Three translations the box does not do for you

The catalog is organised around a legal cliff edge

Recreational flight under 250 grams needs no FAA registration and no Remote ID broadcast. One gram over and you owe both. That is not a gentle curve, and it is why 10 of the aircraft here weigh exactly 249 grams on the nose — the makers are designing to a statute, not to an engineering optimum. 25 of the 41 drones listed sit under the line and 16 sit over it.

The registration chip on every card is computed from that aircraft’s published takeoff weight and its Remote ID hardware, against the published FAA rules. It is never typed into the data, so a weight corrected next month moves the chip with it and the two cannot quietly disagree. It restates a published rule and is not legal advice.

How aircraft are sorted, and what the categories mean

Everything sits in one of 5 types — Sub-250 g camera, Camera drone, Selfie / follow-me, FPV, Beginner / budget — assigned by what the aircraft is for rather than by what its marketing calls it. Two of them show why that is worth doing: HoverAir X1 weighs 125 grams, carries no gimbal and comes without a controller, while DJI Mini 4 Pro weighs 249 grams with three-axis stabilisation and a controller in the box. Both are under the line. Neither is a substitute for the other.

Obstacle sensing gets its own 6-step ladder for the same reason: three brands will all write “intelligent obstacle avoidance” on the box for forward-only sensing, front-and-back sensing, and full omnidirectional coverage. 24 of the aircraft here sense nothing at all, and a downward vision camera is positioning rather than sensing — it will hold a perfect hover and then fly into a branch.

Takeoff weight, sensor size and flight time

The maker’s own published specification page for the exact model, first and by default — not a retailer’s paraphrase of it, which is where wrong weights breed. Sensor area is the one conversion applied on top: makers publish an optical format like 1/1.3″ and never the millimetres, so each format is expanded through the published active-area table on the specs page, in full, where you can check the arithmetic.

Where an independent measurement of flight time exists and can be cited, it is printed next to the claim instead of replacing it. That applies to 5 aircraft so far. The widest gap in the catalog belongs to Holy Stone HS600D: 40 claimed minutes against 20 measured, a shortfall of 20 minutes. Both figures stay on the page.

Empty cells, and why they stay empty

A field nobody publishes stays empty. That is visible and slightly ugly on purpose: 22 of these 41 aircraft have no published video bitrate, 26 have no flat colour profile stated, 38 have no published crash-cover price, and 5 never state a sensor format at all. Filling those in from a plausible sibling model would make the tables tidier and the site worthless.

Star ratings work the same way. One is shown only when it comes from a citable source outside a retailer whose terms permit republishing it, which right now is 0 of 41 aircraft. There is no aggregate-rating markup anywhere on this site, because there is nothing real to put in it.

What pilots report, and how it is marked

Each drone’s pros and cons are read off its specification sheet, and the page says so. What owners report is a separate, separately marked section, written from public owner discussion and dated published reviews, with the sources listed on the drone’s own page. It exists for 26 of 41 aircraft, or 63%.

For the rest there is not enough genuine discussion to summarise, so the section says that rather than manufacturing a consensus. No engagement counts are published anywhere here, because counting them was never done and an invented count is the easiest lie to tell.

Who keeps this, and how it earns nothing from the order

Two people, at a kitchen table, around other work. Nowhere to fly from, no hangar, no test bench and no staff, and no aircraft in this catalog has ever been flown by anybody who writes here. Stating that plainly costs nothing and is the only reason to believe the rest of the page.

No manufacturer pays to be listed, to be ranked, or to be described a particular way. No invoice has ever gone out to an aircraft maker, nor any payment come back from one, across the 12 brands here. There are no affiliate links, no buy buttons, no “check price” rows and no retailer links of any kind — the revenue that would create the pressure simply does not exist here. Every price is a rough figure noted at the last catalog refresh so that per-dollar sorting has a denominator; they are not offers, and by the time you read them they will be wrong. The full funding position is on the privacy page.

Regulations move faster than the aircraft

The catalog carries one date, and it is on the page you are reading: last refreshed 2026-10-06. Every per-drone figure, every guide order and every sitemap entry is stamped from it rather than from the day you happen to load the page.

Two things move faster than the catalog and are dated separately. FAA rules carry their own checked date, because a threshold that shifts rewrites the obligation on every card at once. And US availability is dated per aircraft: customs detentions and the FCC Covered List have made “can I still buy this” a live question for a whole brand, so each entry says what was true on the day it was checked instead of implying it is true today.

What is actually here

41 drones, each with a full page; 49 head-to-head matchups; 7 ranked guides, each stating its sort key at the top; 8 explainers on registration, airspace and the things that cause flyaways; and one specification reference whose every figure is computed from the catalog. The rules behind all of it are written out on how we compare.