Crochet hooks UK: ergonomic hooks and sets compared

The short answer

For a first hook, buy a 4mm, the size 23 of the 31 UK DK ball bands in our hook size guide list. Add a 5mm if you plan to use aran. At Wool Warehouse a 4mm KnitPro Waves 2.0 with a soft rubber handle is £2.99, a Clover Soft Touch is £3.99, a Prym ergonomics is £4.99 and a Clover Amour is £7.09.

If you already know you’ll crochet a lot, a nine-hook cushioned set covering 2 to 6mm cost from £21.15 (Drops Circus) to £82.00 (Clover Amour at Hobbii), or £2.35 to £9.11 a hook. Buying the same nine KnitPro Waves 2.0 sizes one by one costs £26.91, which is £8.08 less than the boxed Deluxe set, so a set isn’t automatically the cheaper route.

If your hands ache, the hooks sold as ergonomic share one thing: a thicker handle you don’t have to pinch. They differ in shape, weight and what the shaft is made of, and the table below sets those differences out.

How we compared them

We opened each product page on Wool Warehouse and Hobbii on 2 October 2026 and noted the shop’s material fields, the sizes and prices listed, and what the description says about the handle and the hook head. For sets we counted the hooks the shop lists and divided the price by that number. We added the makers’ own pages where they say more, such as Prym on what its ergonomics hooks are made of.

We haven’t tested any of these hooks ourselves. This is a comparison of specifications and prices, not a hands-on review, and every claim about comfort is the maker’s or the shop’s, quoted as theirs.

Prices move, so treat them as a snapshot. Wool Warehouse offered free UK delivery on orders over £30 on the day we checked. We left out Hobbycraft because its site blocked our checks, and Amazon sets because no price was shown to us. The Amazon sets are covered further down.

Single hooks: handle, material and price

The table sorts single hooks by handle type. Plain hooks are a straight metal, wood or plastic rod with a flattened thumb rest. Cushioned and ergonomic hooks add a thicker handle, usually rubber or soft plastic, over an aluminium shaft.

The cheapest 4mm in our table was the Drops Basic aluminium hook at £1.00, then Pony’s grey aluminium hook at £1.49. Wool Warehouse’s own Bobbin Box 4mm, not in the table, was £0.99 on the same day. Among handled hooks, KnitPro Waves 2.0 at £2.99 was the cheapest at Wool Warehouse and Hobbii’s own Easy Touch was £3.90. Tulip’s Etimo Rose was the dearest at £10.99.

The same hook can cost different amounts in different shops. A 4mm Clover Soft Touch was £3.99 at Wool Warehouse and £4.90 at Hobbii, and the Clover Amour set of nine was £59.99 and £82.00.

Hook sets: what you pay per hook

Of the 15 sets in the second table, 14 list their sizes and all 14 include both 4mm and 5mm. None of the 14 includes 3.25mm, the hook 11 of the 16 UK 4 ply ball bands in our hook size guide ask for, so if you work in 4 ply you’ll need to buy that size on its own. A Clover Soft Touch, KnitPro Waves 2.0, KnitPro Zing, Addi grip handle and Clover Amour are all sold singly in 3.25mm at Wool Warehouse.

Sets don’t always save money. Nine single Clover Amour hooks in the set’s sizes come to £63.81 at Wool Warehouse, £3.82 more than the set. Hobbii’s Easy Touch set of nine is £9.60 cheaper than the same nine singles at £34.10. But the KnitPro Zing singles come to £27.01, £2.98 under the Zing set, and the KnitPro Waves 2.0 singles £8.08 under the Deluxe set. In those cases you pay extra for the packaging: the Waves sets come in a fabric case, and the Zing listing doesn’t say what its set comes in.

Bigger isn’t always better value either. The 14-hook Waves 2.0 Grande set adds 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12mm for £14 more than the 9-hook set. If you don’t use chunky or super chunky yarn, those extra hooks may never leave the case.

Our product strip below links two Amazon sets: ZGTS, nine aluminium hooks with soft-grip handles plus a tape measure, stitch markers and sewing needles, and RealPlus, twelve hooks from 2 to 8mm with soft-grip rubber handles, markers, needles and a case. Those details are from the Amazon listings. Amazon didn’t show us a price for either on 2 October 2026, so they aren’t in the table. Work out the price per hook on the day and compare it with the sets above.

Ergonomic handles: what the makers say

Wool Warehouse describes the Clover Amour handle as shaped to fit your fingers, with a soft rubber texture so you can hold it without gripping tight. The Clover Soft Touch has a shaped plastic handle with a rubber thumb grip, which the shop calls ideal for crafters with hand pain. Tulip says the cushion grip on its Etimo hooks is easy on the hands and helps prevent fatigue, and Wool Warehouse says the Etimo Rose handle is designed to lessen hand fatigue.

The shapes differ more than the word ergonomic suggests. Addi’s aluminium hook has a ridged handle you can rotate to the angle you prefer. Addi Swing has a shaped ergonomic handle. Pony’s Easy Grip has a flat thumb rest that Wool Warehouse says suits both the knife hold and the pencil hold, though Wool Warehouse only lists it in thread sizes, 0.6 to 1.75mm. Prym’s ergonomics hooks are synthetic all the way through, shaft included, which Prym says keeps them light and warm to the touch.

