A 14″ laptop is the perfect choice if you want extended portability, but also a screen that’s large enough to easily see what’s happening on it. Another bonus is that price-wise, you can get a better deal for a 14-inch laptop than a larger one, without giving up on performance.
Today we are going to keep budget in mind and look at the best 14-inch laptops under $1,000. We did all the research so that you don’t have to – and you can rest assured that these are the best products you can buy right now on a budget.
I personally believe that any laptop under 14-inch is small and even though I prefer the larger ones for work and gaming, I can understand and appreciate the higher portability of a 14-inch model. It offers the best balance in terms of price, size and portability. In other words, a perfect choice for many!
In the list of the best laptops below, we are only including models running Windows 10. If you’re looking for Chromebooks, we have a dedicated article for them which you can check out here.
But today it is all about Windows laptops because they offer more options in our opinion. The best 14″ laptops under $1,000 in 2021, to be precise!
We have more details about each model that we selected in our in-depth reviews below, but you are in a hurry and just want to get over with this faster, we’re listing them quickly in the table below. So just pick and choose your favorite – listed from the cheapest to the most expensive at the moment of writing.
Please note: We get commissions for purchases made through links in this article.
| Model | Main Features |
|---|---|
Daysky V14S | Best Budget Choice Very low price, good specs 12GB RAM, 256GB SSD Unknown brand Check price here |
Asus VivoBook 14 | Best portable 14″ laptop Thin & light, decent specs 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD Check price here |
Lenovo Flex 5 | Best for school Digital pen, 2-in-1 (tablet mode) 16GB DDR4, 256GB SSD 80% charged in 60 minutes Check price here |
HP Pavilion x360 | Best 2-in-1 14″ laptop 8 GB DDR4 RAM, 512 GB SSD Battery not great Check price here |
Dell Inspiron | Editor’s Choice (best overall) Amazing specs – top speed 32GB RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD Only HD, not full-HD Check price here |
If you want to find out more about each recommended model, read on! These are the best 14 inch laptops of 2021, all under $1,000 at the moment of writing this article (have in mind that, even though highly unlikely, prices could change so double check the prices yourself). Great products, especially if you can go to the top limit of your budget!
Daysky V14S
If you’re on a very limited budget, your best bet is to exchange brand with performance. And this lesser known brand offers the best performance we could find for such a low price.
And it has some solid specs overall, even though it doesn’t do that well in the CPU category. But everything else – top notch!
The processor is an slower Intel N5095 Processor, but it is paired with 12GB of RAM to make up for that. It also offers 256GB SSD storage, which is ultra fast too. So overall, it will take it seconds to boot up and it will go generally fast, despite the slower processor.
There are even more goodies available – the benefits of going for lesser known brands! While these are not vital, they are useful to have: it offers a backlit keyboard, a USB Type-C port (as well as a regular USB 3 one) and a nice screen-to-body ratio.
But no HDMI! Keep this in mind in case you were planning to connect it to a larger screen (and USB-C to HDMI adapter is out of question).
What is really good though is the laptop’s resolution: it offers a full HD resolution for the price (1920×1080 pixels) and a really solid image quality, overall. It’s all rounded up by a good battery that offers around 6 on a single charge on regular usage.
It is really thin (0.6 inches thick) and extremely light – under 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs), which makes it extremely portable. But all these smaller laptops are easy to carry around!
While not the most amazing laptop you can ever get, have in mind that you are paying for it just a fraction of a regular laptop’s price. It’s not perfect and it’s far from the best – but for this money, you can’t really find something better.
Note: If you don’t like the pink color we picked for showcasing, it also sells in a more traditional silver color.
Click here to check its price on Amazon
ASUS Vivobook 14
We’re moving to better known brands now, with a product that’s similar in terms of performance, but with its own set of additional PROs – the most important being that is is manufactured by a reliable, solid brand.
A note to have in mind: From now on, I consider all the recommended models great choices, with them getting better and better as the price increases. So always consider purchasing the one that gets as close to your maximum budget as possible.
Back to the VivoBook 14, it is powered by a quad-core AMD Ryzen 5 3500U Processor (going up to 3.7GHz) and also has 8GB of RAM. This combo is a really solid one and its performance will be pretty impressive, for the money you spend on it!
Its fan does get loud when trying to cool it down – so know that you’re not getting the most silent laptop ever. But for the money, it is really good!
To round things up, the Asus VivoBook 14 also has a 256GB SSD that is ultra fast and has incredible read/write values of around 500 MB/second!
Yes, 256GB is definitely on the lower end and by no means lots of storage, but you can still make it work if you’re on a budget. You can consider free cloud storage as an alternative, purchasing an external SSD or a microSD card.
It is very light and thin, making it extremely portable. While it is a bit heavier than the previous model, it still grabs our award for portability since at 3.1lbs it will surely not break your back. And you do have the ASUS quality to be happy about!
