10 Best Snowboard Bindings in 2021

Safety is paramount in snowboarding, and snowboard bindings are one of the most useful tools you can buy to protect yourself when you are out on a snowy mountain or snowboarding trail. However, they are not just designed as a safety aid – almost every snowboarder uses them, from novices to professionals. The right kind of bindings can improve your skills and help you learn tricks, techniques, and other movements that give you much more freedom.

Below are ten different sets of snowboard bindings that might be perfect for your chosen style and current skill level, as well as some reasons they stand out from other bindings on the market.

View the Best Snowboard Bindings, Below.

• Flow Alpha Snowboard Bindings
• Union Force Snowboard Bindings
• Salomon Rhythm Snowboard Binding
• Burton Cartel Snowboard Bindings
• System MTN Snowboard Bindings
• Burton Custom Snowboard Bindings
• 5th Element Stealth 3 Snowboard Bindings
• Burton Citizen Snowboard Bindings
• Burton Freestyle Snowboard Bindings
• Burton Mission Snowboard Bindings

1. Flow Alpha Snowboard Bindings

These rear-entry snowboard bindings use straps with a robust and exoskeleton-style support frame that makes it much easier to tighten them around your boots, ensuring that they don’t slip off during crucial moments. The one-piece back section is easy to recline if you want to take them off, but they are still stable enough to keep your feet secure on long slopes.

The baseplate is designed to minimize how much of the board you’re touching at once, adding some more sensitivity to your movements and making it easier to adjust your angle without having to shift your body weight around.

These snowboard bindings are perfect for beginners, offering plenty of control and flexibility while still being reliable and strong enough to take on challenging jobs.

2. Union Force Snowboard Bindings

These durable snowboard bindings are designed for maximum protection and endurance, taking on all kind of terrain and weather conditions without wearing out or breaking apart easily. However, it also offers enough comfort to ensure it doesn’t hurt your feet after long periods of use, and the high stiffness of the baseplate and backplate are counteracted by the extra padding.

The pattern on the baseplate helps improve your grip while using your board, and the high-quality parts used in these snowboard bindings design will last much longer than many other models and designs, even if you’re wearing them on a daily basis.

These snowboard bindings are durable, reliable and can take a lot of punishment before showing signs of damage, making them an excellent choice for people who want to take on more extreme slopes and challenges.

3. Salomon Rhythm Snowboard Binding

These soft flex snowboard bindings feature an adjustable toe ramp and built-in EVA padding that maximizes the comfort and efficiency of your movements, ensuring that you’re always in control of the board without putting your feet at risk. Not only that, but the canted footbeds help provide more power to your motions without making it feel like you have to fight against the board itself.

Alongside that is the soft and cushioned strap of these snowboard bindings, which helps keep your feet in the right place without digging into your legs or feeling too tight to move around in.

These snowboard bindings could come in handy if you value comfort and control sensitivity above everything else, especially if you want to avoid injuries or foot fatigue.

4. Burton Cartel Snowboard Bindings

These snowboard bindings use a range of different durable materials to create a very rugged, reliable tool for snowboarders of all skill levels. Thanks to its reasonably stiff response and versatile design, it's able to handle almost any situation with relative ease, making it a great jack-of-all-trades.

This works really well alongside the fact that its straps have been minimized to reduce weight without putting you at any higher risk. The extra cushioning also means that you won't be fatigued or hurt by long slopes and sudden bumps, making the entire experience much more comfortable in the long run.

These snowboard bindings are great for situations where you need a universal, easy-to-use snowboard binder that can take on whatever risks lie ahead.

5. System MTN Snowboard Bindings

These EVA-padded snowboard bindings are able to dampen impacts and protect your feet from all kinds of potential physical damage, both on the footbed and the highback. Alongside this is the polyurethane-coated ankle strap, which has been 3D molded to provide maximum comfort and a much greater level of control and responsiveness, especially compared to models that use a relatively flat strap instead.

The multidisk plate at the base of the bindings means that you can mount them onto almost any kind of board on the market, making them an excellent tool for people who regularly change or upgrade to new boards.

