It would be no exaggeration to say that when it comes to lightweight tents for solo backpacking and wild camping, MSR’s Hubba NX is a true modern classic. The freestanding design is impressively lightweight, with a compact packed size that’ll happily fit in most rucksacks. It’s easy to pitch and sturdy enough for 3-season camping, while the tent’s symmetrical geometry and non-tapered floor maximise interior space. All of which ensures it’s a pleasant and comfortable space to rest, recuperate and recover after a hard day’s adventuring, whether you’re walking a long-distance trail or wild camping in the hills and mountains.

The familiar hubbed pole system has an integrated spreader bar for improved interior headroom. It has a symmetrical rectangular footprint that feels inherently more stable than the tripod designs of rivals like the Sea to Summit Alto TR1, the EXPED Mira 1 HL or the NEMO Hornet. The MSR also has steep walls at both the head and foot ends, ensuring lots of liveable space. In terms of floor area, it measures 75cm wide by 215cm long. Headroom is just as generous, with an apex height of 92cm. That’s ample space to sit upright, even if you’re over six foot.

The tent is well-built, with first-rate materials and components. This includes reinforced webbing at all pegging points, with quick adjust buckles and anodised aluminium hardware. The flysheet provides good all-round coverage and the design feels robust and protective enough for three-season use in the UK, with four guy lines to keep it securely anchored.
The dark green colour of the flysheet makes the Hubba NX a sensible choice for inconspicuous wild camps, as it is stealthy and unobtrusive. Weight is competitive for a one-person tent, though it’s worth noting that the pack size is a little longer and chunkier than some rivals, which makes the tent a bit trickier to stash in smaller packs.

What you get for your money though is an excellent lightweight backpacking tent that delivers tried and tested performance for three-season UK use, along with perhaps the best balance of protection, liveability, weight and packed size on the market.

Read our full MSR Hubba NX review

The Alpkit Ultra 1 is exactly what its name suggests: an ultralight solo shelter. Designed for multi-day adventures, it’s a 3-season backpacking tent that ought to work well for wild camping weekends, backpacking trips or weight-conscious mountain marathons and adventure races. With its compact packed size, it would also fit easily on a bike frame, making it a viable option for bikepackers too.

Technologically advanced, it employs ultralight fabrics and a carbon fibre pole set. This ensures that it packs small and weighs an impressively svelte 900g. All that for a UK RRP of £300 – in classic Alpkit style, this new offering seems to provide plenty of bang for your buck.

The design is freestanding, which makes it easy to move the tent if you need to hunt around for the flattest piece of ground. It does need to be pitched inner first, which is less ideal if you’re setting up camp in the rain, but it goes up quickly and easily. The pole system has an unusual but effective offset integrated spreader bar, designed to offer slightly improved liveability and a wider door entry. Chunky pole clips and an intuitive colour-coding system ensure that setup is simple and straightforward.   

There’s a single internal storage pocket for essentials and a hanging hook for a tent lantern. The single vestibule is a good size. It’s roomy enough to stash boots and a pack, whilst still leaving space to cook if needed. The flysheet door also has a well-designed curved zipper that ensures easy entry/exit and rarely jams or snags. It’s an excellent feature.

The Ultra 1 is a technologically advanced tent with an impressive sub-1kg weight and small packed size. At around £200 cheaper than comparable carbon fibre poled tents, it’s arguably good value too. However, if you’re not a committed ultralighter, you might want to look elsewhere, since you can buy roomier, cheaper and more robust solo tents, albeit with an added weight penalty.

Read our full Alpkit Ultra 1 Tent review

This (relatively) bargain tent has many great advantages, and one major drawback. We’ll kick off with the good stuff…

With the general cost of living being high, spending money on a tent is not a priority. But even for those of us lucky enough to still be able to pursue our hobbies, money is tight. For would-be wild campers, then, the Helm Compact 1 is a godsend. It’s rare to find a tent for less than £300, let alone one that performs so superbly.

It’s a well-proportioned, free-standing one-person dome tent that packs down to a compact size. Ultra-lighters may turn their nose up at the weight stats, but for most of us sub 2kg is a perfectly acceptable weight for a reliable one-person shelter.

And it’s tough – we’ve witnessed one of these withstand a wintery battering in north Wales, performing as well as the tent pitched next to it that had a price tag nearly 4x that of the Helm.

So what’s the bad news? These things are so popular that they’re currently rare as hen’s teeth. Which is frustrating, as there really are few alternatives to compete on this level. Still, keep your fingers crossed and your eyes open and you might just find one...

Read our full Wild Country Helm Compact 1 review

The Alto TR1 Plus from Aussie outdoor brand Sea to Summit is a double-skinned solo tent designed for lightweight backpacking. It’s described as a ‘3+ season’ model, intended to enable use into the so-called ‘shoulder seasons’ of early spring and late autumn, thanks to more weatherproof fabrics. This is what distinguishes the ‘Plus’ version from the standard model. We’d say it’s worth the upgrade.

It is slightly more expensive, but features a full fabric inner, which is considerably warmer than mesh, plus upgraded waterproofing for the bathtub groundsheet (improved from 1200mm to 2500mm hydrostatic head). For UK use, it’s therefore much better suited to general wild camping and long-distance, as well as multi-day walks in the hills and mountains.

The Alto also strikes a good balance between low weight and liveable space. The major innovation in design terms is a wishbone-style spreader bar that the brand calls Tension Ridge architecture. This increases head height, creates more volume overall and improves airflow through the tent. It also helps to keep the tent walls taut, reducing bowing and buckling in breezy conditions.

The overall coverage of the flysheet is pretty good for a three-season tent. It also feels stable, and extra guy-out points made from sturdy reflective webbing tape enable you to add reinforcement in gusty conditions. Extra guy lines (x4) and pegs (x2) are supplied with the tent. You may well need these, since the design does have fairly steep walls, which can occasionally catch the wind in more exposed pitching locations. You also get a repair kit and a pole sleeve in case of emergency.

Sea to Summit’s overall sustainability report is mixed. It would be fair to say the company is ‘on a journey’. As such, it has estimated its Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions in order to try and reduce its overall carbon footprint. However, it has not yet put steps in place to offset or limit these emissions.

In truth, there’s not much to choose between this and our 2024 best in test winner, the MSR Hubba NX. Which one to go for depends on your priorities. The Alto TR1 plus does have some unique and innovative features that the Hubba lacks. The Alto also has superior headroom. The weights are comparable, though the Alto TR1 Plus uses marginally less tough and less weatherproof fabrics.

Read our full Sea to Summit Alto TR1 Plus review

NEMO markets this model as ‘the ultimate ultralight tent for extreme minimalists.’ The specs certainly back this up. It has a minimum trail weight of just 657g (minimum weight includes the inner tent, rain fly, poles and tent pegs, but not the stuff sacks). Yep, you read that right. Even the packed weight is a mere 812g, about the same as a loaf of bread. Which is an impressive feat for a double-skinned design. In fact, on the scales it compares favourably to several ultralight single skin shelters.

This tent uses cutting-edge fabrics that are exclusive to NEMO, in the form of their proprietary OSMO nylon-polyester blend. It’s made from fully recycled fibres and is free from harmful chemicals such as PFC-based water repellent coatings or toxic flame retardants. Meanwhile, the inner tent canopy is made from ultrafine mesh and the pole set uses a hubbed DAC Featherlite NFL TH72 aluminium alloy.

As well as being light in weight, the flysheet fabric is also light in colour. This means that being inside this tent is an airy experience – you almost feel like you’re out in the elements, despite being under cover. However, NEMO claims that OSMO fabric has 3x less stretch than conventional nylon. It wouldn’t be difficult to puncture it though, and we’d say that use of the additional footprint groundsheet (sold separately) is pretty much an essential.

Though the Hornet Elite is described and marketed as a backpacking tent, in reality we’d be hesitant to take it on long-distance classics that involve a lot of upland stretches. If you were forced to pitch in more exposed locations or higher up the hillside, you’d be in for a testing night. It just isn’t designed for the blustery, gusty weather than you get when camping in our hills and mountains, or even on the coast.  

