Best Airsoft BBs: The 2023 Expert Guide To Airsoft Ammo
- ELITE FORCE 0.20G
- ELITE FORCE 0.25G
- VALKEN ACCELERATE 0.32g
- G&G 0.20G BIO
- ELITE FORCE 0.25G BIO
- G&G 0.28G BIO
- ELITE FORCE 0.28G BIO
- Lancer Tactical 0.20g
- G&G Perfect 0.25g
- G&G Perfect Spherical 0.30g
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Whether you’re a 16-year-old beginner without a clue about airsoft ammo, a mom or dad looking to buy safe airsoft BBs for your child, or a hobbyist wanting to educate themselves further, you’ve found the single best airsoft BBs resource on the internet!
Why You Should Trust Me
I’m Liam, and I’ll answer your every question on airsoft ammunition you can have! I’ll give you access to my years of airsoft expertise and provide you with a comprehensive list of the best airsoft BBs!
As I wrote in my humongous 19,000-word (that 76 pages!) comprehensive guide on airsoft, I’m a true lover of the game. With over a decade of experience, over two hundred weekends of play, and probably around 2 million BBs fired – I know more about BBs than I should.
Let me just quickly gather myself after it dawned on me how much money I’ve spent on small plastic balls over the course of the past 10+ years, gulp. Worth it!
In addition to my own expertise, I’ve consulted with many, many of my friends and airsoft buddies to ask for their own advice and opinions. To further prepare for this guide, I read through well over 800 different Airsoft BB reviews on Amazon, more than 50 forum threads on Reddit’s /r/airsoft and Airsoftsociety, as well as a few dozen other small airsoft hobbyist blogs’ anecdotal info.
How I Selected the BBs
Here are some of the criteria I used when choosing the products for this guide:
1. Craftsmanship
What I mean by “good craftsmanship” or “excellent manufacturing” has largely to do with the physical appearance of the pellet. A perfect pellet is characterized by a balanced center of gravity, a smooth shiny polish, and a consistent lack of deformities, imperfections, seams, dimples, bubbles, and cracks in the surface. We want our BBs to be as perfectly spherical as possible. The more they approach perfect sphericalness, the more accurate and straighter they will shoot. Any kind of imperfections on the surface or inside the BB will throw off the center of gravity, and the pellet will swerve away from the target.
2. Accuracy & Range
Let me preface this by stating very clearly – your shooting skills, your gun and how it’s set up, and the environment you’re playing in will all affect your accuracy to a high degree. Having said that, the pellet you chose to use can adversely affect your performance if everything else is taken care of.
As I stated above, craftsmanship will be the variable that can throw off your game or give you a huge advantage on the field. Well-crafted BBs will simply achieve much better degrees of accuracy. The only other big variable on accuracy is the weight of your pellet and (indirectly) the FPS of your gun. The more powerful your gun, the heavier weight you can use. The heavier your BB, the less it will be affected by windy conditions. That’s as simple as it is.
On the flip side, the heavier your BB, the less range you can expect to achieve. This is why you want more powerful guns for heavier BBs. You need to optimally balance weight and your gun power for optimum accuracy AND range performance.
Check out this handy chart for FPS to Weight correlation:
| FPS | BB Weight |
|---|---|
| Up to 250 | 0.12g |
| 280-350 | 0.20g |
| 350-400 | 0.25g |
| 400-450 | 0.28g |
| 450-500 | 0.30g |
| 500-600 | 0.36g |
3. Durability
Quite simply, how structurally sound the pellet is. You might wonder why this is important since you don’t really care what happens to your BB once it leaves your barrel, right? Yes and no.
The immediate problem with weak BBs is their proneness to break inside your gun. Now imagine you’re operating an unmodified AEG, and you’re shooting around 15 rounds per second. All of a sudden, one of your BBs gets stuck and breaks into dozens of pieces inside your gun. By the time you notice your gun has clogged up and jammed, you’ve shot another 10 BBs, which will all cause immense damage to your gun internals. Now imagine this is a $500 and heavily modified and upgraded gun which shoots at 50 rounds per second. One small pellet can undo so much effort and money.
