Best Golf Clubs of 2025
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
These are the golf clubs of 2025, ranked by our critic's grade. All five reviews the year holds are drivers, and the grades split cleanly: three S, two C, nothing in between. Stability is the word that recurs, and two entries are as much about the hosel as the head, Ping G440 Max with eight positions and Cobra DS-ADAPT MAX-K with thirty-three.
TaylorMade Qi35 leads, graded S. It keeps almost all of the 10K stability in a head a good player can actually look down at. Cobra DS-ADAPT MAX-K, also graded S, finally separates loft, lie and face angle on a K-frame head stable enough to deserve it, and at $549 it undercuts the $649 flagships by a hundred dollars. Ping G440 SFT, the third S, is the rare draw-bias driver that fixes the slice without looking shut, with roughly twenty yards of correction built into mass placement rather than a closed face.
The two C grades are Callaway Elyte, with its thermoforged carbon crown, and Ping G440 Max, which moves hosel mass into the sole. Neither verdict finds a fault. A C here means sound engineering that did not separate itself from the field. A reader deciding between Ping G440 SFT and Ping G440 Max, both $649, should weigh whether the slice correction is needed, since Ping G440 SFT is the one graded S.
TaylorMade Qi35Keeps almost all of the 10K stability in a head a good player can actually look down at. The driver Qi was aiming for.Read the review
Cobra DS-ADAPT MAX-KFutureFit33 finally separates loft, lie and face angle, and the K-frame head is stable enough to deserve it.
Ping G440 SFTThe rare draw-bias driver that fixes the slice without looking shut or turning a fade into a hook.
Titleist GT1 HybridTitleist's lightest hybrid was built for slower swings and turned out to be the one testers kept reaching for.- Srixon ZXi5Srixon ZXi5The best feeling players distance iron on the market, and it undercuts every club it beats by two hundred dollars.
Callaway Apex UW 25Callaway's utility wood sits between a hybrid and a fairway wood and does both jobs well enough to stay in the bag whatever the weather.- Ping G440 LSTPing G440 LSTPing finally built a low spin driver a normal golfer can hit, and it is the best of the three G440 heads.
Callaway ElyteThermoforged carbon and an aerodynamic crown ridge, with the face optimisation pushed out to ten variables.
Ping G440 MaxThe 10K idea with the hosel put on a diet, freeing weight from the one place Ping had not touched.