Over the years we've racked up thousands of cold, dark winter road miles to test hundreds of rear lights. From brilliant budget beamers to retina-ripping radiants that comand the attention of even the most inattentive drivers. Here are some of the best rear bike lights available, with quick links to our top picks just below, along with more highly recommended options from road.cc further down the page.
Best rear bike light overall: Exposure Boost-R with ReAKT and Peloton
Best rear bike light under £20: Knog Plus Rear Light, Black
Best value rear bike light: Giant Recon TL 200 rear light
Best rear light with a camera: Techalogic CR-1 Rear Light with HD Wide Angle Camera
Best sidelight for extra visibility: Brightside Bright, Amber and Sideways
Our top super-bright rear light recommendation: Lezyne Strip Drive 300+ LED Rear Light
A rear light is a legal requirement when cycling at night in the UK and many other places, and using one that's brighter than the legal minimum seems like a sensible way of helping drivers see you — or at least defanging 'but I didn't see them' excuses. The best rear bike lights have long run-times, can be seen from a good distance, and are sufficiently tough and waterproof to fend off day-to-day abuse.
Rear lights for cycling universally use one or more red light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to generate their light. LEDs are very efficient, putting out lots of light for modest electrical power, which makes them cheap to run but effective at boosting visibility. Most rear bike lights are now rechargeable, taking power from a USB source like a standalone charger or your office computer. Battery-powered lights are still available, and have their adherents who appreciate being able to revive a dead light at any filling station or corner shop.
A flashing red light says 'bike' to most drivers; we recommend using a constant light as well so your position can be easily followed. It can be hard to track the position of a flasher on an otherwise unlit minor road. Rear bike lights are increasingly intended as day-time safety lights too, with super-bright flash or pulse modes designed to be impossible for drivers to ignore. They can be very annoying to other riders though; please use them only when necessary.
While we don't deploy the famous road.cc Beam Comparison Engine to test rear lights, the procedure for reviewing rear lights is much the same as front beams round these parts. Our reviewers, with centuries of riding experience between them, use products for at least a month before writing up their findings and coming up with final verdicts. For more information on how road.cc does product reviews and how we compile our buyer's guides, head over to this article.
If you want to see our top picks of back, front and combined lights all in one place, you can also check out our overall guide to the best bike lights. Just looking for a front beam? Head on over to our guide to the best front bike lights instead.
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31 comments
Lezyne PRO 400+ REAR. I run daylights and this goves me 60 hours super bright flashing. Heading into to year 2, Was a fan of seesence but not their durability, this is amazing
The article states "A rear bike light of between 50-100 lumens is sufficient but it depends on the type of riding that you plan to be doing." Yet you give the 20 lumen Knog Plus Rear Light the Cheapest road.cc-recommended rear light award!
If you just want cheap and not really functional light (20 lumens IMO is not suitable for riding on the road in traffic, barely better than a glow worm) then there are planty of other similar spec but cheaper lights on eBay and Aliexpress (or Aldi as someone has suggested).
A 20 lumen light might be suitable as a spare emergency backup in case your main 50 lumen plus light dies or goes flat, but that's about it.
Or, alternatively, get the pair of excellent Aldi lights for £10. No, I don't work for Aldi!
Surprised this didn't get a mention for side lights: https://orb.bike/product/the-orb-mkii/
I use mine all winter on my commute, although I don't usually drink much/anything. I've got the old, original version and wouldn't think twice about buying another if I lost mine or it broke.
Once I started using it, it made me really aware how much I may or may not be seen from the side in different situations.
It comes with my big rubber stamp of approval - but I'd like to see road.cc review it and hear their thoughts.
A fine idea. I've put Christmas lights in a water bottle, and seen some very good YouTubes of people placing very bright LED lightstrips and big batteries in bottles which were very cool.
But of course this gets use of the bottle too.
If the manufacturers would send the product to road.cc for proper testing...
(If they dare...)
Every single one of the above mounts on the seat post. What happens if you've got rack & rack pack or a saddle bag? How many come with alternative mounts?
You invest a modest amount in one of the many available adaptors or (more fun) you make a bodge yourself, a short length of appropriately-sized pipe, a drill/Dremel and some cable ties usually does the trick for me.
I have a rack pack, and commute using panniers.
The rear light mount of my rack has a reduced section in the middle ... so it starts wide then narrows and then goes back to wide.
I found out that the centres of the mounting holes on the rack mount are too far apart for anything I had laying around; but, the narrow bit was the right width to fit between the bolts of a seat rail mount.
Because of the shape of the rack mount, the seat rail mount can't go anywhere - there is too little space between the centres to allow side to side movement, and the shape of the rack mount doesn't allow for up and down movement.
A few extra pennies (less than 20quid) and an aluminium tee action cam mount later, and both my Garmin radar and my Fly6 Gen 3 are securely mounted with very little movement.
I share your pain. Bontrager Flare RT is the remedy. I use their rear mudguard mount, but they also make a variety of other mounts, including a seat stay mount. Bonus is that the light can switch on/off with your Garmin, saving the hassle when the light itself is mounted out of reach from the saddle.
I use a handlebar extender on the side of the seatpost to gvie me 2" of extra width. They usually cover up to 32mm diameter tubes, so will do either the small tube attached to the seat or the larger seat tube.
Cost £5 to £10, and need to be installed such that they touch neither your heel nor your thigh.
No option for me as the under seat saddlebag is full of batteries for the Gruber Assist.
I just bought one of these:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CM9N74V6
The availability of good quality mounts is one of the reasons I like Cateye. Although the parts are sold separately, they cover various seatpost sizes (SP-6 covers 26-30mm IIRC), clothing clip* and a pannier rack mount.
