Choosing the Ideal Chromebook for Academics: In-Depth Analysis by Experts

If that five-year-old laptop that keeps freezing during class is killing your back-to-school mood, it’s time for an upgrade. Students have many options for laptops great for studying and getting work done, but lightweight and speedy Chromebooks are some of the best. They typically cost less than Windows machines or Apple’s Mac offerings and are streamlined with ChromeOS, a lightweight operating system without all the bells and whistles of Windows.

Also: The best laptops for college in 2024: Expert tested and reviewed

ChromeOS makes it easy to navigate to popular apps like Google Docs , Google Drive , and Gmail so you can stay on task and in touch with teachers and classmates.

Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links

If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

What is the best Chromebook for students right now?

ZDNET staff went hands-on with all of our top choices, including our pick for best Chromebook overall – the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook -- to help you decide which laptop ranks supreme. Find out how each model from brands like Lenovo, HP, and more stack up to determine which Chromebook is best for your classroom needs this back-to-school season.

The best Chromebooks for students in 2024

Show less

View now at HP

Pros

• The best hardware you’ll find in this price class
• Brightest touchscreen on a Chromebook
• 8MP front-facing camera is exceptional
• RGB keyboard

Cons

• Priced higher than typical Chromebooks
• Availability is limited

HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook

Best Chromebook for students overall

Chromebooks have come a long way since the early years of prioritizing value above all else. That’s not to say that the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook doesn’t pack a lot of value; it’s just built differently than any other Google-powered laptop we’ve tested to date… and we mean that in a good way.

Instead of focusing on compromises, HP partnered with Google to create the best, premium-tier Chromebook available on the market, and it shows with the Dragonfly Pro’s industrial design, the fantastic dual-firing speakers, RGB keyboard, and display that’s best described as pure eye candy.

In fact, if you often find yourself working outdoors – maybe on the campus quad or at a local coffee shop – the Dragonfly Pro has the brightest touchscreen display out of all Chromebooks. It’s also the first to feature an 8MP front-facing camera that’s been tuned by the team behind Google’s own Pixel cameras.

Review: HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook

As ZDNET’s Kerry Wan wrote in his full review, “With 16GB of RAM and a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, there’s little to worry about when it comes to performance and day-to-day operations. Not to mention, consistent updates over the past years have given ChromeOS a more leveled playing field between it and competing operating systems. Thanks to that maturity, HP had every opportunity to capitalize on the Dragonfly Pro’s hardware – and it most certainly did.”

The HP Dragonfly Chromebook costs $999, which certainly isn’t the cheapest laptop on this list, but it still undercuts alternatives like Apple’s MacBooks and does so with some superior (and flashy) features.

HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook specs: Display size: 14 inches | Refresh rate: 60Hz | Resolution: 2560 x 1600 | Touchscreen: Yes | RAM: 16GB | GPU: Intel Iris X Graphics | CPU: Intel Core i5-1235U | Storage: 256GB SSD | Battery life: Up to 11 hours and 30 minutes

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

View now at Best Buy

Pros

• Flexible viewing and interactive experience
• Compact and durable enough to lug around in a backpack
• Fanless design is both surprisingly cool and quiet

Cons

• Exterior design is plasticky
• Trackpad is naturally smaller
• Top-firing speakers are not as clear when laptop is folded

Lenovo Flex 3i

Best ultraportable Chromebook for students

If you’re often moving from building to building and floor to floor, then an ultraportable, lightweight Chromebook may serve you best. To be clear, most of the Chromebooks on this buying list make the cut as far as portability is concerned, but the Lenovo Flex 3i arguably gives you the most functionality for its size.

The laptop weighs about 2.75 pounds, has a sizable 12.2-inch display that supports touchscreen input, and can be folded all around to transform itself into a tented display or tablet. Lenovo equipped the new Flex 3i with an Intel Processor N100, too, which, when paired with the 4GB of RAM, should be more than capable of powering most student tasks.

