Senior updates writer Arriana Vasquez has been pursuing photography as both a professional and a hobbyist for over 10 years. Before joining Wirecutter, she worked as a camera specialist at several camera stores in New York City. She has also contributed to Wirecutter’s guides to instant cameras, full-size tripods, and portable document scanners.

Erin Lodi is a photojournalist, writer, and professional photographer with a wide range of experience researching, testing, and writing about photography trends, techniques, and tools, including in her role as mobile-imaging editor at DPReview, the most popular camera site on the web.

Senior staff writer Phil Ryan has been writing about photography for about 20 years and has been testing small portable tripods since before the first iPhone was released.

Anyone who likes to use the timer function in their phone’s camera app, stabilize their video, or shoot videos hands-free can benefit from a smartphone mount.

Most tripods are made for cameras, with no way to securely attach a smartphone. A smartphone mount, which usually takes the form of a clamp that grabs onto the sides of a phone, is an adapter that changes that.

The pool of people who benefit from a smartphone-specific tripod is smaller. A regular tripod for cameras, which we cover in our guides to tripods, works for a phone in most situations. However, the tripods we cover in this guide are uniquely built to function as selfie sticks or grab onto structures like signposts or trees. They’re also smaller than traditional tripods, which means you can casually throw one into a backpack instead of lugging around a gadget the size of a baseball bat.

But they aren’t nearly as long as traditional tripods, which means you must attach them to another tall object to grab an eye-height shot; you’re out of luck in an open field. As a result, you should treat a smartphone tripod as a portable alternative, but understand that a traditional tripod is useful in more scenarios.

We spent 35 hours researching more than 90 smartphone-stabilization systems before testing 22 sets of legs and 21 tripod mounts to determine what you really need to keep your smartphone pictures and videos steady. We filmed waterfalls while hiking in the Pacific Northwest and snapped images of the Space Needle in Seattle in an initial round of testing. In a second round of testing in 2019, we went on a photo walk in the woods of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and filmed hands-free videos indoors. In 2022 and 2024, we brought the tripods and mounts to New York City street festivals, concerts, and parks to test stability and ease of use.

As with standard-size tripods, we considered legs and mounts separately (in this case, looking at phone mounts rather than the ball heads intended for full-size cameras). We tested legs to confirm that they were sturdy enough to support the weight of the smartphone and mount, and we tested the grippiness of their feet on a variety of surfaces.

When considering mounts, we looked for certain key elements.

• Secure grip for any phone: A mount should hold your phone firmly in place without having to crank down so hard on a knob that it takes a long time to get the phone into it in the first place. It should also be able to accommodate a wide variety of phones. We used the models we tested with phones as large as a cased iPhone 14 Pro Max and as small as a Samsung Galaxy S7 without a case.
• Both landscape and portrait positions: You should be able to quickly and easily position the phone horizontally for landscapes or cityscapes and vertically for portraits, and it should stay in place without a fuss.
• Solid construction: Plastic mounts can be enticingly lightweight but also often feel flimsy. We didn’t rule them out entirely, but we did gravitate toward mounts that will stand the test of time and stand up to use in any environment.
• Stand-up spirit: A great mount should be able to stand on its own even when not placed on a tripod in case you need to place a phone on a surface or the ground for a basic, low-angle view.
• Portability: You should be able to carry the mount in a pocket or a small bag so it can go anywhere with you.

If you find yourself taking tons of time-lapses, videos, and low-light photos, we recommend investing in the Joby GorillaPod 1K Kit paired with a mount—such as our pick, the Ulanzi ST-27 Metal Phone Tripod Mount Clip—for your smartphone.

You can find many copycat versions of these legs online (Joby itself offers variants, including mini and magnetic models), but after comparing them with the real thing, we think the GorillaPod 1K will hold up better over time and be more practical in a wider variety of conditions, because it’s sturdier and designed with more useful features.

Its bendable legs make it easy to set up. The GorillaPod 1K’s signature flexible, jointed legs can bend into just about any position, and once you place them, they stay put. In our tests, cheaper models slipped a bit when nudged lightly.

The 8-inch long legs can wrap around a pole or branch so that you can get in the shot. Then you can use a timer or a remote to trigger the shutter. Other tripods we tested had legs less than 5 inches long or ones that weren’t flexible.

It’s strong and sturdy. The GorillaPod 1K’s 2.2-pound weight capacity has no problem keeping larger smartphones like the iPhone 14 Pro Max steady—something a number of other tested stands, such as the wobbly MonoShot, couldn’t do. It’s even strong enough to hold up a compact or mirrorless camera, or a phone with lights attached.

It comes with a small ball head. The rotating ball head lets you make small, incremental camera-position changes without moving the legs. Rubbery material on the oversize feet provided a better grip on slippery surfaces compared with the smaller feet found on the cheaper legs we tested.

