What are the best battery companies?

It depends on the application that the battery is intended for!

For a car, the ‘best’ battery is the flooded-cell lead-acid battery.

For a portable device such as a smartphone or tablet, a lithium based rechargeable battery would be best.

For battery backed up emergency lighting systems, nickel-cadmium batteries are usually preferred.

For small portable devices such as transistor radios, flashlights or similar, either alkaline disposable batteries or NiMh rechargeables may be best.

For very low drain, long life items such as smoke alarms, alkaline is usually the best bet.

For very small devices such as hearing aids, a silver oxide or zinc-air battery is more commonly used than any other sort.

There is no simple answer to ‘what are the best batteries?’. The question should be ‘what are the best batteries for an intended application?’.

I use flooded wet-cell lead-acid batteries on my off-grid low-power solar setup. The ‘best’ batteries for my usage and performance are made by Alphaline….they give me optimal (in my opinion) trade-off between cost, lifespan and performance. Arguably, the ‘best’ batteries for the application, per se, would be Trojan or Sonnenschein. My budget won’t run to those, so they are not necessarily ‘best’ in my case.

If you wanted to narrow the question down to, for instance, what are the best alkaline AA batteries available, then that boils down to testing and performance versus cost.

The ‘best’ AA alkaline batteries, in my opinion and from much research, are either Pairdeer (Chinese made and common in Australia and New Zealand) or Aerocell (sold throughout Europe by Lidl supermarkets).