Review: Lenovo Flex 3i Chromebook

ZDNET tested the Lenovo Flex 3i and found it both performant and efficient enough to stream hours of content, write and edit documents, and have multiple tabs open at once. The cherry on top is the lack of hissing noises typically found in fan-powered laptops. That makes this a distraction-free Chromebook, especially if you’re churning out last-second papers in the library.

Lenovo Flex 3i specs: Display size: 12.2 inches | Refresh rate: 60Hz | Resolution: 1920 x 1200 | Touchscreen: Yes | RAM: 4GB | GPU: Intel UHD Graphics | CPU: Intel Processor N100 | Storage: 64GB eMMC | Battery life: 12 hours

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

View now at Frame

Pros

• Fully modular design gives you freedom of ports and power
• Rigid build quality even with all the moving parts
• Extensive software support with ChromeOS

Cons

• Speakers can sound muffled
• Doesn’t have a touchscreen display (or option for one)
• Have to buy the laptop and its parts à la carte

Click here

Framework Chromebook

Best sustainable Chromebook for students

Picture this: You use your laptop for a couple of years and notice that the battery has degraded significantly, the chassis is worn out, and the ports you once thought you’d need now exist to collect dust. That doesn’t sound like a good investment, does it?

Framework, the company behind the fully modular and sustainable laptop , launched its first Chromebook variant late last year. Since then, it remains the most planet-friendly Chromebook money can buy right now, and if you’re up for a device that’s completely customizable to your needs, this is the one.

Review: Framework Chromebook

From the choice of ports to the color of the display bezel to how much memory you want on board, virtually every aspect of the Framework Chromebook can be tweaked, modified, and updated. That way, the laptop doesn’t fall behind on specs and functionality as time passes.

Naturally, operating on ChromeOS also gives the device software support for years down the road. If you bought one today, you can expect frequent software and security patches until 2030.

Framework Chromebook specs: Display size: 13.5 inches | Refresh rate: 60Hz | Resolution: 2256 x 1504 | Touchscreen: No | RAM: 8GB | GPU: Iris Xe Graphics | CPU: Intel 12th Gen Core i5-1240P | Storage: Up to 1TB | Battery life: 7 hours

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

View now at Best Buy View now at Acer

Pros

• Brilliant display with 120Hz refresh rate
• Big screen
• Great battery life

Cons

• On the heavier side
• No full-sized keyboard

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE

Best Chromebook for entertainment

Gaming? On a Chromebook? Absolutely. Acer’s latest top-tier Chromebook Plus just came out earlier this year, and is equipped with all the tools needed forstudying and cloud gaming. The Chromebook Plus models that were came out this year are equipped with more robust processors, sleeker and more high-end builds, and above all, huge leaps forward in battery life, and the 516 GE is no exception.

I reviewed Acer’s 516 GE Chromebook Plus , and praised its 120Hz display and sleek form factor, noting that cloud gaming was smooth and performant – something that students who happen to be gamers will love to take advantage of during downtime. With minimal local storage, you don’t have to worry about installing huge game files on the laptop, instead keeping school-related tasks front and center.

Review: Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE

It’s not just gaming that this laptop excels at, though. The slick display works well for any kind of media, and its great battery life means that this machine will be fine for long days on campus or if you can’t get to an outlet.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE specs: Display size: 16 inches | Refresh rate: 120Hz | Resolution: 2560 x 1600 | Touchscreen: No | RAM: 8 GB | GPU: Intel Iris Xe Graphics | CPU: Intel Core 5 Series 1 | Storage: 256GB SSD | Battery life: 10+ hours

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

View now at Amazon

Pros

• Solid display
• Good battery life
• Flexible form factor
• Good port selection

Cons

• Can run warm

Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus

Best Chromebook for creative students

Lenovo’s flexible Chromebook Plus has all the hallmarks of a solid student laptop, with some features that creatives will love as well. First, you have the 14-inch touchscreen display that can be flipped a full 180 degrees, turning the Chromebook into a tablet. Images look great on the screen as it can output a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels.

