CS2 Knife Tier List: All 20 Models, Ranked by Data
A tier list is only worth reading if it says what the tiers are made of. Here is ours.
There are 20 knife models in CS2. We group them by market standing — the median of every wear-level price row in our own skins database for that model — and cross-reference two things the game files can settle outright: how many cases carry the model and how many finishes exist for it. The top group is the Butterfly Knife, Karambit and M9 Bayonet. None of this is a preference ranking, and none of it changes how the knife plays.
Most knife tier lists are somebody's taste written as if it were a fact. This one is not a taste ranking, so it will disagree with yours in places, and that is fine — a Shadow Daggers main is not wrong, the Shadow Daggers are just cheap.
What follows is built from three things that can be checked. Two of them come straight out of the game files, which is where knife models, finishes and case contents are actually defined. The third comes from our own database.
What the groups are based on
- Market standing (the ordering). Our skins database holds 584 knife entries — every model and finish, split by wear, with prices aggregated across marketplaces. For each of the 20 models we took the median of every priced wear row it has, and sorted the models by that median. Median rather than average, because a handful of extreme listings would otherwise decide the whole ranking. This is a computed figure, and it moves with the market.
- Case availability. How many cases carry the model in their special-item (gold) pool. This is a fixed property of the game files: five models appear in sixteen cases each, one model appears in a single case.
- Finish breadth. How many named finishes exist for the model. There are three tiers here and no exceptions: 24 finishes, 18, or 12 — plus a vanilla, no-finish version for every model.
We are deliberately not printing prices in this article. They are live, they move, and a number frozen into an article is a number that is wrong within a week. The current figure for any model and finish is in the knife database.
Group A — the top of the market
Three models sit clearly above everything else on median price, and the gap between them is far smaller than the gap between them and Group B. The Butterfly and Karambit are close enough that the order between them is not a stable fact; treat this group as a set, not a podium.
| Model | Cases carrying it | Finishes | First case | Last case to add supply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Butterfly Knife | 5 | 24 | Operation Breakout (2014) | Dreams & Nightmares (2021) |
| Karambit | 16 | 24 | CS:GO Weapon Case (2013) | Gamma 2 (2016) |
| M9 Bayonet | 16 | 24 | CS:GO Weapon Case (2013) | Gamma 2 (2016) |
Worth noticing what does not explain this. The Butterfly Knife is in five cases; the Karambit and M9 are in sixteen. Availability is not driving the price here — animation and silhouette are, and those are matters of taste that the market happens to agree on.
Group B — expensive, one step down
| Model | Cases carrying it | Finishes | First case | Last case to add supply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talon Knife | 4 | 18 | Horizon (2018) | Prisma 2 (2020) |
| Bayonet | 16 | 24 | CS:GO Weapon Case (2013) | Gamma 2 (2016) |
| Skeleton Knife | 3 | 18 | Shattered Web (2019) | Fever (2025) |
| Stiletto Knife | 4 | 18 | Horizon (2018) | Prisma 2 (2020) |
The Talon is the interesting entry. It is one of the four Horizon-era knives, it has the narrower 18-finish set, and it still outranks the Bayonet — a 2013 model with the full 24 finishes and sixteen source cases. That is a demand effect, not a supply one.
Group C — the middle
| Model | Cases carrying it | Finishes | First case | Last case to add supply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flip Knife | 16 | 24 | CS:GO Weapon Case (2013) | Gamma 2 (2016) |
| Nomad Knife | 3 | 18 | Shattered Web (2019) | Fever (2025) |
| Falchion Knife | 5 | 24 | Falchion (2015) | Dreams & Nightmares (2021) |
| Huntsman Knife | 5 | 24 | Huntsman (2014) | Dreams & Nightmares (2021) |
| Ursus Knife | 4 | 18 | Horizon (2018) | Prisma 2 (2020) |
| Bowie Knife | 5 | 24 | Operation Wildfire (2016) | Dreams & Nightmares (2021) |
| Classic Knife | 1 | 12 | CS20 (2019) | CS20 (2019) |
The Classic Knife is the clearest illustration that rarity and price are separate questions. It is the only model in the game whose special-item pool appears in exactly one case, and it lands mid-table. Scarce is not the same as wanted — the rarest knife question is a genuinely different one from the price question.
