The best Chromebooks for students you can buy: Expert tested

The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is the best Chromebook for students, because of its adequate processor, sleek design, and great battery life.

One of the good things about Chromebooks is that almost any Chromebook will work for you. Yes, there are real differences between them when it comes to speed and memory, which is another aspect of speed, screen size, brightness, and resolution for practical purposes. But, for sheer functionality, they all do pretty much the same job. 

Generally speaking, the older the student, the more power they can use. On the other side of the age gap, so long as a Chromebook can take a beating and keep on running, it's fine for a younger kid. 

Personally, just like with any computer, I'll take all the power and screen real estate I can get. But, for the students in your home, you don't need to spend a lot of money for them to go to school virtually. 

Along with selecting based on hands-on, expert testing, ZDNET selected these Chromebooks for students based on CrXRPT 2.0 benchmarks. This test tells you how fast a Chromebook handles things you do every day, including playing video games, watching movies, and editing photos and provides an overall score. The higher the score, the better. 

This benchmark consists of six scenario tests: photo effects, face detection, offline notes, stock portfolio dashboard, DNA sequence analysis, 3D shapes with WebGL and three additional video, music, and game player tests. 

• Photo Effects: Applies three effects (Sharpen, Emboss, and Glow) to two photos each, a set of six photos total.
• Face Detection: Checks for human faces in a set of five photos (low resolution).
• Offline Notes: Measures the time to encrypt, store, and display notes from local storage.
• Stock Portfolio Dashboard: Calculates and displays different graphical views of a stock portfolio.
• DNA Sequence Analysis: Measures the time it takes to process eight DNA sequences for open reading frames and amino acids.
• 3D Shapes with WebGL: Generates equation-based 3D shapes and displays them with WebGL.
• Video Player: Plays a two-minute 1080p H.264 video clip in a browser from the local system.
• Music Player: Plays an audio clip for three minutes.
• HTML5-based game: Runs an impact.js-based game for about two minutes.

All tests were run using ChromeOS 89. Wi-Fi was on, but Bluetooth was disabled during the benchmarking. The screens were set to 80% brightness.

We use a combination of methods to test laptops here at ZDNET. First, we acquire data from benchmarking software to analyze a system's metrics under the hood, and compare those to advertised numbers. Then, we spend an extended amount of time with the laptop (usually a week or two) using it the same way a normal consumer would, in order to analyze its portability, form factor, and how well the battery actually holds up, among others. For an extensive breakdown, check out our comprehensive laptop testing methodology.

• Benchmarking: First, we run a series of tests to put the computer's hardware through the wringer in order to see what it's capable of. Cinebench is one of the most commonly-used hardware testing suites, which tests the laptop's rendering performance on single and multiple CPU cores. PCMark 10 is another powerful program that covers a wide variety of tasks performed in the workplace, and there are many others that we use in tandem to gather as much data as we can. Some components we run tests on include:

• Processor: The "brain" of the laptop, and one of the most important factors that determines performance. The four biggest manufacturers that make most of the CPUs found in laptops today are Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple (in their own machines only). This is tested in benchmarking software.
  

• The display: The size of the display (measured diagonally from corner to corner) is also what dictates the laptop's overall size, and play a big role in the laptop's cost. Brightness is measured in "nits", and color spectrums are tested in benchmarking software.

• The graphics processor (GPU): Whether it's integrated into the CPU or a dedicated graphics card, how well the machine handles graphics is a key factor when it comes to demanding visual tasks like video editing, rendering, and of course, gaming. We test the GPU with a combination of benchmarking software, gaming, and media playback. 

• Physical form factor: Finally, the laptop's overall appearance and physical form factor encompasses its weight, thickness, how the keyboard and trackpad feel, and whether or not it has a display that can be folded back to form a tablet. We carry the laptop around for at least a week and note how well it commutes.

• Battery testing: We test a unit's battery in a few ways. A handful of benchmarking programs have their own battery testing components, but we also will just let the laptop run for as long as it can under a medium load. We ensure screensavers and hibernation mode are turned off, set the display's brightness and audio at 50%, load up a livestream on YouTube in Chrome, and wait 'til the end.

• The human element:  As we mentioned earlier, metrics and system data is important, but numbers alone don't give you the full picture. This is where we weave in our personal experience with the device and tap into the practical use cases that consumers actually care about. 
  

Ultimately, our goal is to break down the capabilities of each and every laptop we test into digestible terms that real people can find useful. There is a lot of noise and confusion when it comes to navigating the laptop and computer consumer market, so we hope to bring an intuitive element to the whole process by leveraging our team's decades of experience. 

Chromebooks are good for almost any job. But they're great for students. If a student can use a web browser, they can use a Chromebook. 

For teachers and school administrators, Google also provides G Suite for Education and Google Classroom to help them make remote learning as easy as possible.

You can argue that thanks to ChromeOS's built-in security, even out-of-support Chromebooks are safer than a newer macOS or Windows laptop. Don't believe me? In Chromebook's 10-year history, only 45 ChromeOS security exploits have been documented.

The main point is that if you're short on cash, a cheap used or older model Chromebook will work just fine. And, since it's trivial to erase a Chromebook and then reset it to your account, it's much safer than buying a used Windows laptop.

A Chromebook can be a great laptop choice for students of all ages. They're more basic than their Windows-based counterparts, which means even very young children will be able to use them. They also have less powerful processors and graphics capabilities, reducing the temptation to play games all night rather than finish up homework. 

A Chromebook's battery life is its biggest selling point, with many models sporting at least 10 hours of use on a full charge. This means your kids won't have to keep track of charging cables in order to use their Chromebook throughout the school day.

There are lots of options out there if you're looking for a Chromebook geared towards students of all ages. Here's a short list of alternate Chromebooks I thought were great choices for students: