The sticker speed was shot at 70 lb and a 30-inch draw
BowRanker is a reference table for hunting bows: 47 models from 20 makers across 6 categories, from $90 takedown recurves to $2,149 carbon flagships. It exists because bow shopping is unusually opaque. Half the market is dealer-only with no published street price, the speed numbers on the sticker were shot under conditions nobody hunts, and what a bow is actually like to draw surfaces only in years of archers talking among themselves.
Whose bench the speed figure came off
Axle-to-axle, brace height, draw-weight and draw-length ranges, let-off, mass weight, and limb configuration come from manufacturer spec sheets and product documentation. Speed figures are the manufacturer's own ATA or IBO rating — measured on their bench at 70 lb, a 30-inch draw, and a 350-grain arrow. Nothing here was shot over a chronograph by us, and you should assume your real setup lands 30–60 fps below the sticker.
A bare-bow price is not a hunting rig
The numbers here are bare-bow list prices, not quotes. Budget bows and ready-to-hunt packages get discounted hard for a season at a time, so the figure on those is the neighbourhood rather than the number. Flagship compounds are stocked through authorized pro shops that set their own prices and bundle in fitting and tuning, so the number here is a starting point for a conversation, not a checkout total. Every compound also needs a sight, rest, quiver, release, and arrows on top.
Why a dealer-only flagship shows no stars
A star rating only exists where a bow is sold somewhere that collects public reviews, which in this category is the cheap half of the market: only 17 of the 47 bows here carry one. The dealer-only flagships — Mathews, Hoyt, Elite, Prime and company — are never sold on a site that collects public reviews, so there is no honest number to show and we leave it blank rather than invent one. Nothing on this site is rated by us, and no rating here was collected from our own readers.
Where a stacking draw cycle gets written down
Nobody here is on anyone's pro staff and no bow has been drawn on this site's behalf. The pros, cons, and tradeoffs on each page are distilled from public archery discussion: long-running archery boards, traditional-shooting communities, shop long-term reviews, and owner posts across a season. When enough people report that a draw cycle stacks hard at the back wall or that a cam system needs a press for every adjustment, that goes in the cons. Separating a bow's draw cycle from a shooter's draw length is a judgement call, and it is ours; what survives it keeps the archers' own wording.
Ordering, and what we don't do
Two people put this table together around other work, and neither of them is on anyone's pro staff. There is no office, no shop and nobody drawing a wage from it. Category and brand pages sort by owner rating where one exists, then by spec; no bow maker and no pro shop has ever bought a listing, a rank or a softer paragraph, and none of them sees a page before it is live. We also don't claim to have hunted with these bows — what this site is worth is that the numbers and the complaints sit in one table instead of forty tabs.
Model years turn over faster than tables do
This table was last walked end to end on August 12, 2026. Cams get revised and draw-length modules swapped mid-season without a bow being renamed, so entries get added as new model years land, prices corrected, and discontinued bows pulled once we notice. If something looks wrong — a dead model, a stale price, a spec that doesn't match the manufacturer's current sheet — that's a data bug, not an ad. Send it through the contact form and say which number and where the right one is printed.