Tent vs Hammock Camping: Which One Should You Actually Sleep In?

The short answer

The comparison people expect is about comfort, and it is genuinely close — a well-hung hammock is more comfortable than a pad on uneven ground, and plenty of people sleep better in one. But comfort is not what sends people home at midnight. Running out of trees does, and getting cold does, and both are predictable before you leave.

Compared on published numbers

Read the weight row honestly. A hammock on its own is 19 ounces and a tent is ten pounds, which is the comparison hammock marketing wants you to make. A hammock you can actually sleep in through a cold night is a hammock plus straps plus a tarp plus an underquilt, and that is about 4.8 lb — still lighter than the tent, but nothing like eight times lighter.

Question one: are there two trees?

ENO publishes a hanging distance of 9 ft 2 in plus or minus 10 in for the DoubleNest, and the Atlas straps are 9 ft each with 30 attachment points, which is what gives you the range to work with trees that are not perfectly spaced. In practice the usable gap is roughly nine to fifteen feet between two trunks solid enough to take a shock load.

That is easy in eastern hardwood forest and impossible almost everywhere else. Desert sites, alpine sites above treeline, beach sites, prairie campgrounds and a great many developed campgrounds with manicured loops simply do not have the anchors. Some parks also prohibit hanging anything from trees at all, and others require wide webbing straps specifically to stop bark damage.

Question two: how many people, and are they together?

A hammock sold as a “double” is a two-person sitting hammock. The ENO DoubleNest publishes a 400 lb capacity and a 9 ft 6 in by 6 ft 4 in size, and two adults do fit in it — in a pile, at an angle, with one person on top of the other by morning. For sleeping it is a generous one-person hammock.

So a family of four is four hammocks, four sets of straps, four tarps and four underquilts, hung at four separate tree pairs, with the children out of arm's reach in the dark. A Coleman Skydome 6 publishes 85 square feet and fits two queen airbeds, and everybody is in one room. This is the single most common reason people go back to a tent, and it has nothing to do with how either one sleeps.

If the trip is you alone or two adults who are happy in separate hammocks, the headcount objection disappears entirely. Sizing for the tent side is in what size tent do I need.

The cold is the part beginners get wrong

This is the same physics as the ground, taken further. On the ground, body weight compresses the fill under you and the earth conducts heat away, which is why R-value decides warmth more than the bag rating does. In a hammock the compressed fill is the same, but instead of insulating soil there is open air on every side, moving. People describe it as their back being cold while their top half is fine, and that description is diagnostic.

Note the honest ceiling on the usual fix. ENO publishes a temperature range of 40 to 60 F for the Ember UnderQuilt at 27 oz, with 160 g of recycled polyester in two layers. That is a three-season shoulder-weather product, not a cold-weather one. Below roughly 40 F you are into a heavier underquilt or a serious pad, while on the ground you can simply buy more R-value — an Exped MegaMat 10 publishes an R-value of 8.1 at 3.9 in thick and works in any tent you own.

The full explanation of why people blame the wrong piece of gear is in why you get cold in a sleeping bag.

Rain, bugs and the things a tent gives you for free

A tent arrives as a system. It has a floor, a bathtub seam, a sewn-in bug mesh and a rainfly cut to fit it, and none of those are separate decisions. A hammock has none of them, and each one is a purchase and a pitch.

• Rain. You need a tarp, and it needs to be bigger than the hammock. ENO publishes 10 ft 6 in by 6 ft 4 in for the ProFly at 22 oz, in 70D ripstop with a 1,000 mm PU coating. Pitched badly, rain runs down the suspension straight into the hammock, which is what drip lines on the straps are for.
• Bugs. A tent zips shut. A hammock needs a separate bug net, or an all-in-one hammock with integrated mesh. On a still summer evening near water this is not optional.
• Gear. A tent has a floor and a vestibule, so packs and boots stay dry and off the ground. Under a hammock they sit on open dirt unless the tarp is pitched wide enough to cover them.

A hammock bug net is the cheapest of those gaps to close, and the one most people discover on night one.

Where the hammock genuinely wins

None of the above means the tent is simply better. On the right site a hammock is the better shelter, for reasons a spec sheet does not capture.

• Ground you could not pitch on. Roots, rocks, slope, mud and standing water are all irrelevant when you are hanging above them. This is the hammock's strongest argument and it is a big one in wet eastern forest.
• No flat spot needed. Finding two trees is often easier than finding level ground, and a hammock never needs the site leveled or cleared.
• Setup time and pack size. The DoubleNest packs to 6 by 4 by 5 in and hangs in a couple of minutes with no stakes, no poles and nothing to break.
• Back comfort. Plenty of people with back trouble sleep better at a diagonal in a hammock than flat on a pad. Lying across the fabric rather than banana-shaped along it is the technique, and it is the thing beginners most often never learn — hammock camping for beginners covers the hang angle and the diagonal lie.

So which should you buy?

The honest summary for most readers of this site: buy the tent first. It works at every site in the country, it sleeps the people you are bringing, and its cold-weather fix is a pad you can buy in any R-value. Add a hammock later as the thing you hang for the afternoon and occasionally sleep in — which is how most hammock owners actually use one.

If you are going the other way, do it in one purchase rather than four. A hammock without straps, a tarp and an underquilt is a garden chair, and buying them one bad night at a time is how people conclude hammocks do not work.

What each system costs you in items

This is the comparison nobody publishes, and it is the one that predicts regret. A tent is one purchase plus a pad. A hammock is four purchases before it matches what the tent did on the first night.

For the tent side, the starting points are best car camping tents and best backpacking tents for beginners. For the hammock side, best camping hammocks and underquilts and tarps cover the four items in order. A set of tree straps is the one nobody should skip, because it is what the tree rules are written about.