The best mouse is a must for those who work around the clock on a laptop or desktop, or for those in need of precise, smooth navigation around their PC. It's a worthwhile investment that will improve your work life and your gaming needs.
After years of testing different mice for the office and gaming, my team of experts and I know the importance of balancing your budget and the performance you're looking for. From a mouse's DPI (dots per inch) showing how quickly your cursor moves across the screen to weight and comfort for everyday use, these are important factors to think about when finding the right mouse for you.
Our favorite right now is the Logitech MX Master 3S. While pricey, it offers a premium ergonomic design and a high 8,000 DPI, along with plenty of controls that include touch gestures. For the office, check out the Razer Pro Click Mini, boasting silent clicks, two scrolling modes and a great design. As for gamers, look no further than the Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2.
If you're specifically geared towards gaming, you'll find the best gaming mouse options are also suitable for productivity. Otherwise, for a range of mice to upgrade your setup, pick up the best mouse for you below.
The quick list
The Logitech MX Master 3S takes the crown as the best mouse for most, as it balances everything you'd need in a mouse for productivity. Build quality is fantastic, onboard buttons and controls are welcome additions, and its 8,000 DPI hits the sweet spot even for gamers.
For around $20, you can grab yourself the Logitech M325 wireless mouse. It's sleek and portable, offers great wireless connectivity and has long-lasting battery life. Don't expect any customizable features, but do expect a low price for this handy mouse.
For office-goers, the Razer Pro Click Mini makes for a fantastic companion. It offers silent mechanical switches so clicks are quiet, a brilliant quality and design for easy use and a free-spin scroll wheel to get through pages quickly. Add its long battery life, and this mini mouse won't disappoint.
Looking for comfort? The Contour Unimouse stands out thanks to its hinged design and adjustable thumb rest, making it unique yet satisfying to use. It has 6 remappable buttons and a sturdy, stylish design, while its 2,800 DPI makes navigating a cursor smooth. Not bad for its $79 price.
The Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 offers the best you can get for gaming. It has a maximum DPI of 32,000 and a 4,000Hz polling rate. It’s a no-frills mouse without any RGB lighting, a premium matte finish, and a light-as-air construction. It's the ultimate gaming experience for the competitive ones among us.
For the real esports competitors, check out the Razer Viper V2 Pro. Not only is it an extremely lightweight wireless esports mouse with exceptional battery life, but it also works great for everyday use, too. Plus, it boasts a slew of customization options to fine-tune your experience.
Who says gaming mice need to be pricey? For $30, the SteelSeries Rival 3 offers a great amount of value for what you get. With good performance, 8,500 DPI, two programmable thumb buttons and even stylish LED strip lights, this is a no-nonsense gaming mouse that delivers.
The Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 excels in the office, as it comes equipped with three physical buttons dedicated to AI tools. From bringing up ChatGPT to quickly allowing you to rephrase or create emails at the click of a button, this mouse makes work life all the easier.
For supreme comfort while on your PC for hours on end, the Logitech Ergo M575 is your go-to pick. At just $49, you can give your wrist and hand a rest with its curved body feeling natural in the palm of your hand. It also comes with a trackball mouse where the thumb is placed to effortlessly move the cursor.
Tony is a senior staff writer at Tom’s Guide with years of experience testing the latest and greatest mice. Whether it's for office use or to gain an edge over the competition when gaming, Tony knows the best mouse for any use case and budget.
The best mouse you can buy today
The best overall mouse
The Logitech MX Master 3S is the best wireless mouse around if you need a tool for productivity. This mouse has a variety of onboard buttons and controls, including a secondary scroll wheel, thumb buttons and gestures, all of which can be customized in the Logi Options+ companion app to function exactly how you need to speed up your workflow. You can also set per-application layouts, which the mouse will automatically switch to when you open specific apps.
Build quality is fantastic, with milled metal control wheels, a premium matte finish and decent weighting. The main scroll wheel, in particular, feels lovely in use and can be set to either ratchet or infinite scrolling based on your preference. You can also crank the sensitivity up to 8,000 DPI, which should be fast enough for casual gamers.