Group D — entry level
| Model | Cases carrying it | Finishes | First case | Last case to add supply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gut Knife | 16 | 24 | CS:GO Weapon Case (2013) | Gamma 2 (2016) |
| Paracord Knife | 3 | 18 | Shattered Web (2019) | Fever (2025) |
| Survival Knife | 3 | 18 | Shattered Web (2019) | Fever (2025) |
| Navaja Knife | 4 | 18 | Horizon (2018) | Prisma 2 (2020) |
| Shadow Daggers | 5 | 24 | Shadow (2015) | Dreams & Nightmares (2021) |
| Kukri Knife | 2 | 12 | Kilowatt (2024) | Gallery (2024) |
This is where a first knife usually comes from. The Gut Knife has the same 24 finishes and the same sixteen source cases as the Karambit and sits at the bottom of the price ranking anyway — the model itself is simply unpopular. If budget is the constraint, our cheapest knives page sorts the whole set by live price rather than by group.
Feel: what Valve has actually changed
"Which knife feels best" is the part of a tier list that is usually pure assertion. It does not have to be — Valve documents animation work in the patch notes, and knives got a great deal of it recently.
- The 28 July 2025 update began the move to AnimGraph2 and replaced all first-person animations, including deploy, firing and inspect.
- The 14 August 2025 update improved deploy and quick-inspect animations for all knives, and removed the deploy inspect delay for most weapons.
- The 26 August 2025 update fixed the Classic Knife's inspect animations, fixed the Stiletto and Butterfly deploys, made the Talon fidget-inspect more responsive, and adjusted the Flip and Bayonet inspect-after-deploy animations.
- The 8 September 2025 update shipped viewmodel animation fixes for the Bowie, Bayonet, Kukri, Nomad, Paracord and Skeleton.
- The 21 January 2026 update added higher-fidelity knife draw and inspect sounds, stopped draw sounds overlapping on fast weapon switches, and made knife impact sounds distinct for primary and alt-fire swings.
Two practical consequences. First, older "best animation" videos are describing a game that no longer exists. Second, if you last formed an opinion about a knife's deploy before mid-2025, it is worth re-forming it in-game — the inspect animations in particular are not the ones you remember.
Where the tier list stops being useful
Grouping by model answers one question and hides another. Within a single model the spread across finishes is enormous — a Doppler-family Karambit and a Safari Mesh Karambit are the same model and nothing alike as purchases. If you are actually buying, the model group is the first filter and the finish is the real decision.
Two things that cut across every group: float decides which wears a finish can even exist in, and pattern index decides how the finish lands on this particular copy. On Case Hardened that second one dominates everything else, which is what the blue gem market is about.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How many knife models are there in CS2?
- Twenty. Our skins database holds 584 knife entries, and grouping them by model gives exactly 20 distinct knives: Bayonet, Bowie, Butterfly, Classic, Falchion, Flip, Gut, Huntsman, Karambit, Kukri, M9 Bayonet, Navaja, Nomad, Paracord, Shadow Daggers, Skeleton, Stiletto, Survival, Talon and Ursus. The same 20 appear in the game files.
- What is this tier list actually based on?
- Three measurable things, all stated on the page: where each model sits in our own price data (the median of every wear-level price row we hold for it), how many cases carry that model in their special-item pool, and how many finishes exist for it. None of the grouping is a personal preference.
- Does the knife you equip affect gameplay?
- No. What changes is cosmetic and presentational — the viewmodel, the deploy and inspect animations, and the draw and impact sounds. Valve has re-authored those repeatedly through the AnimGraph2 transition, so how a knife feels in hand has genuinely changed over 2025 and 2026, but no model gives you an advantage.
- Why is the Butterfly Knife at the top and not the Karambit?
- Because that is how our price data falls out, not because it is the better knife. The Butterfly and the Karambit sit close together at the top of the median ranking with the M9 Bayonet just behind. The gap between those three is much smaller than the gap between them and everything else.
- Which knife models are hardest to find?
- On availability rather than price, the Classic Knife appears in the special-item pool of a single case and the Kukri Knife in two. By contrast the Bayonet, Flip Knife, Gut Knife, Karambit and M9 Bayonet each appear in sixteen. Availability and price are separate axes and they do not line up.
- What is a vanilla knife?
- A knife with no finish applied — listed simply as, for example, "★ Karambit". The game files carry a vanilla item for every one of the 20 models, and several cases include it in their special-item pool alongside the finished versions. Our skins database indexes finishes, so vanilla knives are not in the price tables below.