Another reason (and this is very important) is that some brittle BBs will shatter into a hundred pieces on impact. Now, most of the time, you wouldn’t care about this, but if you accidentally shoot at a newcomer who hasn’t been told not to wear wire mesh eye protection, these small fragments can pass through the mesh and into the player’s eyes (it’s best to wear a full-face mask with integrated goggles, like this one here).
Unfortunately for tree-huggers like myself, biodegradable BBs are prone to being brittle. This is why I recommend you heed my advice on the best biodegradable BBs, as they have been tested in combat and bear my seal of approval.
4. Packaging
Admittedly not nearly on the same level as the points above, but still something to keep in mind. Even the most perfectly manufactured BB can start underperforming drastically if dirtied by greasy hands. This is why BBs that come in bottles are vastly preferred to those that come in bags or tubs. Bottled BBs can be poured into hi-cap magazines without the need to touch them.
BBs that come in either tubs or plastic bags are at a disadvantage due to one more reason – spillage. The sharp corners of tubs and the flimsy nature of plastic bags make these prone to spilling your BBs all over the place if your UPS processing center has a bad day and mishandles your package.
Best Airsoft BBs
ELITE FORCE 0.20G BBs
Elite Force’s 0.20g BBs are the #1 go-to choice for players with guns shooting in the range of 280 to 350 Feet Per Second. Due to their high-quality manufacturing process, they don’t have any dimples, seams, or imperfections. They are well-polished and slick to the touch.
The BBs feature the industry-standard 5.95mm diameter and weigh in at 0.20g per pellet. The standard deviation is less than +- .05. This makes for consistently high performance. For guns with FPS outputs below 350, the 0.20g per pellet is optimally balanced to achieve the highest degree of range and flight path stability. Most commercially available entry pistols and rifles will handle these BBs perfectly.
The BBs come in a 12 by a 3-inch bottle with a durable screw-on cap. Usually holding 5000 pellets, the bottle facilitates easy feeding into high-cap magazines without the need to handle and dirty the actual pellets with your hands.
Elite Force is one of the most popular and well-known brands in airsoft. This is reflected in their pricing – they are usually slightly more expensive than other brands.
ELITE FORCE 0.25G BBs
For mid-range and more powerful guns, Elite Force 0.25g BBs are the perfect choice. I would advise you to get these BBs if your gun is shooting at above 350FPS consistently. The 0.25g pellet by Elite Force is designed without seams, holes, or deformations. – they are incredibly smooth and consistent. Powerful punch, straight shots all around, and adequate range for most situations.
Due to the 20% increase in weight, these BBs will be able to achieve improved accuracy and flight stability. However, the increased weight negatively impacts the range of less powerful guns, so I’m only recommending the 0.25g BBs for guns powerful enough to overcome this issue.
My friends and I usually play on small fields, so I prefer to just bulk buy half a dozen bottles of 0.25g BBs and use them across all my guns. This way, I never have to worry about BBs again!
Best Biodegradable Airsoft BBs
VALKEN ACCELERATE 0.32g BBs
The Valken Accelerate 0.32g BBs make for an incredibly performing projectile in high-end and modified guns shooting at 500FPS and above. If you have poured some serious money and effort into your gun and you want to achieve ranges of up to 200+ feet, these are the BBs to choose!
Valken’s BBs sport a 6mm diameter and are polished to perfection. Due to their weight, they have unparalleled accuracy and fly straight as an arrow. However, keep in mind that this BB weight is usually reserved for powerful (and costly) bolt-action snipers. No gas or AEG stock gun will be effective with such a heavy BB.
