The Best Pruning Shears for Houseplants

A bad cut is not just cosmetic. Crushed plant tissue heals slowly, opens the way for fungal infection, and produces visible callusing scars that don’t go away. A clean, sharp cut closes within days and is barely visible after a season. The difference between a clean cut and a crushed one is often the difference between roots and rot on a propagation cutting.

Cheap pruning shears do not stay sharp, and once dull they crush more than they cut. The picks below are the seven tools worth knowing about — from the heirloom-grade Felco that does most of the work for most plant keepers, to the £8 scalpel that does the very fine work better than anything else.

Best Overall — Felco No. 6

The Felco No. 6 is the smaller-handled variant of the world-standard professional pruning shear. The No. 2 is the iconic full-sized model used by orchardists; the No. 6 is sized for slightly smaller hands and indoor-scale work, which makes it the right Felco for most plant keepers.

The cuts are clean. Forged steel blades hardened and ground to a curved edge that engages a stationary anvil — bypass design, like scissors. We tested it on stems from 1mm (Pothos vine) to 15mm (Rubber Plant trunk cutting), and every cut was a clean slice with no crushing, no tearing, no roughness at the edges. Cuttings rooted reliably in water and soil; pruning wounds on parent plants healed within a week.

The under-appreciated case for Felco: every part of the shear is available as a spare. Blade, anvil, spring, bumper, handle grips — Felco publishes the parts diagram openly. A pair bought today can be kept in service for decades with occasional £5–£15 part replacements. A £60 Felco kept for 20 years is £3/year; a £12 supermarket shear that goes dull in 18 months and gets binned is £8/year and adds metal-and-plastic waste to landfill. The shear that lasts wins on both economics and embodied carbon. Full review: Felco No. 6.

Best for Larger Hands — Felco No. 2

The Felco No. 2 is the full-size original the No. 6 is a scaled-down version of — same Swiss build, same replaceable-everything design, but sized for large hands with a 25mm cutting capacity against the No. 6’s 20mm. If your hands are on the larger side, or you’re regularly cutting past pencil-thickness (a maturing rubber plant’s woody stems, a fiddle leaf fig’s thicker growth), the No. 2 closes cleanly where the No. 6 starts to struggle.

We tested it on a mix of houseplant and balcony work, including an 18mm overgrown jade plant branch our No. 6 had refused to close on cleanly — the No. 2 took it without a second squeeze. On the thin, soft growth that makes up most routine indoor pruning, the two perform identically; the No. 2 just costs you a little extra weight and handle span if your hands don’t need it. Buy whichever one actually fits your hand — see the full review for the direct hand-size comparison.

Best Budget — Burgon & Ball Precision Snips

For occasional pruning — deadheading a Peace Lily, taking a Pothos cutting, trimming a brown tip — the Felco is over-tooled. The Burgon & Ball Precision Snips are the right thrift pick: spring-loaded snipping shears with a comfortable handle, sharp out of the box, designed for stems under 5mm.

Six months of testing on a mixed houseplant collection. The snips handled every cut we asked of them with one exception (a 12mm rubber plant trunk needed the Felco; everything else was within the snips’ capability). The cuts were clean enough that propagation success rates were comparable to Felco cuts on stems under 5mm.

The trade-off vs Felco is durability. The Burgon & Ball blade is not the same forged steel; it goes dull within 18–24 months of regular use and isn’t designed to be sharpened. Plan to replace at that point. Across the price gap (£15 vs £60), you’d buy 4 pairs of snips for one Felco — and the snips would still total fewer total years of service.

For a casual plant keeper who prunes maybe twice a year, this is the buy. For anyone who propagates regularly or maintains a maturing collection, save up for the Felco instead.

Best for Weaker Grip — Darlac Compound Action Pruner

Budget and grip strength are two different problems, and the Darlac Compound Action Pruner solves the second one specifically. A lever mechanism at the pivot multiplies the force reaching the blade, so a given stem takes noticeably less hand effort to cut than a standard shear the same size — real mechanical advantage, not marketing.

We tested it head-to-head against a standard single-pivot shear on identical 15mm stems: the difference in effort was obvious, not subtle. If arthritis, RSI, or simply a weaker grip is what makes pruning tiring rather than the price of the tool, this is the pick — the Burgon & Ball above is the better choice if budget is the only constraint. SK5 carbon steel blade, PTFE-coated, and Which? Best Buy rated with a lifetime warranty at around £15.

Best for Wrist Strain — Felco No. 12

The Felco No. 12 is a standard Felco bypass cutting head — same clean, no-crush cut as the No. 6 — with one change: the lower handle rotates on its own axis as you cut, instead of staying fixed in your palm. That solves a genuinely different problem from the Darlac above. The Darlac’s lever reduces the force a single tough stem needs; the No. 12’s rotating handle reduces the wrist twisting and blister friction that build up across a long session, regardless of how tough any individual cut is.

We tested it across a full repotting-and-cutback afternoon — upward of eighty cuts on a mixed collection — against a fixed-handle No. 6. Cut quality was identical; the difference showed up afterward, in noticeably less palm friction and thumb-base ache. If a single tough stem is your problem, the Darlac or the larger-capacity No. 2 solve that more directly and for less money. If it’s cumulative wrist strain over a long session — arthritis, RSI, or just a big collection — this is the one built for it.

Best for Fine Work — Niwaki Mainichi Bonsai Scissors

For very fine work — leaf-tip browning trims, deadheading individual flowers, removing damaged tissue from a Calathea — the Felco’s anvil is too thick and the Burgon & Ball’s blade is too broad. You want a narrow-blade scissor.

The Niwaki Mainichi (translation: “everyday”) are Japanese-tradition bonsai scissors with very narrow blades, a long spring-loaded handle, and a balance designed for sustained precision use. We’ve used them for: removing a single browning leaf-tip from a Calathea without touching the rest of the leaf; trimming damaged frond tips on a Boston Fern; cutting individual stamens off a Peace Lily flower for cleanliness.

The Felco can’t do any of these jobs without imprecision. The Burgon & Ball Snips can do some, but not all. For collections that include any of the species that need this kind of precision — calatheas, orchids, ferns, bonsai if you keep any — the Niwaki earns its £35–£45.

Best for Propagation — Sterilised craft scalpel

For propagation cuttings specifically, the right tool is not a shear at all. It’s a craft scalpel — the kind with disposable surgical blades, available in any art-supply shop for £8 with 5 spare blades.

The advantage is twofold. First, the blade is genuinely surgically sharp — sharper than any shear in this list, including the Felco. The cut is clean to the cellular level, which matters for the rooting success of difficult cuttings (Fiddle Leaf Fig, Strelitzia, anything woody). Second, the disposable blades allow easy sterilisation. Wipe with isopropyl alcohol between every cut and you eliminate the cross-contamination that propagates fungal infections through your collection.

For propagators serious about success rates, this is the move. A pair of Felco shears makes a clean cut; a sterilised scalpel makes a clean cut on a sterile surface. The latter is what professional nursery propagators use.

What you give up: durability of any single blade (the disposable blades dull within 5–10 cuts), and the convenience of a single tool. For routine pruning, use a shear; for cuttings you actually want to root, use a scalpel.

What to skip

Garden secateurs at the £25–£40 mid-range. They sit awkwardly between the budget snips (which do small work better at lower cost) and the Felco (which does serious work better at higher cost). The mid-range pruners don’t really beat either at their respective use cases. Either go cheap (Burgon & Ball) or go proper (Felco).

Anvil-only shears. These have a flat blade that cuts onto a flat anvil — they crush rather than slice, which is the opposite of what propagation and clean pruning need. The bypass design (blade past anvil) is what makes a proper shear; anything anvil-only is for woody outdoor work, not houseplants.

Disposable plastic snips with paper-thin metal blades. Sold cheaply in supermarkets. The blades flex under any real stem, the handles break within a year, and the cuts are uniformly crushed. Skip.

How we tested

Each tool was used on its primary use case for at least three months: the Felco for pruning across stem sizes; the Burgon & Ball for small-stem snipping; the Niwaki for fine work on sensitive species; the scalpel for propagation cuttings. Sharpness tested at start, mid-period, and end. Cut quality assessed visually and by propagation rooting success rate. See how we review.

For the techniques themselves — when to cut, where to cut, how to handle the cuttings — see the propagation guides and the pruning basics guide.