The downsides? There are very few. This isn’t the cheapest mouse on our list, although its features justify its price in our opinion. There’s also no left-handed option, so lefties must look elsewhere.
Read our full Logitech MX Master 3S review.
The best budget mouse
If you walk into an electronics store and make a beeline for the laptop mice, the Logitech M325 is probably the first thing you'll see. This mouse is inexpensive and ubiquitous, but it came by its popularity fairly. This small gadget is optimized for laptops, making it ideal for frequent travelers, or workers with limited desk space at home. It's also extremely comfortable, according to user reviews, and provides a DPI just high enough to comfortably scroll across a screen without overshooting your target. It's arguably the best wireless mouse for the price.
Thanks to a durable 2.4 GHz wireless dongle, you can use the mouse wirelessly anywhere — and with up to 18 months of battery life, you'll rarely have to replace the peripheral's single AA battery. Another cool thing about the M325 is that, unlike many other productivity mice, it comes in a variety of colors: red, blue, purple and pink. Logitech also produces extremely similar mice under its Party and Doodle collections, which adorn their mice with floral and cartoon patterns.
The best office mouse
A nifty little mouse geared towards productivity, the Razer Pro Click Mini prioritizes a silent work environment. If you work in an office and don’t want to disturb your coworkers, this mouse could be a game-changer. Featuring silent mechanical switches, left- and right-clicks don’t make any loud sounds. Unlike its predecessor, the Pro Click, the Pro Click Mini has a new free-spin scroll wheel that can be toggled via the rocker switch on its body. This allows you to scroll through pages quickly, especially if you’re catching up on a conversation you missed or tackling a long spreadsheet. The mouse can also be connected to 4 devices simultaneously, thanks to its Bluetooth technology.
It is important to note, though, that the Pro Click Mini’s companion software — Synapse 3 — is compatible with Windows only, so macOS users might feel a little shortchanged. This means that you won’t be able to customize the buttons, change the mouse’s DPI, or adjust the sensitivity of the tilt-click scroll wheel. Also, when in tactile mode, the scroll wheel can squeak and disturb your peace. The mouse doesn’t have an ergonomic design either, so it’s worth considering other options if you’re prone to wrist pain.
But if these don’t sound like dealbreakers to you, the Pro Click Mini could be a worthy addition to your office setup.
Read our full Razer Pro Click Mini review.
The best contour mouse
The Contour Unimouse stands out thanks to its hinged design, adjustable thumb rest, and front-mounted LED strip. You can keep it standing tall or lower its angle to better suit how you work or if you want to change how the mouse feels.
Adjusting the shape of the mouse makes it more comfortable to use, though we understand that this design might be off-putting for sure. But we appreciated how nice it feels to fine-tune the mouse's tilt to our liking on a day-to-day basis. Speaking of customization, 6 of the 7 buttons are fully programmable.
If you like vertical mice and want more adjustability or aren't sure whether a vertical mouse is the right choice for you and want some room to go back to flat, the Unimouse is a great mouse for the price.
Read our full Contour Unimouse review.
The best gaming mouse
For a lean and clean gaming mouse with a premium look, lightweight design and excellent performance, the Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 will do the trick. It's pricey, but it comes with the right stuff under the hood even for gamers competing at the highest level.
Featuring a 32,000 DPI and 4,000Hz polling rate, this mouse will make sure you never miss a shot, especially in first-person shooters. It also comes with great battery life (up to 95 hours on a single charge), along with Logitech's companion software to fine-tune your needs. The Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 is a worthy addition to anyone's desk.
Read our full Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 review.
The best esports mouse
The $150 Razer Viper V2 Pro is billed as a wireless esports mouse, but it’s also ideal for everyday use. This is due to the device’s lightweight, nondescript design, and its exceptional battery life. A slew of customization options via the Razer Synapse desktop app also lets you tailor the mouse's functionality to your tastes.