G&G 0.20G BIO BBs
G&G 0.20g Biodegradable BBs are without a doubt the best choice for environmentally friendly players with guns shooting at up to 350FPS. Not only is G&G producing some incredibly popular airsoft guns, but they are also often touted as the best airsoft bio BBs brand.
The BBs themselves come in at a 5.95mm diameter with industry-standard +-.05 tolerance. They shoot perfectly in tight bore barrels with 6.02 diameters. The pellets are extremely high quality, something very much appreciated with bio BBs, where manufacturers usually like to slack a bit. The BBs fly incredibly straight and have never jammed on me.
ELITE FORCE 0.25G BIO BBs
It’s no surprise that Elite Force has found itself once more in my Top 3 rankings. Elite Force 0.25g Biodegradable BBs are continuing the trend of manufacturing excellence. Just like their 0.25g non-bio cousins, these BBs are void of any deformations, seams, or imperfections and are perfectly polished and smooth to the touch. They are perfectly suited for guns shooting above 350FPS.
The 0.25g bio variations come in the same 5.95mm diameter with a +- .01 tolerance. As you can already guess, Elite Force has done a marvelous job at ensuring the pellets fly straight through the air with a stable flight path. I feel like a broken record here, but it’s no surprise that with such consistently high products, Elite Force is among my favorite BB brands.
The pellets come in a bottle, like any other Elite Force BB products. Make sure that when you screw the cap back onto your bottle, it’s sealed perfectly. You don’t want any moisture to get into the bottle and start the decomposing process.
G&G 0.28G BIO BBs
G&G 0.28g Biodegradable BBs are another product from airsofters’ favorite Bio BB brand. The big brother of the 0.20g BB, 0.28g BBs are some of the heaviest bio pellets available on the market. Snipers and owners of high-powered airsoft rifles shooting at around 450FPS will do very well with 0.28g’s.
The pellets are virtually the same as the 0.20g ones. Same 5.95mm diamater (+-.05 tolerance). Same premium grade quality in terms of smoothness, lack of imperfections, perfectly spherical design, and consistently balanced center of gravity. Once again, very, very accurate and stable shooting. Especially for a Bio pellet.
ELITE FORCE 0.28G BIO BBs (Honorary Mention)
Another knock-out-the-park airsoft product by Elite Force! Their 0.28g Biodegradable pellets continue the trend of excellence. The only reason I decided not to feature these was to give an awesome American brand such as G&G some much-needed exposure. Having said that, if you want to bank on perfection, Elite Force is the way to go!
Best Cheap Airsoft BBs
Let’s be honest here, airsoft is anything but a budget hobby. From guns to equipment, consumables, and apparel, to all the bells and whistles that come with this awesome game, it can get quite expensive.
So, it’s easy to understand that not everybody can afford to spend a fortune on airsoft BBs. Nor should they! It’s very prudent to allocate a bigger chunk of your budget to more essential parts of your loadout, such as your gun and its parts, instead of spending $25 on biodegradable BBs. Not to mention that, if you like using airsoft grenades, you may need to spend more on BBs than you’d like! In this case, cheaper 0.20 or even 0.12 BBs are a fantastic option. Also, if you like grenades, make sure to check my best grenade guide – you’ll definitely find products of interest there!
Here are a few BB products that are cheap without losing much in quality.
Lancer Tactical 0.20g BBs
The Lancer Tactical 0.20g BBs are the perfect choice for budget-conscious players with entry guns shooting below 350FPS! These pellets are 6mm in diameter, white in color, polished, and completely seamless.
These BBs are perfect for any airsoft gun that uses 6mm BBs. Plus, they feature a high rate of accuracy, grouping, and range with minimal jamming. Sure, it’s best to use them while playing indoors (not biodegradable), but you get the best bang for your buck, especially if you want to practice.
