Best Budget Camping Tent

Over the past few years, hiking and camping has become a much more prominent pastime, and with that we are seeing some new competitors entering the market. Amongst these newcomers is CORE Equipment. Our favorite amongst its sizable lineup is their 6-person straight wall cabin tent with screen room. At a price of around $200 (or $140 if purchased through Costco), CORE would appear to be making a run at Coleman in the best-bang-for-your-buck arena. It boasts massive interior space, decent materials and build quality, and a spacious room at the front for taking in views. However, it is far from simple to pitch and the screen room offers very little protection from the elements. The highly appealing price point for the CORE paired with its many positive qualities were enough for us to name it the winner of Best Budget Camping Tent.

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See Our Best Camping Tent Review 2021 HERE!

Over the past few years, hiking and camping have become a much more prominent pastime, and with that, we are seeing some new competitors entering the market. Amongst these newcomers is CORE Equipment, which offers a range of outdoor gear that includes nearly two dozen tents, ranging from 4-person dome tents to 12-person lighted instant cabin tents. Our favorite amongst this lineup is their 6-person straight wall cabin tent with a screen room. At a price of around $200—or $140 if purchased through Costco, which comes in green rather than orange—CORE would appear to be making a run at Coleman in the best-bang-for-your-buck arena. But can they really take down the king of low-cost camping? We were determined to find out.

Comfort

One of the reasons we loved this tent was that it’s shockingly roomy. Its 10’x9’ dimensions give it 90sqft of space in the tent body, with a peak height of 6’4”. This ties with the Limestone 6P for second-highest headroom, just behind the North Face Wawona 6 and NEMO Wagontop 6, which beat it out by 4 inches. However, it’s worth noting that the Limestone 6P has seven fewer square feet, and the Wawona 6, which has five fewer square feet, is much more dome-style, so the nearly vertical walls of the CORE 6-person Cabin Tent add up to a great deal more interior volume.

The CORE can only be entered from one side, but there are two half doors at this entryway. We would have preferred a secondary entrance on the back wall or the versatile quad-zippered doors like we found on the Marmot, but the CORE’s setup still allows easier access for multiple parties to access their sleep areas on opposing sides without having to navigate around other people’s gear. Speaking of gear, there are four moderately-sized stash pockets near the bottom corners of the interior, along with a mesh basket that can be attached to the ceiling for lanterns and the like.

The CORE’s five windows allow for loads of ventilation, and if even that’s not enough, there are deployable floor vents on the side of the tent. These vents will need to be staked out in order to be deployed, which is a bit more cumbersome than the velcro vents found on other cabin tents. We also found that we needed to stake down these vents to keep the side walls fully extended, which was a bit inconvenient.

Rather than a pure vestibule, the CORE sports what they called a “screen room” with mesh front doors and partial cover with the rainfly attached. At 50sqft, this is a very roomy space that’s more than half the size of the tent itself; you could easily set up a table and a couple of chairs here for morning coffee while you purvey your campsite. The mesh doors can also be cinched back to make for a large entryway and awning, and you will need to stake out the front corners to erect this room.

Ease of Setup

The CORE 6-person Cabin Tent comes with a total of 9 poles, which is quite a few more than any of our other tents. There are six poles that make up the main tent body. The first two poles you’ll need to grab are the roof poles, which crisscross from corner to corner and are threaded through sleeves. These are held together by a ribbon that will need to be tied in a bow, a system that was a bit more low-tech than we would have liked. Once that’s assembled, four poles connect the roof corners to the floor using angled hubs at the top and a pin-and-ring system at the bottom. The hubs are quite beefy and simple to connect, but the pin-and-ring system is a bit outdated for our liking.

The last three poles are for the screened room and follow a similar process as the tent body. One pole will be fed through the awning and then connect to the two base poles using the same combination of hub and pin-and-ring system. The pins for the screen room are actually shared with the front corners of the tent, which can be a bit awkward but not overwhelming. You’ll then need to stake out the front corners of the screen room to pull it open.

There’s quite a mixture of pros and cons with the CORE set up system. Some of the more antiquated technology makes it a bit awkward for just one person to put this together, since one side may collapse while you erect the other side without a second person to hold the poles in place. The screen room is also an integral part of this tent, so it’s not an optional include if you feel like just putting together the bare minimum. However, the color-coding makes it easy to differentiate the poles, and with just a bit of practice, this tent should take no more than 15 minutes to erect. All packed up, the CORE weighs 24lb, making it one of the heavier tents in our review but within the acceptable range for 6-person tents. Its travel bag, which measures 30”x12.5”x10”, has a large zipper that extends across the top and down one side, making it reasonably easy to fit all the contents inside, but it can be a bit tricky if you don’t make an effort at eliminating any extra air.

Weatherproofing

There is a partial rainfly included with the CORE that covers the roof and most of the screen room, with an overhang that should feed rain away from the windows as long as it’s not too horizontal. If things get a bit windy, you’ll want to zip up those windows to keep things dry inside. The rainfly, which is made of 68D polyester using CORE’s H20 Block Technology, slips over the top of the tent with relative ease and connects to the rings at the corner of the tent using thick plastic hooks. On a warm summer night, you could easily skip this step and enjoy a view of the stars through the mesh roof, but this mesh roof also allows for a decent amount of ventilation if you’d prefer the additional privacy granted by the fly.

The same H20 Block Technology in the rainfly is also used for the tent body, so it should be fully water-repellent with all the windows zippered shut. The CORE has a bathtub floor that keeps any groundwater from seeping in at the bottom. It’s worth noting that the screen room is not what we’d call amply protected from the elements. Any gear stashed close to the interior door will likely stay dry, but beyond that, expect anything stashed outside to get a bit damp.

Durability

The fabric making up the CORE 6-person Cabin Tent is quite rugged; it has a thick 115gsm polyethylene floor and 68D polyester in both the tent body and rainfly. The roof poles, which are made of fiberglass, are pretty thin but reinforced with steel connectors, and the sections easily feed into one other with the internal rope system. The main poles are all steel with metal connector cables, which we were very pleased to find. Many bargain tents will opt for fiberglass poles only, which have a tendency to splinter or crack completely, and even aluminum poles can bend under extensive pressure. The steel poles on the CORE felt incredibly strong, even if they do make up 9lb of the tent’s total packed weight. We would have liked a footprint included with this tent, but we were able to supplement this with a rugged 10’x10’ tarp for less than $20. We also weren’t very impressed with the included stakes, which actually suffered a few bends after a couple of camping trips, so you may want to switch these out for a higher-quality set that is better designed to handle several seasons of mallet strikes.

Other Features

At its core, the CORE is a budget tent that passes up many of the bells and whistles. Much of its value is rooted in the quality of its craftsmanship, which we will always prefer over novelty features that unnecessarily inflate the price. However, for those who like to bring along some electronics on their outdoor adventures, or even bring a luxury air mattress that requires a power source to be inflated, there is an e-port in the front-left corner that enables you to feed cords inside the tent.

The Bottom Line

The CORE 6-person Cabin Tent w/Screen Room is an impressive addition to the budget camping scene and is definitely giving Coleman a run for its money. It boasts massive interior space, decent materials and build quality, and a spacious room at the front for taking in views. However, it is far from simple to pitch, and the screen room offers very little protection from the elements. The highly appealing price point for the CORE paired with its many positive qualities were enough for us to name it the winner of Best Budget Camping Tent.

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