Sarah Stearns, who writes the Sarah Maker crochet blog, says in its hook guide that she prefers metal-tipped hooks with thicker ergonomic handles, such as Clover Amour and Tulip Etimo, because they help her avoid the wrist pain she sometimes gets with thin metal handles. That’s one crocheter’s experience. Handle shape is personal, which is the case for buying one 4mm in a style before you buy a set.

Inline vs tapered hooks

The difference is in the throat, the part just below the head that catches the yarn. Sarah Maker’s hook guide describes an inline hook as having a straight throat and a sharp point, and a tapered hook as having a rounded point and a shaft that narrows gradually. It calls Susan Bates Silvalume the leader of the inline hook category and says Boye is a favourite brand for tapered hooks.

The guide describes inline hooks as holding the yarn securely and giving some beginners more control, and tapered hooks as gliding through stitches more easily, though some crocheters find the rounded tip harder to push into a stitch. It lists Tulip Etimo’s hook shape as hybrid, between the two. It calls the Clover Amour a tapered hook set, though the same entry gives its type as hybrid.

None of the shop pages we checked labels a hook inline or tapered. Wool Warehouse’s descriptions mention a tapered point or tip on Clover Soft Touch, Tulip Etimo Rose and Pony’s hooks. Boye and Susan Bates weren’t among the hook brands Wool Warehouse lists, and Furls sells direct from the US in dollars: US$26 for a Streamline Metal hook and US$38 for an Odyssey II on 2 October 2026, in 3.5 to 10mm.

What sizes a beginner needs

Start with the hook on your yarn’s ball band. In our hook size guide, the most common hook on UK ball bands was 4mm for DK, 5mm for aran, 3.25mm for 4 ply, 6mm for chunky and 10mm for super chunky. 23 of 31 DK bands and 13 of 20 aran bands gave exactly 4mm and 5mm.

That makes 4mm and 5mm the two hooks most UK beginners use first. Bought singly at Wool Warehouse the pair costs £2.98 in Pony aluminium, £5.98 in KnitPro Waves 2.0, £9.98 in Prym ergonomics and £14.18 in Clover Amour.

A half size either side is useful once you start checking tension. In our hook size guide, designers dropped one or two sizes for amigurumi and often used a smaller hook for borders, so a 3.5mm is a sensible third hook. Our hook size finder suggests a size from your yarn weight, and the hook size guide lists the band hook for 86 UK yarns.

Old UK sizes and US letters on the packet

Every hook in our tables is sold in millimetres, and that’s the number to buy by. Older British patterns use numbered sizes that run backwards, so a UK 8 is 4mm and a UK 6 is 5mm, and US patterns use letters, so 4mm is G-6 and 5mm is H-8. Our UK crochet hook size chart converts all three, and shows where published charts disagree.

Hobbii prints the US size beside the millimetres on its sets, for example 4 mm (G-6) and 5 mm (H-8) on Easy Touch, which matches the Craft Yarn Council figures in our chart.

Common questions

Sources and scope

• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/crochet-hooks
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/clover-amour-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/clover-soft-touch-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/tulip-etimo-rose-ergonomic-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/prym-ergonomic-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/prym-soft-handle-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/pony-crochet-hook-easy-grip-handle-with-finger-flat
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/pony-single-end-crochet-hooks-grey
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/pony-single-end-crochet-hook-bamboo-15cm-4-00mm
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/knitpro-zing-single-ended-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/knitpro-crochet-hooks-waves-2-0
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/knitpro-crochet-hooks-symfonie-2
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/addi-swing-crochet-hooks
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/addi-aluminium-crochet-hook-with-grip-handle
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/drops-basic-crochet-hook
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/clover-amour-crochet-hook-set
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/tulip-etimo-rose-crochet-hook-set
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/prym-ergonomic-crochet-hooks-set-of-5
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/knitpro-zing-single-ended-crochet-hook-set-of-9
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/knitpro-crochet-hooks-waves-2-0-set-of-9
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/knitpro-crochet-hooks-waves-2-0-set-of-14
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/addi-swing-crochet-hook-set-2mm-8mm-set-of-7
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/addi-aluminium-crochet-hook-with-grip-handle-set
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/drops-circus-soft-grip-crochet-hooks-set-of-9-pink-leatherette-case
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/bobbin-box-single-end-crochet-hooks-acrylic-14cm-set-of-9
• www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/needles-and-hooks/bobbin-box-single-end-crochet-hooks-coloured-anodised-aluminium-15cm-set-of-12
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1004079-easy-touch-crochet-hook
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1004077-easy-touch-crochet-hook-set-9-sizes-2-0-6-0-mm
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1004078-easy-touch-crochet-hook-set-11-sizes-2-0-8-0-mm
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1006143-duo-touch-crochet-hook-set-9-sizes
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1007410-cosmo-crochet-hook-set-9-sizes-wisteria
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-7045-amour-crochet-hook-set-9-sizes
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-1005249-alu-crochet-hook
• hobbii.co.uk/products/hp-6818-crochet-hook-soft-touch
• www.prym.com/en/crochet-hook-for-wool-set-prym.ergonomics
• en.tulip-japan.co.jp/knitting_needle/
• sarahmaker.com/best-crochet-hooks/
• furlscrochet.com/products/graphite-streamline-metal-crochet-hook
• furlscrochet.com/products/odyssey-ii-crochet-hook-in-hunter
• www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08TWL47XW
• www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09F9B2XTD

Sources checked 2 October 2026. Label facts come from the linked references; worked purchase examples and arithmetic are our own illustrations.