This is our review of the best bike chain cleaners of 2024.
The more you ride, the dirtier your bike gets. Having the tools at home to thoroughly clean your bike’s parts and components is essential to keeping them in good condition for a long time.
A bike chain cleaner is a must-have.
The best bicycle chain cleaner should allow you to perfectly remove dirt and grease after a ride without removing the chain. However, the best tool should be easy to use, fast, and efficient. Not all of us have the energy or the time to spend hours cleaning our bikes after every ride. It is therefore necessary to find the ideal compromise among all those proposed on the market.
I’m a bike enthusiast who researched the best bicycle chain cleaner to help you find the best chain cleaner for your bike.
UPGRADE PICK | BEST VALUE | LOW BUDGET PICK |
  Park Tool - CM-25 |   Park Tool - Unisex’s CG-2.4 |   Focopot – Bike Cleaning Kit |
With its metal body, this tool is built to last. It will satisfy any hardcore rider or professional. | The best quality/price compromise that everyone should have at home. | At a small price, this kit gives you everything you need to properly take care of your chain. |
I found that the Park Tool – Unisex’s CG-2.4 is the best overall bike chain cleaner.
Each person has a different bike and therefore a different need. So, I have included reviews of the best products according to all types of needs that one may have when thinking about bike chain cleaning.
Let’s get started.
Our Best Bicycle Chain Cleaners
- Park Tool – Unisex’s CG-2.4 (Best Value Kit – Our favorite)
- Park Tool – CM-5.3 Cyclone Chain Scrubber
- Park Tool – CM-25 Chain Scrubber Tool (The Rolls-Royce)
- Finish Line – Pro Chain Cleaner
- Focopot – Bike Cleaning Kit (For small budgets)
- Muc Off – X-3 Dirty Chain Machine (Honorable mention)
- Muc Off – Ultimate Bicycle Cleaning Kit (The most complete)
7 Best Bike Chain Cleaners
Our Pick
Park Tool is a reference in bike tools, so it’s not surprising that the brand offers chain cleaners.
The Park Too – Unisex’s CG 2.4 is in our opinion the best possible buy in terms of quality/price. What ParkTool offers here is not only a chain cleaner but a small kit with the essentials to clean correctly the chain of all your bikes. A scrubbing tool, a degreaser, and a brush: the ideal to clean chain and drivetrain easily.
The solution proposed here is fast, easy to use, and allows you to clean your chain in record time while being much more efficient than if you had to do everything by hand.
This kit is suitable for all chains and materials, it will not damage any of your components.
Also, a magnet in the lower part of the case attracts small metal parts so that they do not stick and damage the chain.
Easy to remove, the chain scrubber also cleans up in seconds after use.
The only drawback is that sometimes the bristles of the brushes will pull out if you force a little while using the chain scrubber, and it is sometimes possible to find them stuck in the links of the chain.
A tool that does a remarkable job and is well worth the price.
If you don’t need to buy the whole CG-2.4 kit, Park Tool also offers for sale only the chain scrubber: the CM-5.3 Cyclone Chain Scrubber.
Simply use it with a separately purchased degreaser or hot water and liquid soap. The tool cleans your chain with a formidable efficiency that makes your chain look like new, it’s a must-have when you are looking to equip yourself with bike maintenance tools.
As said before, the tool can be cleaned quickly by dismantling the parts that compose it like the small sponge and the brush rollers.
Finally, the only notable drawback concerns the brushes which sometimes lose bristles when the chain is turned too fast in the scrubber, those get stuck in the chain links.
Pro Pick
If you want the absolute best, the CM-25 Chain Scrubber is for you. Clearly, this model is not in the same league as the others on the market.
The case and handle are made of metal (aluminum), so there is no risk of breaking it in comparison to the more traditional plastic cases that can get damaged more easily.
Oriented toward professionals and bike shops, the CM-25 has nothing to do with the competition. The quality of the product, its efficiency, its life span… Everything is better. Its price is then necessarily higher but it is worth it.
Many people use it several times a week on a wide range of different bikes, the opinions are all the same: no other chain scrubber can match.
This is easily one of the best bike chain cleaners on the market.
Finish Line – Pro Chain Cleaner
- Chain scrubber
- Bottle of dry lube
- Bottle of chain degreaser
The Finish Line – Pro Chain Cleaner kit offers a chain scrubber, a degreaser, and a chain lube. And for its price, it works very well.