It’s relatively small and lightweight. Paired, the GorillaPod 1K legs and the Ulanzi ST-27 collapse to the size of a small water bottle and weigh about as much as a navel orange. The resulting combo is easy to tote along in your bag or a larger coat pocket.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• The multi-jointed GorillaPod 1K legs can make it feel as if you’re playing with a toy rather than using a tripod—but then again, you can’t wrap your normal tripod around a tree branch. The GorillaPod 1K is also bigger than some of Joby’s other leg systems, but the extra stability is worth the trade-off.
• Like all of the multi-jointed tripod legs we tested, the GorillaPod 1K has its limits. Heavy jostling or hits cause it to slide down slick surfaces such as poles; don’t attach it to the handles of your four-wheeler and expect it to stay secure.

Whether you want a great mount to pair with our top smartphone tripod pick, or you already have a tripod you’d like to use with your smartphone, we recommend the Ulanzi ST-27 Metal Phone Tripod Mount Clip.

About as tall as a deck of playing cards, this lockable, spring-loaded rotating clamp can easily fit in a pocket and is sturdy enough to hold your phone firmly in place. It was the most secure of the mounts we tested, including those from Joby.

It’s easy to switch between landscape and portrait orientation. The Ulanzi ST-27 holds the camera upright so your camera faces forward, but you can also rotate it to switch between horizontal and vertical positions. It has detents in 90-degree increments where you can tighten the knob on the back of the mount to lock it in place. It will only lock fully at those points, but in our testing with an iPhone 14 Pro Max, it stayed in place when we tightened down at other angles, too.

It has plenty of attachment points. The top and bottom of the clamp have cold shoes (like a flash hot shoe, but without power) so you can attach lights, shotgun microphones for video shoots, or other accessories that use a standard shoe mount. Plus, a third shoe is on the back of the mount, nestled between two extra ¼″-20 (standard tripod) threaded holes.

It holds your phone securely in place. The clamp has a spring that’s fairly strong but still easy to use. It will likely loosen up a bit over time, as most springs like this do, but the ST-27 has a red knob on back that locks the clamp in place. The angled, rubberized interior top and bottom of the clamp held our phones tightly even when we purposefully whacked them with elbows during testing.

It can stand up on its own. The bottom has a standard ¼″-20 tripod socket and is shaped so you can clamp it in place of an Arca-Swiss-style quick-release plate on tripod heads that use those. It’s also flat and has enough surface area to stand up your phone on its own for extra low-angle shots.

Other models we looked at, such as the DaVoice Cell Phone Tripod Adapter, can support a phone only propped up at an angle when used without legs—not perpendicular to whatever surface you have them on—making them hard to use on their own.

It fits most any current phone. The ST-27 mount holds phones from 2.75 to 4 inches wide, a range that covers the vast majority of currently available phones but doesn’t fit large tablets. A Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra or iPhone 14 Pro Max will be fine, but you will run into problems once diagonal screen sizes start to reach 7 inches or larger.

If you want a slightly more portable version of the Joby GorillaPod 1K Kit: Consider the Joby Podzilla. It’s nearly identical to our pick in height and weight, but thanks to skinny, flexible aluminum legs (instead of the bulkier ball joints on our pick), the Podzilla can bend in half more easily, making it easier to stash in a small bag (along with a small mount).

The ball head is less versatile than our pick, though—it has only one cutout for vertical positioning, and the legs are firmly attached, as opposed to our pick, which offers two ways to achieve vertical positions and lets you spin the camera 365 degrees independently of the legs. We also found that, while the ball head is very, very secure when locked, you need considerable single-hand strength to press the push-button locking mechanism in order to release the ball head.

If you want a simpler mounting solution for a MagSafe-compatible smartphone: The Moment Tripod Mount for MagSafe has a lightning-fast setup time, is extremely portable, and provides a secure hold.

The Moment mount is essentially a strong magnet wrapped in a textured circle attached to a slender stick, with a tripod screw hole at the bottom. It can’t stand on its own, but when paired with our pick for tripod legs, it held any phone we put on it firmly in place. Moment offers the mount with or without a cold-shoe mount.

To test this mount, we used an iPhone 13 without a case and an iPhone 11 Pro Max with a MagSafe-compatible case; in both instances, the Moment mount gripped the MagSafe ring securely. While you save a few seconds mounting and unmounting the phone (since you don’t have to mess with the tension arms of our pick), the Moment mount is typically more than two times the price of our phone-mount pick, the Ulanzi ST-27 Metal Phone Tripod Mount Clip, and works only with iPhone 12 and newer models directly. We did test it with a third-party case on the 11 Pro Max and it worked just fine, but we can’t speak to other off-brand cases.

That said, we plan to do further testing to see if the Moment mount could be helpful for people with dexterity issues. We’ll update this recommendation depending on the results of those tests.

