The Best Boning Knives and Fillet Knives of 2023

Admittedly, I went into these tests thinking that the top five knives would all be boning knives. After all, I assumed the shape of a boning knife would be able to fillet fish easily while long, skinny fillet blades would have a difficult time working around chicken joints. Well, the Zwilling J.A. Henckels Twin Four Star 7-Inch High Carbon Fillet Knife certainly proved me wrong.

Not only did it cleanly remove the silverskin from the pork tenderloin, it can also break down whole chickens without issue. My only gripe is that the long, straight blade is a touch awkward around the tinier chicken pieces like the wings, but the blade is flexible enough to make it work. In addition to all that, this knife is a fan favorite here at Reviewed, especially for removing fish skin. If you work more with fish than meat, this is definitely the knife to get.

The Victorinox Cutlery 8-Inch Straight Fillet Fishing Knife is surprisingly light, given its long profile. The super flexible blade is slightly tapered, too, which is perfect for quickly and effortlessly filleting fish. While the blade is a little too long to comfortably maneuver around chicken joints, it's certainly sharp enough to get the task done. That said, it's great for butterflying pork, enough so that we can safely call this knife a multi-tasker.

The Shun TDM0774 Premier Gokujo 6-Inch Boning Fillet Knife is plenty sharp and capable, but it's not my first choice as a professional butcher. It's lightweight enough, but it gets heavier and more cumbersome the more we used it. Between the handle and the wide, curved blade, our cuts ended up a little thicker than we like, and it's harder to maneuver than some of the competition. There’s no question that this is a beautiful knife with a very sharp edge, though, so that's why we have no problem recommending this knife for cutting meat (especially if beauty is as important to you as functionality).

Compared to the other knives, the Victorinox Swiss Army 6-Inch Fibrox Pro Boning Knife with Flexible Blade isn't the sharpest knife in the block. It has a nice, textured handle with a great lightweight grip, but we noticed some resistance when butterflying pork and removing the fish skin. It’s still a good knife for the price, but its edge can't compete with most of the other knives in the group.

There's no question about this knife's ability to work with fish. It can easily remove the skin from the fish in one smooth motion, but the jutted edge on the plastic handle gets in the way, especially when working with chicken. The long, straight blade also makes precision all but impossible when removing the pork's silverskin.

You wouldn't expect a knife that costs so little to live up to the performance of a $100 knife, but that's exactly what happened here. While it did a fine job on the pork and the chicken, the other knives did it better. It certainly wouldn't be our first choice for working with fish because it created jagged edges when removing the skin. This knife might fit the bill if you needed a meat and poultry knife at a budget price, but its performance paled in comparison to the similarly-priced Mercer knife.

Unfortunately, the Forged Premio 5.5-Inch Boning Knife falls short in terms of performance. It's disappointingly heavy for a boning knife, tiring our hands out after boning a single chicken. Not only that, but the super rigid, straight blade design makes it hard to get into tight spaces. It wouldn't be our top pick for boning knives, and it didn't perform well enough on the fish to quality as a multi-tasking knife, either.

At the time we tested, the Bubba Blade 9-Inch Tapered Blade Flex Fillet Knife was sixth on Amazon’s Boning and Fillet Knives best-selling list. Unfortunately, this is not a knife I'd recommend for use in a home kitchen. It's comically large, both in blade length and in handle girth. It's too heavy for slicing up chicken and pork tenderloin, and it looks like a sword when placed next to our trout fillets. The blade is sharp, though, so I have no doubt this knife is great to store on your boat for deep sea fishing (especially since it comes with synthetic sheath for storage).