I have been using a Viz 100 for a few months now and I am impressed enough to buy a second one for my dry/summer bike (it's currently just £15 in Halfrauds). Brighter than I expected with impressive wide angle visibility. The Viz 300 and 450 models are OTT, quite unnecessary.
The Lezyne strap for my 800XL front light snapped the other week, it broke near the end, the bit I have to pull around the handlebar. £14 and the LBS will have to order it. A design weakness, it will surely fail without warning again in the future.
* it used to be included with some models so I have 3 or 4 of these.
The Lezyne strap for my 800XL front light snapped the other week
In contrast, I have been using the simple stretchy rubber straps on my Aldi lights for 5 years now and none of them have torn yet. They're what I use to film apparently non-existent vehicles like Y40 DAN. The significance is that the vehicle was initially identified and reported as 'No MOT' in July 23. I have come across these disappearing vehicles around here before
Not so sure about the 300 and 450 being unnecessary.
I've been on a few NSL roads with low, very bright sun directly in front of me. I was confident that the 300 would show up and less confident that other models would. (also it will do 30 lumens in other modes).
Was also very glad of my radar too !
I'm normally commuting with a Carradice saddlebag, so can't use seatpost-mounted lights as they're obscured. It would be useful in your reviews if you mentioned whether lights come with either a seatstay mount (eg most Cygolite taillights have both seatpost and seatstay mounts in the box) or a belt clip that will fit the mounting strap on saddlebags.
I use a NiteRider Sabre clipped onto the back of my rucksack. It has a big clip, never had any retention problems. In fact use it there so much I'm not sure where the actual mounting bracket is!
The Knog+ ('lightest rear light') has a decent looking clip. The actual bracket for it works with magnets and gets good reviews.
I am considering the Knog Blinder Link, the saddle rail version. As a bit of an extra, and to lower my Hope District+, as I can with my mudguards.
I did want something to go on the right hand seat stay, a Moon, but the weatherproofing seemed somewhat inadequate, and I was unsure of the fixings.
The Knog has a USB C, which will mean I need another cable as this will be the first for my lights...
Did a little research, mainly good reviews, but the few bad ones, reporting light loss put me off.
I'm using the Knog Blinder on my pannier and it works great so far. The USB C charging is however terribly slow. The attachment clip might look cheap but is easy to attach/remove and the light is hold tighly in place. Using it for about 1 year now, almost every day, would definitely buy again.
There has to be something here that works for you...
https://www.trekbikes.com/gb/en_GB/equipment/bike-accessories/bike-light...
Thanks for that, impressive range of brackets, but nothing that does it for me. The Flare has a seatstay bracket, but I would prefer a cob striplight there. The seat lights seem to be wired for ebikes and dynamos, the knog looked very cool, but the quick attachment seemed weak for such an expensive unit, I'd considered Exposures little rear as an underseat light, better bracket and lots of printed aftermarket ones too, but then difficulties for removal when leaving and when needing to charge.
It's for an extra extra light, so not essential, which is why I'm after "perfection", already have the Hope R4+ on the seatpost, an Exposure RedEye piggybacking my Axis on the helmet and a NiteRider Solas 250 as a baglight.
How about this
https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/lighting-spares/madison-universal-light-moun...
Fits to any old rack, then you can put on any old light.
the Cateye Viz is frustrating me. It comes with a plastic mount that you slide the light into, then you wrap a rubber block over the mount, which stops the light from sliding out. Then you use the rubber "ladder" to hold the light to the seat post.
Two problems I've found:
Eh? You just take it off and charge it, no need to dismount it.
Not following the second point - the ladder end locking is independent of the orientation.
The image on the left is how you have to have the rubber block to slide the light in and out, the the part you slide the light out of is how it is held onto the seat post - so you would have to pull it away from the seat post and push the rubber back (as i have in the photo) and then slide the light out.
The image on the right is the light put in horizontally - the tag is pushed out by the light and makes me worried it'll slip out of the mount.
I see what you mean now - I have one of those but use it on a Brompton with the proprietary Brompton seat mount, which allows it to slide in and out easily. I've just dug out the original mount like yours and it's just as you say. One solution for off-bike charging perhaps would be to get an alternative mount? The Cateye square mount is fairly common and there should be others available.
Something like this
https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/lighting-spares/cateye-sp11-flex-tight-brack...
I wasn't envisaging you making it horizontal on the seat post, I thought you were using it elsewhere as horizontal.
I've just tried and you can slot the light on afterwards if you want horizontal and the retaining tab in the square mount will hold it. I needed an allen key to move the tab to get the light out.
Hmm, although I don't use that mount any more and I'm now wondering if I've lost a bit !
EDIT
Apologies, I have found the missing bit and now I understand the issue. What is even more bizarre is the site shows the horizontal placement as an option with no reference how it is very hard to get it on.
The rubber band is so easy to attach and remove, I never bothered about removing/fixing the light in any other way...
Most of the time, the brightest flashing mode of the Viz450 is overkill - but not when riding into a setting sun - I really appreciate the power then!
And in the dark, it's good to have a long runtime and a choice of modes - flashing in twilight, continuos or semi-continuous at night.
USB-C is now a must, when will we see more manufacturers implementing this...
But why I hear you cry..
1) No right or wrong way up so no bent connections
2) Higher amp bandwidth means faster charging
3) future proof (until the next better thing sticks at least)
Amen. At this point it's a no-brainer. It would be helpful if the charging port could be in the first line of the review, could save a lot of wasted reading!
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