Best AA and AAA Batteries 2025: The best choices to power your electronics

The GP Ultra AA are a fantastic choice for most households as they offer great value for money, are available in a wide-range of pack sizes and are designed for all types of use. Although we’ve reviewed batteries that boasted higher capacities, the overall flexibility and price of the GP Ultra AA easily make them our most recommended choice.

GP states that the Ultra AA batteries have a service life of 19.5 hours based on a 10-Ohm discharge resistance, which essentially means they are designed for power-hungry devices such as remote-controlled toys and torches.

To trial this ourselves we used an Ansmann Energy XC 3000 to drain the batteries to determine how long they take to consume power. We concluded that this resulted in one of the highest initial capacities we had seen across all our battery tests, with the batteries ending at 0.94V.

We then left the batteries to cool down and re-ran our test to check if there was any charge remaining. Impressively, the Ultra AA boasted the highest result of any alkaline batteries we’ve reviewed, as the total capacity was an average of 1680.5mAh.

Essentially this shows that the GP Ultra AA are not only optimum for high-drain applications but also low-drain devices such as remote controls and radios, and can keep them powered for a good amount of time.

As the GP Ultra AA batteries are versatile, can support both high and low drain capacities and has a generous RRP across all pack sizes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better value set.

Although one of the more budget-friendly options in our list, the Amazon Basics Alkaline AAA (also available in AA) are easily some of the best batteries we’ve ever tested.

While Amazon doesn’t provide much detail on the specs of the batteries, it does state that they have a 10-year shelf life, are suitable for both high and low drain jobs and are built to prevent leakage during storage.

The Amazon Basics Alkaline AAA are available in packs of eight, 12, 20, 48 or 100 with prices ranging from 75p per battery down to 30p (depending on the quantity you opt for), making them some of the cheapest to buy.

To begin our tests we selected four batteries at random from the box and checked their starting voltage. All four had a voltage of 1.5V which is exactly what we’d expect to see from alkaline batteries.

Next up was our first drain test, which saw the batteries achieve a capacity of 560mAh. Not only does this result show they can be efficiently drained at high load but it is also among the best results we’ve ever seen from other AAAs we’ve tested.

After letting the batteries cool down for a few hours, we then repeated the drain test to check if there was any charge leftover, which returned an average of 25mAh for a total overall capacity of 585mAh.

What our testing concluded is that the Amazon Basics Alkaline AAA batteries can be efficiently drained at high load, making them a great choice for torches or toys, but also their overall high capacity means they’re good for low-drain devices too, such as remote controls.

Overall, given that the batteries are impressively versatile, can cope with both high and low drain tasks and are available in different pack sizes to best suit your needs, it’s clear as to why the batteries have achieved a perfect five-star rating.

The word ‘budget’ often has bad connotations, but the Amazon Basics Alkaline AA batteries avoid that trap. While these are undoubtedly cheap batteries, particular when bought in bulk.

Running these batteries through our normal tests, we measured them with an initial capacity of 1376mAh, which is only slightly behind the Duracell Plus AA. This amount of power shows that these batteries are an excellent choice for high-drain uses, such as torches and toys.

We then ran the batteries through a second drain test, which delivered an additional 219mAh, for a total capacity of 1595mAh, which is only just behind the GP Ultra AA batteries. That makes these batteries a good choice for lower-drain use, such as clocks and remote controls.

While the GP Ultra batteries may be slightly more flexible, if you’re on a tighter budget, these are a great choice, particularly if you want to buy in bulk.

The Duracell Plus AAs are easily the best set of batteries we have ever tested, although their power comes at quite a high cost.

When you think of battery brands (which admittedly may not be as often as us) the first company likely to spring to mind is Duracell and this is with good reason, thanks to its promise of a 10-year shelf life and efficiency.

A long shelf life is especially important as it means you can stock up and have the batteries to hand whenever you need them, without fear of expiration.

Using an Ansmann Energy XC3000 tester, we picked four batteries at random from the pack and measured their initial voltage. The Duracell Plus batteries averaged at 1.5V which is exactly what we’d expect to see from a fresh set. As voltage drops when batteries are used, any lower would have been a cause for concern.

We then turned to our drainage test, which discharges batteries with a 600mA load and stops when the voltage hits 0.94V. After the initial drain, we saw a total capacity of 1442mAh remaining, which is the highest we’ve seen in any set of batteries.

After this test, we left the batteries to cool for a few hours before testing them again to determine the remaining capacity. We found that there was 176mAh of additional charge which results in an impressively high total of 1618mAh.

Such a high overall capacity indicated that the Duracell Plus batteries should last for a long time across multiple use cases, from low-drain applications such as remote controls to more demanding needs like toys.

If you don’t want to compromise on power and are willing to spend a bit more then we can’t recommend the Duracell Plus AA batteries enough, as they provided the best results we’ve seen. On the other hand, Amazon Basics AA batteries are considerably cheaper and still fared well in our tests.