These snowboard bindings are strong and offer much more control over your board, making them incredibly useful for people who like to take on dangerous slopes and snowboard trails.

6. Burton Custom Snowboard Bindings

These specially-designed snowboard bindings are intended to take on any kind of terrain, using a soft flex that focuses on the user’s enjoyment above all else. The baseplate of each binding is made with lightweight and damage-resistant materials that keep the soft parts of your foot safe from harm, while the padded highback ensures that you’ll still reach an excellent level of performance and comfort.

The custom-designed straps of these snowboard bindings have been designed in a similar lay, wrapping around your boots in a way that keeps them tightly bound to your body at all times – they won’t go flying if you bump into something, and you’ll stay connected to your board regardless of the situation.

While they might get overlooked by professionals, these snowboard bindings are great for hobbyists or people who just want to have fun without stressing over intricate stats and tweaks.

7. 5th Element Stealth 3 Snowboard Bindings

These high-performance snowboard bindings are built for maximum control and ride quality, using a padded base that’s able to dampen vibrations and absorb shocks without directing them into the bottom of your feet. The adjustable toe strap, alongside the regular strap, ensure that you won’t slip out of your mountings while you’re taking on longer and/or tougher snowboarding trails, while the soft flex makes it suitable for users of almost any skill level.

Due to the built-in forward lean adjustment, you can easily alter these snowboard bindings to fit with your preferred boarding stance, rather than having to awkwardly adjust the way you stand.

Inexperienced or first-time snowboarders will find these snowboard bindings incredibly useful, especially if they're not entirely comfortable with their own stance or posture yet.

8. Burton Citizen Snowboard Bindings

These well-cushioned snowboard bindings focus on maximum comfort and minimum weight, mixing lightweight materials with an excellent level of padding and cushioning that gives you plenty of protection as well as a lot of control over your board. The Re: Flex system allows it to work with any standard board mounting system, while the FullBED cushioning keeps the footbed soft and comfortable at all times.

Not only that, but the upgraded straps of these snowboard bindings are able to keep your feet locked in place without being uncomfortably tight or awkwardly-strapped-on.

If you hate feeling vibrations and bumps underfoot while you’re trying to ride your snowboard, these snowboard bindings can help eliminate the problem without weighing you down.

9. Burton Freestyle Snowboard Bindings

These freestyle bindings use a medium-response design that allows for excellent control and comfort, with the FullBED cushioning design improving this even further without feeling like it’s adding much extra weight. Thanks to the convertible toe strap and larger standard strap, it is easy to fit these bindings on top of a snowboarding shoe without having to fiddle with it first.

The single-piece highback is easy to put on and has its own layers of padding, keeping the vulnerable parts at the back of your feet protected if you slip or fall during a tricky snowboarding run.

Having extra padding is rarely a bad thing, and this snowboard binding design brings extra protection to a style that can be used by newcomers and professionals alike.

10. Burton Mission Snowboard Bindings

The medium response on these snowboard bindings makes them a versatile choice, especially since they have two incredibly well-designed straps that can hold it on your footwear really well. The built-in Re: Flex FullBED cushioning system keeps you protected and comfortable, while the hinge-based one-piece highback can fold down for easy access through the back of the bindings.

Due to the skeletal and minimalistic design of these bindings, they are also much lighter than some other models and designs, making them perfect for high-speed boarding or situations where you need to keep yourself light to get the best possible performance.

Being able to quickly adjust the way your snowboard bindings fit can be important, and this is one of the best designs for the job thanks to its range of different adjustable and tweakable parts.

Snowboard Bindings Buyer’s Guide

Choosing snowboard bindings for the first time can be difficult since it’s not something that most people realize they need until they get into the sport. It is the equivalent of buying tacks for your football boots or gloves for extreme cycling – you don’t realize how important they can be until you see other people using them.

Snowboard bindings for snow boots aren’t just an optional thing, they are practically required for almost every form of snowboarding there is. Being able to keep yourself connected to your board is sometimes the only way to avoid serious injuries or damage to your snowboarding gear, especially as you get past the initial stages of learning the ropes and move on to riskier, more dangerous techniques and challenges.