The special feature of the product is its singular shape. The cleaner, unlike competing models, has a 47-degree angle to eliminate any drips or spills that might be encountered during use.
On that note, even though it seems to work, I always recommend protecting the surface you are working on (especially in the shop) to make sure you don’t get anything dirty or stained during the cleaning process. Using newspapers or plastic sheeting is ideal to make sure you don’t create a mess.
Also, a magnet in the lower part of the case attracts small metal parts so that they do not stick and damage the chain.
Finally, if its use seems to me quite intuitive and effective, some buyers complain about difficulties in use, mainly because of the presence of the famous angle I mentioned.
Budget Kit
Focopot – Bike Cleaning Kit
- Chain cleaning brush
- Tire brush
- Taper detail brush
- Wheel brush
- Sprocket scraper
- Sprocket brush
- Bike cleaning glove
- Bike chain cleaner
Here is the small matter of this article. The Focopot cleaning kit. It’s simple, you won’t find it cheaper.
This cleaning kit offers no less than 9 different tools to clean your chain, drivetrain, and more generally your bike. Brushes of all kinds, a chain scrubber, and a bike cleaning mitt.
Obviously, absolutely everything is made of plastic and not the best quality.
If you buy this kit for the brushes it will suit you, if you choose it because you are mainly interested in the chain scrubber, just don’t buy this kit, my advice is to go for the CG 2.4 from Park Tool.
Taking all this into account, I would say that you get what you pay for and that it will be very well suited for troubleshooting or simply if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on this kind of bike cleaning product.
Honorable Mention
The X-3 Dirty Chain Machine is a good surprise on this list. For a price very close to the CG 2.4, Muc Off offers a compact product that is easy to use, and efficient since it allows to clean a chain in about 5 minutes. 2 passes of the chain and it is clean as new.
The main advantage of this product is the solvent tank on the top. It can be filled with the small bottle supplied, the nozzle of which corresponds precisely to the inlet of the tank. Once filled, the solvent is poured onto the chain by pressing a button on the upper part of the scrubber. The rest of the tool is designed to prevent the dirty solvent from being reused over and over again on the chain.
The cleaning fluid comes in a small bottle but can easily be found online in large quantities.
Helpful tip: Just keep the small applicator bottle that came with the chain cleaning tool for easy refilling.
On a negative note, some users have complained about poor build quality with flimsy materials already damaged on delivery, it’s hard to say if this should be generalized to all products or if they were just unlucky.
Ultimate Kit
Muc Off – Ultimate Bicycle Cleaning Kit
- Nano Tech Bike Cleaner
- Aerosol Bike Protect
- Wet Lube
- Cleaning Sponge
Let’s move away from a simple chain cleaning tool. Let’s get serious.
This Ultimate Bicycle Cleaning Kit from Muc Off contains absolutely everything you need to clean your entire bike. Muc Off makes an interesting proposition here by condensing the essentials of cleaning, protection, and lubrication.
The Muc Off product line is good. No doubt about it. The brushes allow you to clean the entirety of your mountain bike, road bike, or any other two-wheeled creature.
Special mention for the box itself, the plastic can be disappointing and looks very cheap in hand. The ideal is to put the products in another container.
Put together, even if the price is high at the beginning, the kit is worth it. Buying each component one by one will cost you much more.
Bicycle Chain Cleaner Buying Guide
This section lists tips to know before buying your chain cleaner or to keep it in perfect working condition as long as possible.
Watch out for the water
Bike chain cleaners often contain screws and small metal parts that rust quickly when exposed to water and moisture. Keep them in a dry place to protect them and enjoy them for as long as possible.
Beware of the sun
When the case of your chain cleaner is made of hard plastic, check the material of the pins of the brushes inside, this is important to extend its life expectancy.
Sounds strange? Read on.
If the pins are made of metal, i.e. aluminum or stainless steel, be very careful not to expose your tool to the sun for too long. The metal swells and expands as it heats up, causing the surrounding plastic to break.
Our Verdict
A chain cleaner is a tool that should be kept for a long time. We don’t want to change it every year.
For the best ratio in terms of efficiency, practicality, ease of use, resistance of the box to falls as well as on the passing of time, the best bike chain cleaner on this list is the Park Tool CG 2.4 which is in our opinion the best compromise.
