Boost your lawn’s health with the best lawn aerator for terrific turf

This classic rolling lawn aerator from Greenkey is a popular option and Amazon's Choice for the category. It currently enjoys a four-star rating for its ease of use and the effective results it produces.

You simply apply some pressure and push this rotary option around your lawn to get that aeration you're looking for. For this reason, this option is best for small- to medium-sized gardens - anyone with a large lawn could end up pushing and walking for miles. Do note, reviewers suggest it works best on damp or wet ground.

Making for efficient operation, this has a generous 30cm roller head that's equipped with thirty 4.5cm metal spikes. The spikes are secured with nylon locking nuts to ensure they don't work loose and get stuck in your lawn.

If you can't, or don't want to, push an aerator around your lawn, aerator shoes are an attractive alternative. These Abco Tech 'shoes' are comprised of a polymeric hard plastic sole, 13 heavy-duty, 4.8cm metal spikes on each, and three adjustable straps with strong buckles, designed to be anti-corrosive and durable.

While these shoes don't offer the precision coverage a roller-style aerator can achieve, what they are great for is wearing while you're mowing the lawn - multi-tasking doing two vital garden jobs in one go. You could also pop these on as you're simply pottering around your lawn.

These do require assembling by adding the spikes into the sole, but an instruction manual and the correctly sized spanner are included. Abco Tech promises assembly is a five-minute job.

If you have a large lawn, or are just super-swank, you may want to consider investing in an electric aerator. This corded option from VonHaus will earn its place in your shed or garage thanks to its multi-tasking abilities - as well as aerate, this can rake and scarify your lawn for a full beauty treatment.

This comes with two interchangeable rotary roller blades that fit into the base of the machine to offer two different functionalities. Once fitted you simply squeeze the power trigger and push just like you would a mower. If you're going down the scarification route, a 30-litre collection bag will catch the thatch and moss that's dug up.

This boasts a 32cm working width and gives you the flexibility of four cutting depths, changed by a simple safety trigger, so you can choose the best working height depending on your lawn's needs. There's a height-adjustable handle and a 10-metre power cable.

A spike-style aerator is a traditional choice with a simple concept - you just use your foot to press down on the footplate and propel this into the ground to create the aeration holes.

This has an 88cm handle while the aerator's spiked heads measures in at just over 23cm wide. This is equipped with 15 sharp spikes that can penetrate your lawn to a depth of just over 7cm. The T-shaped handlebar has specially shaped, ergonomic hand grips and is cushioned for a comfortable grip, although the beauty of this design is that most of the force you exert comes from your foot pushing on the footplate.

While using this to aerate an entire lawn would be a time-consuming job, this shines when it comes to dealing with difficult areas of lawn - where the drainage is poor, or if you're just working on improving patches with grass seed and fertiliser.

This is a more specialist aerator designed for a specific purpose - taking small plugs of grass and earth out of your lawn to create visible holes. While the solid tine aerators we're featuring are great for general maintenance on established lawns, core aerators are designed for use on ground that has become compressed or compacted due to high traffic or heavy wear and tear.

Depending on weather conditions, the holes created will stay open for weeks, giving grass roots some real time and space to breathe and spread, before gradually settling back. The downside to hollow tine aeration is that you end up with plugs all over your lawn that need to be collected up and disposed of. This clever EEIEER aerator solves that issue with a built-in bucket that collects the plugs as they are ejected.

This boasts durable iron construction that's been given a powder-coated finish, so it's heavy-duty and rust-resistant. This comes with a free wooden handled garden cleaning tool to help you remove blockages from the tines and to get it nice and clean when the job is done.

This high-quality Gardena garden tool offers two useful functions in one - aerating and raking. It has a 35cm wide rake head that's equipped with 11 very sharp galvanised cutting tines to aerate your lawn.

In addition to the aeration, those sharp, blade-like tines are very effective at removing moss. They can also help to drag out thatch - the layer of dead grass that sits between your healthy grass and the earth that can result in a spongy-feeling lawn.

This forms part of Gardena's Combisystem which sees various tool heads from the manufacturer fitting the same handles. This is great if you've already bought into the range. There various designs of handles available, including wood and aluminium handles, telescopic handles, and Gardena's ergonomic "ErgoLine" handles.

Technically, a cultivator is an entirely separate tool from an aerator, designed to break up and mix soil, but more heavy-duty options can also be used to aerate. We've included this as it could be a good option for someone with a smaller lawn who doesn't have the space - or maybe budget - for two separate tools.

The head of this cultivator is made of high-hardness stainless steel and it offers polished cast-aluminium blades. The blades measure around 4cm and can be detached as required to manoeuvre around plants, although for a lawn you're probably going to want to use the full set.

This rotary aerator has a telescopic handle that can be adjusted from 58 to 160cm, good for your back as you can make it the perfect length for you. This comes complete with free rubber-palmed gardening gloves so you can handle it safely and securely.