Best Paper Shredder
Having a paper shredder for disposing of sensitive documents is more important than ever, with risks of identity fraud, financial fraud and cyber-attacks become more prevalent. Whether it’s documents with personal information at home or business documents in the workplace, you need a way to safely and reliably destroy documents containing sensitive information.
The exact type of shredder that will best suit your needs is going to depend on how you’re using it. If you have a large number of documents that you’re going to dispose of on a regular basis, you’re going to want a shredder with a reasonably fast shredding rate, and a large-capacity storage bin.
Here’s our roundup of the best shredders available today.
Products at a Glance
Best Paper Shredder
- Cheap reliable shredder
- Compact size
- Cross-cut shredding for great security
- Not able to shred CDs
- Only has a five minute running time
- Limited to just 8 sheets
- Very lightweight
- Cheap
- Can shred CDs
- Short continuous runtime
- Strip-cut is not very secure
- You can get more advanced shredders in this price range
- Excellent security from Micro-Cut shredding
- Solid design
- Decent sized 3.9-gallon wastebasket
- Quite heavy
- Only 5 minute continuous running time
- 30-45 minute cooldown time.
- Hour-long continuous run time
- Comes with 5 year-long warranty
- Excellent security from Micro-Cut shredding
- Very heavy
- Quite large
- Overkill for domestic use
Do I want a Strip-Cut, Cross-Cut or Micro-Cut shredder?
A strip-cut shredder is the most basic kind, which simply cuts paper, cards, and CDs into thin strips. These don’t offer the best level of security since anyone who finds these shredded strips would be able to reassemble the strips to form the completed original with just a bit of patience and glue. They are fast and cheap, and for low stakes, domestic usage is perfectly up to the task. These are also a convenient way to prepare a waste paper for recycling.
A Cross-Cut shredder offers more robust security, usually at a higher cost. Instead of documents just being cut into thin strips, it will also cut each individual strip into multiple smaller pieces. This would significantly increase the work required to reassemble any shredded documents, so these are a good choice for more sensitive personal or business documents.
A Micro-Cut shredder will turn paper into confetti, turning a single sheet of paper into thousands of tiny pieces. This would take an extreme forensic operation, and a lot of time and effort, to even attempt to reassemble. This is ideal for the most sensitive documents that you would want to be absolutely certain have been destroyed, but it does make it the most expensive type of shredder, and it can take quite a long time to fully shred documents.
Do these Shredders feature protection from overheating?
Each of the shredders featured here features protection from overheating. Thermal overload protection will automatically shut down the shredder if it’s getting close to overheating.
Our Verdict
We’ve picked the Aurora AS890C as our top shredder. It’s an excellent shredder for the price, and for most users, Cross-Cut shredding is a good compromise between the basic Strip-Shredding and comprehensive Micro-Cut shredding. It’s nice and compact, and ideal for a home office.