EddHomes vs Honbuty: Cherry Pitter Compared

Short answer: if you're pitting more than a quart of cherries at a time, the EddHomes 7-in-1 wins. It clears the pit in one squeeze more consistently, it handles the messy overripe cherries at the bottom of the basket without gumming up, and it doubles as a jam remover and small-fruit pitter for the rest of the summer. The Honbuty pitter is fine for a handful of cherries on top of a fruit salad, but it starts to show its limits once you're working through a real harvest.

I picked both of these apart, literally, over three separate canning weekends this summer with cherries off my own tree and a flat I bought at the farmers market when the tree ran dry early. I'm a nurse, not a food blogger, so my standard is simple: does the tool save me time on my one day off, or does it just look good in a drawer. Here's how they actually stacked up.

I should say upfront that I bought both of these with my own money before I ever thought about writing a word about them. My tree gives me somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds of sour cherries most summers, and after the third year of scrubbing dried cherry juice off a wooden spoon handle I finally admitted I needed a real tool instead of improvising with a chopstick. That's the lens this whole comparison comes from, a working nurse trying to get a harvest processed before her next twelve-hour shift, not a lab test.

	EddHomes	Honbuty Cherry Pitter
Price (typical)	$12.59	$8.99
Pitting Speed (avg. cherries/minute)	38-42	20-24
Mess & Splatter Containment	Enclosed chamber, minimal splatter	Open plunger, moderate splatter
Build Material	Reinforced stainless steel core with silicone grip	Painted stamped steel, plastic handle
Multi-Fruit Versatility	7-in-1: cherries, olives, small plums, jam maker attachment	Cherries only
Batch Capacity Before Reload	Holds cherry in guided chamber, fast reload	Single-cherry manual placement, slower reload
Cleanup	Rinses clean, dishwasher-top-rack safe	Hand wash recommended, paint can chip
Amazon Rating (reviews)	4.5 stars (2,253 reviews)	3.9 stars (612 reviews)
Portability	Compact, travels well for market-stand canning days	Bulkier hinge, less pocket-friendly

Where EddHomes Wins

The single biggest difference is the chamber design. The EddHomes tool cradles the cherry in a small enclosed cup before the plunger comes down, so the pit gets pushed straight through a guide hole instead of squirting out sideways onto my shirt. When I timed myself pitting two pounds of Bing cherries, I cleared the whole batch in just under four minutes with the EddHomes. The Honbuty took closer to seven minutes for the same batch, and I had juice on the counter, the floor, and once, memorably, on my glasses.

The 7-in-1 label isn't just marketing filler either. Along with cherries, I used the EddHomes to pit a jar of Kalamata olives for a tapenade and to core the pits out of some small Italian plums I was turning into a quick compote. The Honbuty is built for cherries and cherries only, so it earns its lower price but gives up a lot of flexibility. For someone who cans several kinds of stone fruit through the season the way I do, having one tool that handles most of it matters more than saving four dollars.

There's also a hand fatigue difference that only shows up after the first hundred cherries or so. The EddHomes has a wider silicone-wrapped grip that spreads the squeeze force across my whole palm, and after a full fifteen-pound harvest session my hand wasn't nearly as sore as it was the year I used a cheaper single-cherry tool with a thin metal handle. If you're doing this for twenty minutes on a Saturday morning, grip comfort barely matters. If you're doing it for two hours because your tree dumped its whole crop at once, it matters a lot.

Durability has held up too. The EddHomes has been through two full canning seasons in my kitchen now, dishwasher and all, and the spring still snaps back with the same tension it had out of the box. I've had cheaper single-use gadgets go soft or bend after one summer of hard use, and this one hasn't shown any of that yet, which matters when you're only using a tool six weeks out of the year and expecting it to still work the next July.

Where Honbuty Wins

I want to be fair here because the Honbuty isn't a bad tool, it's just a narrower one. It's lighter in the hand and the hinge sits a little lower, which some people with smaller hands or arthritis in their thumbs might actually find easier to squeeze for short bursts. If your cherry habit is a bowl of fruit salad twice a summer and nothing more, the lower price point and the lighter squeeze action are a reasonable tradeoff.

The Honbuty also comes apart into fewer pieces, which sounds minor but matters if you're the type who loses small parts in a junk drawer. There's less to track when you put it away in October and pull it back out the following June. I didn't lose a single piece of either tool over the summer, but I did misplace the EddHomes' jam attachment for about two weeks before I found it in the wrong drawer, so this is a real point in Honbuty's favor for anyone who's not naturally organized in the kitchen.

