Biking with the best bike phone mount can truly be a game-changer. Instead of having your phone tucked away in your bag or a pocket, where it can be hard to reach quickly or even get in the way of pedaling, a bike phone mount provides a useful place to set your device while riding. With your phone out front, you can see and access incoming notifications while keeping navigation information accessible.

For their convenience, bike phone mounts also present some risks. Rather than holding your phone securely in a bag or pocket, they put it right out in the open and subject it to all the same bumps and jolts as your bike. If the mount has a bad hold on your bike, it can flop around, creating more fuss than it’s worth. And if it has a weak grip on your phone, it could see your phone jump free into the not-so-welcoming embrace of the road.

To help you avoid that unfortunate fate, we’ve tested various popular bike mounts and put them through a gauntlet of testing to find those that offer both convenience and a secure grip.

Best bike phone mount: Quad Lock Out Front Mount

The Quad Lock Out Front Mount is the real deal. It has a convenient and impressively secure locking mechanism, isn’t absurdly expensive, and shows no signs of letting a connected phone go anywhere but where the bike is going. It positions the phone conveniently with its extended and offset mount position, so you can have it out in front or hovering over the center of your handlebar stem and slot your phone in horizontal or vertical orientations.

Whether the Quad Lock Out Front Mount is on a casual ride along smooth roads or being vigorously shaken and jolted, it shows no signs of budging, matching the best performance of any mount we tested. It held fast to the phone connected to it and wouldn’t slip even a sliver from its position on the handlebar. Placing and removing our phone was also simple, proving easier to complete with one hand than the links to the budget mounts and trickier to accidentally release than a mount like the SP Connect or Nite Ize Squeeze.

The mount is sleek and compact, so it has a subtle footprint whether a phone is connected or not. A small ring wraps around the handlebar with a few different rubber shims that slot in to give it a secure fit on various handlebar sizes. This is similar to several others, though Quad Lock doesn’t rely on multiple stacked shims like the Lamicall BM02. Instead, it provides a few different sizes so it only takes one to do the job. Tightened down thoroughly, it stays put. However, because of its specific shims, it may not fit every handlebar or tighten down perfectly on tapered sections. Nevertheless, we often got a good enough grip on our handlebar that it didn’t flop over with our phone mounted.

One of the biggest downsides to the Quad Lock is that the link between the mount and the phone isn’t universal. Instead, it requires a special case (available for iPhones, Pixel phones, select Samsung Galaxy phones, and a few dated Huawei phones starting at $35) or a universal stick-on adapter (starting at $15). Buying one of these cases quickly brings the total you’re spending to at least $75.  However, once you have the case on, you can attach it to the mount with a quick twist.  This was one of the easiest and most satisfying locking mechanisms we tested, but it also means you have to live with Quad Lock’s case on your phone 24/7, which might not be everyone’s first choice.

The Quad Lock Out Front Mount was as secure as any we tested but won extra points for ease of use and elegance. The price is steep next to some of the budget competitors and you’ll have to use Quad Lock’s specific case (unless you opt for the stick-on adapter but we’re hesitant to trust it to provide equal security). But for something you’re trusting to keep your smartphone safe potentially every day, we think it’s worth it.

Best budget bike phone mount: Lamicall BM02 Bike Phone Mount

The Lamicall BM02 bike phone mount is about as affordable as it is universal. It features a sizable clamp that can wrap around huge handlebars and a series of rubber shims that let it adapt to even very narrow handlebars. This makes it a bit clunky and potentially a little unsightly depending on your taste, but once it was properly sized and tightened down, it didn’t show any sign of movement under even the fiercest shaking and jolts.

The mount uses a ball head connector between the handlebar clamp and phone holder, allowing for a good degree of adjustability for both angle and rotation. This too held firm in testing when tightened down. The phone holder is an interesting mechanism. Pushing a phone into the top end slides the mechanism open, and releasing it sees the large rubber-padded grips clamp down on the phone.

It has quite a bit of spring force, so it gets a pretty good purchase on the phone (though it almost shot our phone out once when we loosened our grip without aligning the bottom of our phone), but that’s only the start. Underneath the holder is a small latch to lock the mechanism. With it locked, our phones showed no signs of budging and it was one of the most secure mounts we tested. That said, it’s important to remember the lock, as this is the only case that let one of our phones fly free during extreme testing when we left it unlocked.

For $27, the Lamicall is a steal in terms of security. Your phone stays rock solid against even rough terrain as long as you lock it. However, there’s one big and obvious drawback: its looks. You might not care what your bike phone mount looks like but the Lamicall is especially bulky and unsightly, whether a phone is connected or not. If you only need security and don’t care about aesthetics, the Lamicall is for you. But if you want any subtleness or sleekness, go with the Quad Lock.

With a low price, effectively universal compatibility with various handlebars and phones, and as firm a hold on our phone as any mount we’ve tested, the Lamicall BM02 is a solid value. It may be bulky but the Lamicall BM02 is still a great pick.

How we tested

We took many aspects into account when evaluating each bike phone mount. We considered ease of use, intuitiveness, adjustability, security and compatibility with various phone styles and sizes. To examine each of these aspects, we conducted the following evaluations:

Design

Performance

Other bike phone mounts we tested

Peak Design’s Universal Bar Mount uses perhaps the most elegant attachment mechanism between the mount and the phone. Simply setting the phone down sees two little arms sneakily lock onto slots in the phone side of the mechanism. Despite this small latch, it offered a robust connection that showed no signs of failing in our testing. Releasing the mechanism takes a simple squeeze of each side, though this can be a little hard to reach with a large phone in the way.