It offers some extra bells and whistles, like a backlit keyboard and a fingerprint reader for added security and also a very nice & sleek design.
The image quality on this 14-incher is also really good (you get full HD resolution) and as an advantage over the previous model, it also has an HDMI slot for extra options. It also has one USB C and three regular USB slots, plus a microSD card reader.
All in all, a good overall product whose main downside is the low storage offered.
Click here to check its price on Amazon
Lenovo Flex 5
If you’re looking for additional bells and whistles, but also high performance, the Lenovo Flex is a great choice.
One of the main things that sets it apart is the fact that it comes with a digital pen (and a touchscreen), so you can easily take notes, draw, scribble and mark important elements on your screen. This is why we consider this a great choice for students or work (depending on your field).
Another important thing about the Lenovo Flex 5 is that we’re talking about a 2-in-1 product. In other words, you can turn it into a tablet by simply flipping over the display. Or you can use it in “tent” mode for some added height. Your choice.
Even if you don’t plan to use it as a tablet (which would be, truth be told, a bit bulky), the Lenovo Flex is great for a 14″ laptop. It is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Processor and comes with 16 GB of RAM – both of these working well together to deliver a really fast performance even when multitasking and having multiple browser tabs or apps open.
The biggest downside is that the storage space is still limited at just 256GB. But at least we’re talking about a super-fast SSD, so we have that to make us feel better.
The touchscreen supports full HD resolution and delivers a really good image quality overall. You get lots of ports, including USB type-C and they are spread on both sides of the laptop for offering more options.
The battery is good as well – expect around 5 hours on a single charge, which is really good for our budget. As a bonus, the battery charges to 80% in one hour, which is pretty fast.
Overall, we really liked this 14″ Lenovo Laptop, which offers a lot of goodies for a decent price. Definitely worth looking at (at least!)
Click here to check its price on Amazon
HP Pavilion x360
Due to their smaller size, many 14″ laptops come in 2-in-1 variants (meaning that they have a 360-degree hinge that allows you to flip them over and use them as tablets). For that matter, the HP Pavilion x360 is a great choice, with a flawless touchscreen.
It also has some really solid specifications, offering an impressive performance overall thanks to the 10th Generation Intel Core i5-1035G1 processor that goes up to 3.6GHz on turbo boost. It only comes with 8GB RAM though. This is not horrible, but 16GB would’ve made this a perfect choice.
At least it offers more storage space than our previous models: you get a 512GB SSD which is not only ultra fast, but also ready to store more files, including videos, photos and music. So at least we’re covered in this area!
Its screen will really impress you. We’re talking about a micro-edge build with the thinnest edges you have ever seen! You get an edge-to-edge glass touchscreen that works flawlessly, and a full HD resolution for a perfect image quality. And this – the quality of the display – is one of its main strengths if not THE main advantage.
It has various ports, including an USB Type C and HDMI, as well as a large SD card reader.
It is also thin (.71 inches) and light (3.3 lbs) and has a good battery too – one that can deliver up to 10 hours on a single charge (although a more realistic expectation would be somewhere around 5 hours). But still really good!
Dell Inspiron – Editor’s Choice
When it comes to budget laptops, almost always the more expensive products will also be the best. This is the case here and the reason why the most expensive product on our list grabs the Editor’s Choice award: it’s just really good, although close to the top of the budget.
It offers the best specifications on our list, similar to what you’d expect from a high quality, larger laptop.
We’re talking about an impressive CPU, the 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 (up to 4.2 GHz), but also a whooping 32GB of RAM. To round things up nicely, you also get a 1TB SSD which is ultra fast and offers lots of storage space for all your files.
These also are enough to warrant it the Editor’s choice award. Great specifications when on a budget, allowing you to easily multitask or work without disruptions with multiple tabs open (or apps, or both).
This is also a 2-in-1 build, meaning that you can flip it over and use it as a tablet. But it can’t all be perfect – and in this case, the biggest Con of our model is its resolution: it can only go up to HD (1366 x 768). That is a real bummer – even though in reality and in all honesty, the image quality is definitely not bad. On the small, 14″ screen, the untrained eye won’t feel much of a difference.
Particularly good are the speakers for this model and even though they won’t match the quality of a dedicated system, they still deliver surprisingly good sound quality.
All in all, we are talking about the fastest laptop on our list – and one that offers the most storage too. It looks good and it is good, but it’s not perfect because of that lower resolution. It’s up for you to decide if it’s reason enough to make you avoid it or not (we definitely say it’s not such a big deal!)
Click here to check its price on Amazon
These are our recommended 14″ laptops that sell for less than $1,000 right now. We did our best to cover all the price ranges as you saw for yourself and we are sure that, no matter what your budget is, you will find a great laptop that you will love based on our recommendations above.