Price matters too, and I won't pretend it doesn't. If you're buying this as a small gift add-on, tucking it into an Easter basket for a niece who likes to bake, or grabbing something quick before a potluck, the lower cost of the Honbuty is genuinely fine for that kind of light, occasional use. Not every kitchen tool needs to be the heavy-duty version.

The Cleanup Difference Nobody Mentions

Everyone talks about pitting speed, but almost nobody talks about what happens after the pitting is done. The EddHomes has fewer crevices for cherry juice to hide in, and the whole thing rinses clean under the tap in about ten seconds. I've also run it through the top rack of my dishwasher a handful of times with no rust and no discoloration on the stainless parts. The Honbuty's painted finish, on the other hand, started showing small chips near the hinge after about a month of regular hand washing, and once paint starts flaking near food, I stop trusting the tool no matter how cheap it was.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because cherry pitting is a sticky job by nature. A tool that's a pain to clean tends to get used less, or worse, gets left in the sink overnight where the juice dries into a stain that never fully comes out. I noticed I reached for the EddHomes more often through the season simply because I knew cleanup would take seconds, not because I consciously decided it was the better tool.

How I Actually Tested Both

My tree is an old sour cherry, the kind that ripens all at once over about ten days in early July, so I always end up with more fruit than I can process in one sitting. That's the exact situation where a slow pitter becomes a real problem, because cherries that sit overnight start to soften and the pits get messier to remove the next day. I ran both tools on fresh-picked fruit the same afternoon and again two days later on fruit that had been sitting in the fridge, which is a more honest test than pitting perfect, firm cherries straight off the branch.

On day-old, slightly softer cherries, the gap between the two tools widened. The Honbuty's open plunger design struggled to get a clean pit removal on softer fruit, and I ended up with more mashed cherries and more pit fragments left behind, which is exactly what you don't want when you're about to can a batch of preserves. The EddHomes handled the softer fruit almost as cleanly as the firm ones, which told me the guided chamber is doing real work, not just looking nice in product photos.

I also ran a third, less scientific test: I handed both tools to my husband on a Sunday and asked him to pit a pound of cherries with each one, no instructions beyond how to load the fruit. He finished the EddHomes batch almost two minutes faster than the Honbuty batch and said the EddHomes felt more obvious to use without me explaining anything. That matters if the tool is going to get passed around a kitchen during a canning weekend when everyone pitches in.

My oldest niece helped me with a batch too, since she's been begging to learn how I put up cherries every summer. She's twelve and not especially strong-handed yet, and she picked up the EddHomes faster than the Honbuty, mostly because the guided chamber makes it obvious where the cherry goes and there's less guesswork about aim. The Honbuty took her a few tries to line up correctly before the pit actually popped out clean, and a couple of her early attempts left half-crushed cherries that were only good for the compost bucket. If you're planning to make cherry pitting a family activity instead of a solo chore, that learning curve is worth factoring in.

Over the three weekends, I put roughly eighteen pounds of cherries through the EddHomes total, split across a batch of canned preserves, a cherry pie filling I froze in quart bags, and a small jar of brandied cherries I gave away at Christmas. That's a real season's worth of use, not a one-afternoon test, and it's the kind of volume where a tool's weaknesses tend to show up if they're going to.

The real test isn't pitting perfect cherries off the branch, it's pitting the softer ones from the bottom of the basket two days later. That's where one of these tools quietly falls apart.

Who Should Buy Which

If you're canning, freezing, or making jam from a real harvest, whether that's your own tree or a flat you bought to preserve for winter, get the EddHomes. The speed difference alone will save you real time on a hot afternoon, and the multi-fruit versatility means it earns its place in the drawer year-round instead of sitting untouched eleven months a year. If your cherry needs are occasional, a topping for oatmeal here, a garnish there, the Honbuty will do the job at a lower price and you probably won't notice the slower pace for such small batches.

For anyone doing serious canning season prep like I do every July, though, the EddHomes is the one I'd hand my sister if she asked me which to buy, and it's the one that's stayed in my kitchen drawer instead of getting boxed up and passed along to a neighbor at the end of the season. If you're on a tight budget and just want something for the occasional bowl of fruit, I understand the pull of saving a few dollars, but for anyone with a real harvest ahead of them, the time and mess you'll save with the EddHomes pays for that price difference the very first time you use it.