G&G Perfect 0.25g BBs
A perfectly spherical pellet without any imperfections or other drawbacks – fit to compete with pricier competitors in both accuracy and craftsmanship, these BBs from G&G will prove a very good choice for anyone sporting an entry airsoft weapon shooting at up to 350FPS. The BBs are 6mm in diameter with a +-.01 tolerance, polished to perfection, and have no seams, bubbles, cracks, deformities, or imperfections. If you’re a fan of never-jams, you’ve just found your right budget fit.
The only real drawback is that some users have reported feeding issues with tight bore barrels. If you’ve installed such a barrel, I would recommend you look elsewhere for your BB needs. When it comes to accuracy, some people have mentioned that hop-up calibration (more than general) is required. This is easily done and will only take you a good ten minutes of experimentation. Hardly a drawback, but worth mentioning if you have a funky hop-up. Once adjusted, the BBs are very reliable and accurate.
G&G Perfect Spherical 0.30g BBs
The 0.30g BB is similar to the 0.25 pellet from G&G, only heavier and in a different color (grey). Really, that’s it. Other than these two adjustments, they are virtually the same. Once again, low-cost G&G BBs will prove an awesome pellet choice for players who are partial to a sniper play style and own a high-end and/or upgraded airsoft gun shooting at 500FPS and above!
No changes in terms of dimensions – 5.95mm with a +-.01 standard deviation. Impeccable craftsmanship resulting in a perfectly spherical pellet with no issues to talk about. The drawbacks are the same as above – some issues with tight bore barrels. Also, since they come in a bag, spills may occur when handled improperly. Other than that, accuracy will be very high, especially so due to the heavyweight. Some of the most accurate and stable BBs you are able to purchase.
These BBs are grey in color, especially useful for snipers. When half your job is to find foliage to hind between, the added benefit of “invisible” BBs is very much appreciated. Not only will your opponent be unable to dodge (or claim to have dodged *cough, cough*), they won’t know who and from where they were hit! Multi-kills, here we go!
How to Care for Your BBs
Taking care of your BBs is an important part often neglected. It doesn’t matter how much of this guide you read if you yourself mishandle your airsoft ammo. Fortunately for all of us, taking care of BBs is super simple and straightforward.
Wash your BBs
Washing BBs will remove mold-release residue and other gunk left on the surface of your BBs from the manufacturing process. We already covered just how important a smooth surface is. Washing your pellets is fairly straightforward. Check out this awesome video by airsoft legend Novritsch on how to wash BBs:
If you can avoid it, do not touch your pellets with your hands after washing them. This is why I always recommend BBs that come in bottles, as you can easily feed them into your magazine. If yours don’t come in a bottle, or you’ve gone with mid-cap magazines, make sure your hands are clean and dry.
Never ever reuse BBs
It hurts me to watch when someone picks up dirty, half-broken BBs and puts them into their guns. I cringe just thinking about it. I mean, gosh, I recommend you never to touch them if possible – imagine what dirt will do to them. Big no. I don’t care if yours cost $40 and are from some vegan farm in Ireland – the moment a BB leaves your gun barrel, it has done its purpose.
Some people ask me if they can reuse BBs if they wash them, and the answer is a categorical No. As your BB has impacted its target, it has undergone structural damage. All high-quality BB characteristics it once possessed have now disappeared. Let them die a slow, plastic death.
Store bio BBs in cold, dark, and dry conditions
It’s best practice for any BB, really, but especially vital for biodegradable ones. You want to keep them in a cold, dark, and dry place, especially if you’re like me and bulk buy BBs by the tens of thousands. Biodegradable BBs will start degrading in hot and humid environments. If you live in a hot climate, this, unfortunately, means frequent ordering or keeping your BBs in the fridge.
Wrap Up
I sincerely hope this guide has helped you out with your ammo-buying decision! If it has, please make sure to share this guide on social media and comment below with any comments, questions, or concerns! Also, if you’re new to the world of BBs and would like to learn more about it, make sure you check out my huge airsoft guide. I’ve written an entire section dedicated to BBs!