Related: Mountaineering Boots.

The Flex

Perhaps the most important part of any binding is the amount of flex it can offer. Unfortunately, since there is no standardized scale across all companies, you might end up buying something that’s slightly more stiff or soft than you expected.

Having the right flex makes a big difference. Softer flexes are much easier to turn, which makes them far better for beginners and less-confident snowboarders, as well as people who take part in the sport for enjoyment or to explore areas that they would otherwise have no excuse to visit. They can suffer at high speeds, especially if you are trying to hold a specific angle or keep yourself stable, but they are often the best choice for moving at slow speeds.

Stiffer flexes, on the other hand, trade in this turning power for more stability and strength, making them harder to “aim” but far more reliable once they pick up speed. In many cases, they will also have some extra padding or reinforced layers to boost their durability, since they’re intended to be used in circumstances that could easily result in them wearing out quickly.

The Highbacks

A highback, for those who aren’t’ aware, is simply the rear part of a binging that acts as leg support. They are also often the main part that hinges down to let the user put their foot inside it, which means that they need to be carefully designed for as much protection and reliability as possible.

The amount of padding used in your highbacks can make a huge difference in how comfortable and safe you’ll be, since they protect the rear of your feet and ankles – areas that are quite vulnerable, especially around the heels. On the other hand, all of this extra protection can add weight and might make it harder to balance.

There’s also the problem of the stance or position you’ll be boarding in. Many highbacks are built with the assumption that the user will be standing in a certain way, but not everybody finds these conventional poses useful, which can make the extra padding or any custom-molded sections much less useful. In certain cases, they might even end up being counterproductive by ruining your ability to balance in a safe way.

The Baseplate

The baseplate is the part that connects the bottom of your bindings to the board and is another extremely important component – but for a variety of different reasons. For starters, like the highbacks, adding more padding and cushioning can keep you comfortable as the cost of adding more weight, which can make it harder to move your feet around and control the board. There’s also the issue of how they’re molded since certain shoe types might not grip onto them properly if they’re too smooth or flat.

You might also run into problems with the mounting system they use – not all of them are designed to work alongside all existing board designs, and certain manufacturers and brands don’t use universal mounting systems, limiting what kind of boards they can actually be used on. While it’s sometimes possible to get them replaced, it takes a lot of extra time and money, so finding a pair that will fit your board straight out of the box is usually the cheapest and most convenient option.

Remember that poor-quality mounting systems might also break easily – in these cases, not only will the board go flying and you’ll have to recover it by hand, but you’ll also need to get yourself out of the bindings, which can make it harder to get to where your board landed.

The Straps

Like highbacks, straps are partially meant to offer more support, but they’re also responsible for holding your feet in place against the board so that it doesn’t go flying off. However, not all straps are designed equally, with some being incredibly strong and others simply being added out of necessity.

Straps can be made of all kinds of different materials and designs, but the most useful ones are both strong and lightweight – however, this combination can sometimes be hard to find, and you might end up with a pair of bindings that use a less-than-ideal strap design.

In general, they’re definitely not as important as most other parts of your bindings, but they still matter a lot in the long-term. Replacing and repairing straps can be hard, especially if they use extra padding or molded materials that have to be gotten from the original company you bought them from, so finding straps that are made out of long-lasting and damage-resistant materials should definitely be a priority at some point.

Remember that there are no hard rules in snowboarding, just like most other sports – not everything that works for other people will work for you, and you might find a particular combination of gear that you prefer even if other people don’t find it helpful. Go with whatever bindings you know you can rely on, rather than just following trends and hoping they’ll feel right when you’re wearing them.

Expert Tip

Ideally, you’ll want the heel of your ski boot to be quite snug in your bindings. This means that it won’t rattle around or feel loose when you’re trying to take on difficult slopes, and won’t bash into your foot and hurt your heel if you crash.

Did you know?

Scales are rarely the same between manufacturers, so getting actual measurements is often important if you’re not sure what their exact scales are.