The Best Pellet Smokers for Venison and Jerky

If jerky and snack sticks are why you want a smoker, buy a vertical cabinet that publishes a minimum temperature below 160°F. If you want one machine that smokes a venison ham and also sears a backstrap, buy a horizontal. That is the whole decision, and it is settled by a spec most pellet buyers never read.

This page ranks seven Pit Boss machines — four vertical smokers and three horizontal pellet grills — for the jobs a season of venison actually produces. We have not run any of them. Every figure below is Pit Boss's own published number from the product page cited beside it, read on 2026-11-06, and where Pit Boss publishes nothing we have said so rather than borrowing a number from a sibling model.

The floor, not the ceiling

Here is the finding that orders this entire page. Pit Boss publishes a temperature range on three of these seven machines:

• Navigator 3-Series and 6-Series (vertical): 130–420°F.
• FB2 700 and Carbon 700 (horizontal): 180–500°F.
• The Sportsman 5-Series, 7-Series and 850: no temperature range published at all.

The USDA's jerky guidance is to heat the meat to 160°F first, then dry it. The drying step is a long, low hold — the range where water leaves the strip without the meat cooking and rendering. A machine whose lowest setting is 180°F cannot do that step. It will make something, and that something will be closer to a dry roast than to jerky: brittle at the edges, greasy where the fat rendered out.

What we ranked on

1. Low-temperature control (30%). Whether the maker publishes a floor, and how low it is. This is the spec that decides whether a machine can do the job a hunter buys it for.
2. Rack area per batch (25%). Jerky and snack sticks are thin things laid out flat, so usable rack area matters far more than it does for barbecue, where one big piece sits on one grate.
3. Build, hopper and controls (20%). Hopper capacity decides whether an overnight run needs watching; app connectivity decides whether you watch it from the house.
4. What the maker publishes (15%). A machine that states its range and capacity is a machine you can plan around. We mark down the ones that do not, the same way we do on every other page here.
5. Value at list price (10%). Pit Boss's own list price, read 2026-11-06, shown on the button with its date.

Vertical or horizontal

A vertical is a cabinet of racks. For the same footprint you get several times the surface, which is the right shape for a jerky batch: the Navigator 6-Series lists 2,224 square inches across five racks, the Sportsman 7-Series 2,015 across six. It will not sear, and it is not the machine for a spatchcocked bird.

A horizontal is a barrel with one grate. The FB2 700 lists 747 square inches, the Sportsman 850 lists 849 — a third of a vertical's capacity. What you get in exchange is the Flame Broiler lever, which opens the fire pot for a direct sear Pit Boss rates to 1,000°F, and a shape that suits a whole bone-in ham or shoulder.

What Pit Boss publishes, and what it doesn't

The gap worth knowing about before you spend: the Sportsman line is the one Pit Boss markets at hunters — its own copy for the Sportsman 850 lists “grilling game” and “smoking jerky” among the uses — and it is also the line that publishes the least. No temperature range on the 850, the 7-Series or the 5-Series. No hopper capacity on either vertical Sportsman; the page says only “a larger hopper capacity.”

That is why the Navigator cabinets outrank the Sportsman ones here despite the Sportsman 7-Series having more racks and a viewing window. We are not claiming the Sportsman cabinets cannot run low. We are saying Pit Boss does not tell you, and on the one spec that decides a jerky machine, buying on an assumption is how people end up disappointed. If you want the Sportsman hardware, ask Pit Boss for the minimum set temperature before you order.

Rack area in deer

Square inches are abstract until you convert them into an animal. At the Ohio Division of Wildlife's measured average a whitetail yields about 52 pounds of venison, and a hunter might turn 10 to 15 pounds of that into jerky — the hams, trimmed and sliced.

Sliced at a quarter inch and laid out without touching, a pound of strips occupies roughly a square foot of rack, so 10 pounds wants something close to 1,440 square inches. That number is the reason the entry vertical at 1,118 square inches is a two-batch machine for one deer's jerky, and the 2,224-square-inch cabinet is a one-batch machine. It is also why no horizontal here does a deer's jerky in one run: 849 square inches is most of a day in three loads.

Snack sticks change the arithmetic in your favor, because a stick is round and takes less rack per pound than a flat strip. If sticks are the main job rather than jerky, the smaller cabinets stretch further — see how to make snack sticks.

The alternative: a dehydrator

We would be selling you something you do not need if we left this out. If jerky is the only reason you are shopping, a dehydrator does the job better and for a fraction of the money. It holds a set temperature in the drying range all day, it lives indoors, it costs a quarter of the cheapest machine on this page, and the good ones publish their range the way the Navigator cabinets do.

What a dehydrator cannot do is put smoke on the meat, and it cannot take a venison ham, a summer sausage chub or a rack of ribs. That is the honest line: buy a pellet smoker when you want wood flavor and the capacity for whole cuts as well as strips, and buy a dehydrator when you want jerky. Many people here will be better served by our dehydrator rankings, and dehydrator vs smoker for jerky compares the two routes directly.

How to choose

Start with the job, not the budget. Jerky and snack sticks: a vertical with a published low floor. Hams, shoulders, summer sausage and the occasional steak: a horizontal. Both, with jerky as the priority: a vertical plus the grill you already own.

Then size it to one deer. Work out the pounds of jerky a season actually produces and divide by roughly a square foot per pound. Most hunters processing one or two deer are comfortably inside the entry Navigator; it is the three-deer households and the people who make sticks for the whole camp who need the 2,000-square-inch cabinets.

Then check the hopper against your longest cook. A 75 lb hopper is an overnight run you can sleep through. A 13.5 lb hopper on a summer-sausage cook is an alarm clock.

Finally, budget for a thermometer that is not the one in the lid. A built-in probe reports the air in the cabinet and, on better models, one piece of meat. It does not tell you that the thickest chub on the middle rack has reached its finish temperature, and on a cabinet with five racks the spread between top and bottom is real. Our thermometer rankings cover the leave-in probes that do.

Pellets are a flavor decision, not a performance one

Every machine here burns standard hardwood pellets and none of them requires the maker's own brand. Venison is lean and takes smoke readily, which is an argument for the milder woods rather than the strongest ones — a heavy mesquite load on a lean ham is easy to overdo and impossible to undo. That is a preference rather than a spec, so we will not rank it.

What does matter mechanically is keeping pellets dry. Damp pellets swell, bridge in the hopper and stall the auger, and a stall mid-cook on a cured product is a food-safety problem rather than an inconvenience. A hopper cleanout — the Carbon 700 and the Navigator line have one — makes it practical to empty the hopper between cooks instead of leaving pellets to sit through a wet week.

Where a smoker fits in the chain

A smoker is a finishing tool. It does not replace the grinder, the stuffer or the sealer, and buying one does not shorten the day: you still break the animal down, still grind, still cure and stuff. What it changes is the last step. If you are assembling a bench from scratch rather than adding to one, start with the 3-5 deer setup and add the smoker once the rest of the chain is in place — the order matters more than the brand.