually yes.
If you only want to smoke, go to best smokers or best smokers under $500 instead; if you only want to grill, best charcoal grills under $500will serve you better than anything here. Prices move constantly, so the live figure with its date under each button is what counts. We own none of these cookers and have not tested them — every number here comes from the published spec sheet named on each write-up, and our methodology page explains exactly what we do instead.
