Hello, I am a 22-year old Canadian Counter-Strike player. I have played Counter-Strike on and off over the past 9 years and have accumulated over 4,000 hours of playtime. I have competed in varies Counter-Strike organizations such as CAL, CEVO, and ESEA. I currently hold over 500 competitive matchmaking wins. My highest competitive matchmaking rank is Legendary Eagle Master.

The guide has been created to inform new and intermediate players how well CS:GO weapons stack up against one another in higher competitive play. Advance players may find this guide helpful or reassuring. These rankings can be considered fairly accurate in casual play when weapons with lower armor penetration and magazine clip size are ranked slightly lower because players always have armor in casual and the team size is generally larger than five players per team.

In competitive Counter-Strike deciding between two weapons can be very situational. For this guide we do not define a specific situation or consider the price of the weapons since we are assuming both weapons have already been purchased. Instead we classify the weapon rankings by which is "better in more situations". We keep in mind we can give the weapons we pick up to a teammate next round if we survive. Any weapon found above another weapon in the tables below is classified as "better in more situations", AWP being the best primary and Tec-9 being the best secondary.

Example 1: I would drop a Famas for a Galil AR, AUG, etc. in more situations.
Example 2: I would not drop a P250 for a Desert Eagle, Dual Berettas, etc. in more situations.

In competitive Counter-Strike deciding between primary weapons can be very situational. For instance, retaking a bombsite is often easier to accomplish with an AK-47 rather than an AWP. Other times you may want to drop an AWP for an AK-47 because your team already has enough snipers. Nonetheless, the table below ranks all primary weapons in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive by which is "better in more situations". AWP being the best primary weapon and the Sawed-Off being the worst primary weapon.


*Weapons rarely seen in competitive play at higher ranks.

^The P90 has the potential to surpass the Famas and Galil in lower ranked play due to the fact that players at these ranks are not able to handle being overwhelmed by the devastating fire rate and magazine clip size of the P90. This is why the P90 is infamously known as the Pro90.

Note: The Scar-20 is almost strictly better than the G3SG1. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB41bYDxmoY

In competitive Counter-Strike deciding between pistols is much less situational than deciding between primary weapons. Generally you will always find yourself upgrading your pistol without thinking much about it unless you are short on ammunition.


*Weapons rarely seen in competitive play at higher ranks.

**I would consider the USP-S better for holding sites and the Glock better for taking sites and therefore dropping one for another does not happen often.

Note: I consider the USP-S to be a better starting pistol than the P2000 because the USP-S has less recoil than the P2000 and the USP-S is silenced. The extra bullets the P2000 provides is not worth the trade-off in my opinion

Although the weapon prices are not considered in our situation, I believe it is still worthwhile to show the correlation of the weapon's rank and its price. The line graphs below shows the weapons in order from lowest rank to highest rank.

Please take the time to like and favorite this guide if you found it to be helpful.
Any and all thoughtful comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you.