Dedicated ultralighters will be familiar with these compromises and prepared to accept them in exchange for the Hornet Elite’s exceptionally low trail weight. It’s one of the lightest double-skinned designs on the market, and this also makes it arguably more protective (and certainly better at managing condensation) than a single skin shelter. It’s also worth pointing out that the price tag, though high, is way less than DCF or cuben fibre ultralight tents.   

Read our full NEMO Hornet Elite OSMO 1 review

The Mira 1 HL (‘Hyperlite’) is a lightweight backpacking tent that Exped says is “perfect for short trips in moderate climates”. That suggests a design suitable for 2-to-3 season use, primarily for overnight wild camps or backpacking trips from a few days up to a couple of weeks in duration.
The latest model has a commendably light packed weight of 1.15kg (2.54lbs) but is also intended to offer a balanced combination of space, comfort and trail liveability.

Unfortunately, the design lacks the additional corner struts that you get with some similar rival designs (like the Sea to Summit Alto TR1, for example). This means that the foot end slopes away more sharply, giving you a little less internal space. Despite that slight shortcoming, liveability is still decent. There is an impressive 105cm of headroom at the apex, while the footprint is a true rectangular shape with a total internal length of 215cm and a width of 70cm. There’s ample room for a six-footer to both sit upright and lie out straight. You also get a good-sized porch or vestibule, augmented by a small secondary vestibule at the back of the tent, which can be accessed via a reach-through zipper. This gives quick access to smaller items like water bottles. There are also two storage pockets at the head end and a handy gear hanging line, which comes pre-attached to the ceiling.

The brand is an acknowledged industry leader in sustainability. In fact, Exped calculates all climate emissions from the production and transportation of this product and finances certified climate protection projects through Myclimate to an equal extent. Overall, it scores well on sustainability, but is more of a US-style tent: great for less demanding weather but may not give you everything you need in the shoulder seasons of the UK.

**Read our full Exped Mira 1 HL review
**

Japanese ‘outdoor living’ brand Snow Peak has decades of outdoor heritage, but is perhaps better known for its minimalist, design-orientated camping gear and apparel than its lightweight backpacking equipment. So, the Lago 1 tent is a bit of a departure from the norm. It’s certainly eye-catching, with sleek lines and an unusual ivory-coloured flysheet.

Otherwise, it’s a tried and tested double-skinned, single hoop design – though it’s more versatile than most since the central pole is comprised of two straight sections and a U-shaped upper segment. The straight poles can be replaced with trekking poles, effectively turning the Lago 1 into a trekking pole tent. This saves a little weight and adds considerable versatility for backpacking use.

Inside, a full fabric inner is well suited to camping in UK climates, since it adds welcome warmth on chillier nights. A large, zippered mesh vent at the top of the triangular door helps to manage condensation and improve airflow though, ensuring the interior doesn’t get too damp or stuffy. There’s also a small mesh foot vent to circulate air. Both these vents are covered externally by matching hooded vents in the flysheet.

Build quality is good, though the components are perhaps less sophisticated than with some other rivals. For example, pegging points are made from elastic bungee cord and the poles are inserted into webbing tabs with simple metal eyelets, rather than employing the anodised aluminium components or locking tensioners of other tents.  

A versatile solo tent that works as a conventional poled design or as a trekking pole tent, the Lago 1 will attract design-conscious backpackers. Weight and packed size are both competitive and the price isn’t ridiculous either. It’s also stable, durable and reasonably roomy. Its only real drawback is that small vestibule.

Read our full Snow Peak Lago 1 review

Grangers' effective and eco-friendly care kit for tents and outdoor gear such as packs. It even comes with a sponge to help apply the Cleaner solution. The Cleaner and Repel are available to buy individually too.

Nikwax's tent and gear care kit. It's just as good as the Grangers kit and also water-based and PFC-free. SolarWash and SolarProof are available to buy individually.