Unfortunately, this mount starts at a relatively high price and requires a special case (starting at $50) or a universal adapter (starting at $30), so it offers a similar experience to the Quad Lock but at altogether higher prices. The handlebar grip on this universal model is also a thick rubber strap that gets a good grip but isn’t as secure as we experience elsewhere, and extreme enough forces saw it spin around the handlebar.

The Peak Design Out Front Bike Mount has a great deal in common with our top pick, featuring the same type of clamp around the handlebars and the same offset to allow for centering a phone over the handlebar stem. It uses hard shims but these held the mount securely in place on the handlebar without any movement in our testing.

Like Peak Design’s other mount, this one has an elegant latching mechanism but also requires a special phone case or adapter, which brings the total price for a setup to $100 at a minimum. With the Quad Lock option performing just as well and being a little easier to unlock, we had to give it the win. However, if you’ve already got a lot of gear in the Peak Design ecosystem and already have a Peak Design phone case, it may make more sense for you to go for this one.

The Nite Ize Squeeze is a fairly nifty phone mount. It has a pair of levers you have to squeeze to open its clamp, which then can squeeze down on the sides of your phone when you release the levers. While the grip on just two sides of our phone was a little worrying, no amount of shaking and jolting in our testing saw the phone fly free from the clamp.

That said, the simple rubber handlebar wrap didn’t get as strong a grip as others and would slowly spin around the handlebar with enough force. The side clamps can also squeeze a phone’s power or volume buttons. It’s a decent, low-profile option for casual rides on good terrain, especially if you want to remove your phone often, but it’s just not as secure as our top pick and likely easier to accidentally free your phone.

The Nite Ize Wraptor uses the same type of handlebar mount as the Squeeze and therefore can experience the same issues with it slowly slipping around the handlebar. The Wraptor also has one of the simplest mechanisms for holding your phone in place as it uses rubber netting that wraps around each corner of your phone. This seems risky in practice but despite our best efforts to shake our phone loose, the Wraptor held firm. The phone could slap back and forth against the holder but never snuck out of the corner wraps. We’ve used other bike gear with similar rubber and it can break down after some time and then fail without warning. It might be a small issue for an affordable product like this but Lamicall’s holder is just as cheap and proves more secure.

The VUP Silicone Mount is similar to the Nite Ize Wraptor, except it’s slightly cheaper and feels cheaper. It also relies on a rubber web that stretches over the edges of a phone, but its thinner material feels less durable and can be a little fussy about stretching around bigger phones. It didn’t let the phone slap around as much (or at least as loudly) as the Wraptor, and it held our phones even against some serious shaking and jolts.

But its handlebar strap is simple and lets the mount spin around the handlebar. It’s an effective mount but with the Lamicall mount at the same price, we don’t think it’s worth going with an option with simpler points of failure.

The Ram Mounts X-Grip is a beefy, fairly inelegant phone mount. As the name suggests, it uses a big X that stretches out and then springs closed to hold a phone or pretty much any other big enough, flat object in place between its four rubber grips. The design only holds a phone on its sides and may not catch a smaller phone. It does feel like there may be too much wiggle room but the mount held firm in our testing.

However, its price is high next to the competition and it uses an absurdly bulky handlebar clamp that lets the mount spin around our handlebar. This was the only mount that held my phone in its extremely bulky case (which holds five cards) but didn’t feel any more secure than the Lamicall mount.

The SP Connect phone mount is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it has a nicely machined metal mount for the phone, which is quite impressive at its $30 price, but it uses a plastic tie to hold it down on the handlebar. It’s the only mount I had to read the instructions to figure out how to use. The mount has a lot in common with the Quad Lock mount, requiring just a quick twist to mount a phone, but it also requires a special adapter ($25 and up) or case ($40 and up) to get set up.

Unlike the Quad Lock mount, the SP Connect doesn’t let you opt between horizontal and vertical orientations on the fly, instead requiring you to loosen a bolt, spin the mounting point, and then tighten the bolt back down. Then there’s the mechanism itself. The mount held the phone securely enough in our testing but didn’t have a lock. Accidentally bumping the phone could twist it free, whereas the Quad Lock requires a little more to go wrong before it ejects a phone. The Quad Lock justifies the extra $5 it costs to get the mount and a phone case compared to the same setup for the SP Connect.

Joyroom’s mount is similar to Lamicall’s but the two offer different levels of quality. The Joyroom mount has a convenient clamp for mounting onto handlebars and holds firm with no slippage. That’s the main advantage it has over the Lamicall model we tested.

The phone holder connects to the handlebar grip with a ball head for easy positioning, and the holder uses a clever mechanism to open up and snap shut around the phone. Squeezing the two bits on the sides spreads the mount and lock open. Setting your phone down on a button in the middle of the mount will spring the holder closed around the phone. It can still take a little wiggling to get a snug fit but it’s quite convenient. Like the Lamicall holder, there’s a little latch on the bottom to lock the mechanism.

As nice as it sounds and as securely as it held our phones in testing, the arms and mechanism look and feel like they’re entirely plastic, easily bending. For roughly the same price, Lamicall’s holder has metal reinforcing it and incorporated into its mechanism, and it felt far sturdier. So, we have to give the win to Lamicall.