Mounts

The Square Jellyfish Metal Spring Tripod Mount was our pick for smartphone mounts for more than six years, but recently it has become so hard to find that we have replaced it with the Ulanzi ST-27 Metal Phone Tripod Mount Clip. The ST-27 costs more but holds your phone more securely, is made of rugged metal, and has an easier to tighten rotation mechanism to switch between vertical and horizontal orientation. That said, the Square Jellyfish is still a good choice if you can find it and are a casual smartphone photographer.

The MOFT Snap Phone Tripod Stand MOVAS is a slim stand that uses Apple’s MagSafe system to stick to the back of any compatible phone (including Android phones with MagSafe-compatible cases). But while it looks good and feels solidly built, it consistently slipped off our phones in testing, making it unreliable for its main purpose and therefore hard to recommend. If you’re looking to add accessories like a stand or wallet to the back of your phone, we recommend this case instead.

The Pocket Tripod is more of a phone stand than a tripod. With a few quick, origami-like folds, it can go from the size and shape of a credit card to a phone support, with the phone sitting inside two small, C-shaped cutouts. We really liked this phone stand’s extreme portability, but we’re concerned about the somewhat high number of negative Amazon reviews. We plan to continue testing it to see how well it holds up over time.

The Benro MeVIDEO Sidekick Pocket is a sturdy mount that’s adaptable to a variety of needs. There are ¼″-20 and ⅜″-16 threaded mounting holes throughout, plus a built-in cold-shoe mount so you can mount an extra light and/or a mic. The base plate is Arca-Swiss- and RC2-compatible for quick-release tripod heads, and it folds down to be nearly as small as our pick. However, we can’t recommend it because the arms that hold the phone allow for more slip along the length of the device than all the mounts we tested in 2022, and the tension screw that holds the phone requires extreme tightening or the mount can still move around with minimal pressure.

The Joby GripTight One Mount, a former runner-up pick, comes standard on many Joby smartphone tripods. The simple spring-release design folds to the size of a large car key and is fast to use. But we found it didn’t hold phones as securely as the Square Jellyfish mount; we had to be careful about installing the phone or risk it twisting out and falling.

The Vastar Smartphone Tripod tied with the Square Jellyfish mount for stability and security. It’s also cheaper, so it’s a great option if you’re trying to spend as little as possible. However, it’s much larger and clunkier, and it takes longer to attach it to a phone.

We found that the RetiCam Smartphone Tripod Mount offered the functionality we wanted, but the Ulanzi ST-27 offered more flexibility for angles and accessories and is faster to set up.

The newest version of the Studio Neat Glif is far better than the first, but we still can’t justify this nifty mount’s price.

Tripods

The Apexel Gorillas Tripod is nifty, but the features that set it apart also keep it from being a possible pick. It’s designed so that each leg can unscrew from the phone base. While the bendable legs are stiff enough that they don’t unbend on their own, they also sometimes unscrew from the base as you position them. Also, the joints where the legs connect to the base have limited range, and you can’t adjust the tension, so you can’t open it far enough to lay it flat or lock the legs in place.

The Joby HandyPod Mobile pairs a short tripod with a Joby GripTight One Mount. Its legs fold together to form a smooth handle that’s more comfortable to use as a selfie stick than the jointed legs of a GorillaPod, but its lack of flexible legs also means it can’t grip tree branches or sign poles. We decided to dismiss it because the Ulanzi ST-27 mount is more secure than the GripTight One Mount. We dismissed the Manfrotto Pixi Mini Tripod for similar reasons.

Joby makes many tripods with bendy legs, but its mounts aren’t as secure or easy to use as the Ulanzi ST-27 or Square Jellyfish mount. As a result, it’s a better idea to buy our pick, the GorillaPod 1K Kit, and pair it with the Ulanzi ST-27. The Joby GripTight Pro 2 GorillaPod is large and strong like the GorillaPod 1K and has the added feature of a cold-shoe adapter for accessories like mics or lights, but it lacks a ball mount. Joby’s GripTight One GP Magnetic Impulse, GripTight Action Kit, and GorillaPod 325 have shorter legs, which means they aren’t as strong and can’t grip as many objects.

The ChargerCity MegaGrab2 Selfie Kit, which used to be our budget pick, provides plenty of support, collapses easily into a small carrying bag, and costs less than half the price of the Joby legs and Ulanzi ST-27 combined. But it’s less supportive and not as well built. It also squeaks horribly during adjustment.

The MonoShot (the brand-name model we tested, though many nearly identical versions are available on Amazon) extends to nearly 6 feet but sways in the slightest wind at that height—just what you don’t want for your time-lapse.

Kenu’s Stance smartphone tripods are the only kind we’ve seen that use either your iPhone’s Lightning port or the Micro-USB or USB-C port of a newer iPhone, Android, or Windows phone as a mount. Though interestingly designed, the Stance models are less stable and work in fewer positions than our main picks.

The UBeesize tripod and mount combo is an Amazon best seller and even cheaper than our budget pick, but it’s far flimsier.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.