Review: Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus

For students studying design, animation, or media, this works well as a lightweight, cost-effective laptop with a respectable set of hardware that’s versatile enough to be used in a variety of applications.

Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 specs: Display size: 14 inches | Refresh rate: 60Hz | Resolution: 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA) | Touchscreen: Yes | RAM: 8GB | GPU: Intel UHD Graphics | CPU: ‎Intel 13th Generation Core i3 | Storage: 128GB SSD | Battery life: 10 hours

Show Expert Take Show less

ZDNET’s Kerry Wan and Steven Vaughan-Nichols contributed to this story.

What is the best Chromebook for students?

The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is the best Chromebook for students, because of its adequate processor, sleek design, and great battery life.

Which Chromebook is right for you?

One of the good things about Chromebooks is that almost any Chromebook will work for you. Yes, there are real differences between them when it comes to speed and memory, which is another aspect of speed, screen size, brightness, and resolution for practical purposes. But, for sheer functionality, they all do pretty much the same job.

Generally speaking, the older the student, the more power they can use. On the other side of the age gap, so long as a Chromebook can take a beating and keep on running, it’s fine for a younger kid.

Personally, just like with any computer, I’ll take all the power and screen real estate I can get. But, for the students in your home, you don’t need to spend a lot of money for them to go to school virtually.

How did we choose these Chromebooks?

Along with selecting based on hands-on, expert testing, ZDNET selected these Chromebooks for students based on CrXRPT 2.0 benchmarks. This test tells you how fast a Chromebook handles things you do every day, including playing video games, watching movies, and editing photos and provides an overall score. The higher the score, the better.

This benchmark consists of six scenario tests: photo effects, face detection, offline notes, stock portfolio dashboard, DNA sequence analysis, 3D shapes with WebGL and three additional video, music, and game player tests.

• Photo Effects: Applies three effects (Sharpen, Emboss, and Glow) to two photos each, a set of six photos total.
• Face Detection: Checks for human faces in a set of five photos (low resolution).
• Offline Notes: Measures the time to encrypt, store, and display notes from local storage.
• Stock Portfolio Dashboard: Calculates and displays different graphical views of a stock portfolio.
• DNA Sequence Analysis: Measures the time it takes to process eight DNA sequences for open reading frames and amino acids.
• 3D Shapes with WebGL: Generates equation-based 3D shapes and displays them with WebGL.
• Video Player: Plays a two-minute 1080p H.264 video clip in a browser from the local system.
• Music Player: Plays an audio clip for three minutes.
• HTML5-based game: Runs an impact.js-based game for about two minutes.

All tests were run using ChromeOS 89. Wi-Fi was on, but Bluetooth was disabled during the benchmarking. The screens were set to 80% brightness.

How we test laptops

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

We use a combination of methods to test laptops here at ZDNET. First, we acquire data from benchmarking software to analyze a system’s metrics under the hood, and compare those to advertised numbers. Then, we spend an extended amount of time with the laptop (usually a week or two) using it the same way a normal consumer would, in order to analyze its portability, form factor, and how well the battery actually holds up, among others. For an extensive breakdown, check out our comprehensive laptop testing methodology .