As the successor to the Razer Viper Ultimate, the Viper Pro 2 has a lot to live up to. But Razer fans can rest assured that the Viper Pro 2 lives up to its predecessor, and earns its premium over cheaper mice, such as the Razer Orochi.
Read our full Razer Viper Ultimate review.
The best cheap gaming mouse
We've always maintained that a good gaming mouse is also a good computer mouse in general, and that's definitely the case with the SteelSeries Rival 3. This sleek, medium-sized peripheral features a no-nonsense, semi-ambidextrous design with two programmable thumb buttons and a pretty LED strip on the bottom. The Rival 3 is the only mouse on this list with programmable RGB lighting, and while that won't make you any more productive, it will make your desk look a whole lot prettier.
The reason the Rival 3 works so well for productivity users, though, is because of its programmable DPI and robust software. You can set up profiles for individual apps, and customize convenient macros for the thumb buttons while you're at it. The Rival 3 is also very cheap, making it a robust option for the same price as many smaller, less versatile mice.
Read our full SteelSeries Rival 3 review.
The best AI focused mouse
The Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a wireless mouse geared toward office use, and it endeavors to make the working day a little easier. How? It’s got three physical buttons dedicated to AI tools. The bright teal button brings up the Logi AI Prompt Builder which lets you rephrase, summarize, reply to, and create emails. The other two buttons bring up ChatGPT and a dictation tool, enhancing accessibility. All three AI features work really well, and you can even train the email responder to create prompts based on your own tone and style too!
The mouse sports a minimalistic design with no RGB effects, and while its buttons have a tactile feel to them, they don’t make much sound so you won’t disturb your coworkers. However, the mouse is best suited to those with smaller hands.
It doesn’t have a lot of flaws, but it does use a disposable battery which isn’t great for the environment and it isn’t cost-effective either. Also, while its textured scroll wheel features an “infinite” scrolling mode, this doesn’t work nearly as well as some other mice. But any issues this mouse has are balanced out by its AI features. This is an excellent mouse for productivity, and could potentially be the best mouse for you.
Read our full Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 review.
The best ergonomic mouse
As comfortable mice go, the Logitech Ergo M575 is right up there. It’s a premium mouse that costs just $49, and it’s packed full of features to ensure wrist or hand pain never bothers you again. Your thumb intuitively moves towards the trackball on the left side of the mouse, and the curved body feels natural in the palm of your hand.
Having a trackball mouse means you don’t have to constantly move the mouse around, which negates unnecessary wrist movements that could contribute to pain and repetitive strain injuries (RSI). Contributing to the mouse’s ergonomic design are the wide left- and right-click buttons, and three more programmable ones placed just right.
So are there any downsides to this minimalist-designed mouse? Just a couple. Left-handed people will have to look elsewhere as this mouse comes in only the right-handed orientation. The mouse also uses disposable batteries which might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
Read our full Logitech Ergo M575 review.
How to choose the best mouse for you
How to choose the best mouse for you
There are three things to consider when choosing the best mouse for your particular situation: features, size and price.
Features vary from computer mouse to computer mouse. Some, like the Logitech M325, have no extra features whatsoever. What you see is what you get. Others, like the Logitech MX Master 3, have tons of extra buttons and entire software suites, which let you customize just about every aspect of the mouse's performance. If you do a lot of graphic design or video editing work, a feature-rich mouse is a boon; if you stick mostly to typing and Internet browsing, a simpler computer mouse will work just as well. If you're looking to reduce desk clutter, the best wireless mouse for your setup is a worthwhile consideration.
Size is also a consideration, although this is strictly a matter of personal preference. Mice like the Microsoft Classic Intellimouse are long-bodied, and appeal to users who hold mice with their entire palms. Smaller mice lend themselves to a "claw" grip, meaning you can comfortably hold it with three fingertips.
Price is related to a mouse's feature set. Complex mice cost a lot of money; simple mice are cheaper. But beware extremely cheap mice, especially those from second- or third-tier manufacturers; they won't last long.
You can also check out our guide to the best wireless keyboards here.