• Benchmarking: First, we run a series of tests to put the computer’s hardware through the wringer in order to see what it’s capable of. Cinebench is one of the most commonly-used hardware testing suites, which tests the laptop’s rendering performance on single and multiple CPU cores. PCMark 10 is another powerful program that covers a wide variety of tasks performed in the workplace, and there are many others that we use in tandem to gather as much data as we can. Some components we run tests on include:
• Processor: The “brain” of the laptop, and one of the most important factors that determines performance. The four biggest manufacturers that make most of the CPUs found in laptops today are Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple (in their own machines only). This is tested in benchmarking software.
• The display: The size of the display (measured diagonally from corner to corner) is also what dictates the laptop’s overall size, and play a big role in the laptop’s cost. Brightness is measured in “nits”, and color spectrums are tested in benchmarking software.
• The graphics processor (GPU): Whether it’s integrated into the CPU or a dedicated graphics card, how well the machine handles graphics is a key factor when it comes to demanding visual tasks like video editing, rendering, and of course, gaming. We test the GPU with a combination of benchmarking software, gaming, and media playback.
• Physical form factor: Finally, the laptop’s overall appearance and physical form factor encompasses its weight, thickness, how the keyboard and trackpad feel, and whether or not it has a display that can be folded back to form a tablet. We carry the laptop around for at least a week and note how well it commutes.
• Battery testing: We test a unit’s battery in a few ways. A handful of benchmarking programs have their own battery testing components, but we also will just let the laptop run for as long as it can under a medium load. We ensure screensavers and hibernation mode are turned off, set the display’s brightness and audio at 50%, load up a livestream on YouTube in Chrome, and wait ‘til the end.
• The human element: As we mentioned earlier, metrics and system data is important, but numbers alone don’t give you the full picture. This is where we weave in our personal experience with the device and tap into the practical use cases that consumers actually care about.

Ultimately, our goal is to break down the capabilities of each and every laptop we test into digestible terms that real people can find useful. There is a lot of noise and confusion when it comes to navigating the laptop and computer consumer market, so we hope to bring an intuitive element to the whole process by leveraging our team’s decades of experience.

Why use a Chromebook?

Chromebooks are good for almost any job. But they’re great for students. If a student can use a web browser, they can use a Chromebook.

For teachers and school administrators, Google also provides G Suite for Education and Google Classroom to help them make remote learning as easy as possible.

How secure are Chromebooks?

You can argue that thanks to ChromeOS’s built-in security, even out-of-support Chromebooks are safer than a newer macOS or Windows laptop. Don’t believe me? In Chromebook’s 10-year history, only 45 ChromeOS security exploits have been documented.

The main point is that if you’re short on cash, a cheap used or older model Chromebook will work just fine. And, since it’s trivial to erase a Chromebook and then reset it to your account , it’s much safer than buying a used Windows laptop.

Are Chromebooks good for students?

A Chromebook can be a great laptop choice for students of all ages. They’re more basic than their Windows-based counterparts, which means even very young children will be able to use them. They also have less powerful processors and graphics capabilities, reducing the temptation to play games all night rather than finish up homework.

A Chromebook’s battery life is its biggest selling point, with many models sporting at least 10 hours of use on a full charge. This means your kids won’t have to keep track of charging cables in order to use their Chromebook throughout the school day.

Are there alternative Chromebooks for students worth considering?

There are lots of options out there if you’re looking for a Chromebook geared towards students of all ages. Here’s a short list of alternate Chromebooks I thought were great choices for students:

Best battery life alternative Acer Chromebook 311 The Acer Chromebook 311 has a state-of-the-art low-energy-consuming AMD processor that allows for up to 10 hours of battery life. View at Amazon Best versatile alternative Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 can be configured in three ways thanks to its 360-degree hinge: Tent, Stand, and Tablet. View at Amazon

Newsletters

ZDNET Recommends

ZDNET saves you time and money by delivering the best products and tech deals to your inbox every week.

Subscribe

See all

ZDNET Recommends

The best smartwatches you can buy: Apple, Samsung, Google, and more compared

The 5 best VPN services (and tips to choose the right one for you)

The best Android phones you can buy (including a surprise pick)

The best robot vacuum and mop combos (and if they’re worth the money)

• The best smartwatches you can buy: Apple, Samsung, Google, and more compared
• The 5 best VPN services (and tips to choose the right one for you)
• The best Android phones you can buy (including a surprise pick)
• The best robot vacuum and mop combos (and if they’re worth the money)

Also read: