Have you ever been camping in the woods? It’s all fun and games until you find yourself in need of a toilet.
If you have ever used a shovel to dig a small hole for your business instead of using a portable camping toilet, you can probably relate. Even the most clumsy portable toilet can be a luxury compared to squatting in the woods, or god forbid, hanging your business over a boat.
In fact, portable toilets are pretty useful when you go camping, boating or any other place that doesn’t have a clean and fixed toilet. Portable toilets for camping are not only convenient and inexpensive, but they also give you privacy and an enormous amount of decency when you want to use the toilet outdoors.
To make the choice of which portable toilet for camping is the best, we’ve created a Top5er list with the 5 absolutely best toilets in 2020.
Best Camping Toilets Of 2020 – Top5er list
We’ve compiled a list of the most popular portable camping toilets for camping based on quite a few factors. Starting with the capacity, weight and flush number of each toilet and up to how popular they are and how much does a camping toilet cost. Here is the list of best outdoor toilets:
| Portable Camping Toilet | SereneLife Portable Toilet | Luggable Loo | Porta Potti Curve Toilet | Zimmer Comfort Portable Toilet | Camco Standard Travel Toilet |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |
|
| Capacity: | 5.3 gallons | 5 gallons | 5.5 gallons | 5 gallons | 5.3 gallons |
| Weight: | 11.25 lbs | 3 lbs | 10 lbs | 5.56 lbs | 10.8 lbs |
| Tank size: | 50+ flushes | No flush | 70 flushes | 50 flushes | 40 flushes |
| Quality: | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ |
| Price: | $$$$ | $$$$ | $$$$ | $$$$ | $$$$ |
| Rating: | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ | ★★★★★ |
| Top5er status: | Best Overall | Best Budget | Best High-End | Easy Carry | Golden Standard |
| Availability: | Check Price | Check Price | Check Price | Check Price | Check Price |
How To Choose The Best Portable Toilet?
Let’s check what to actually look at when choosing the perfect portable camping toilet. We’ll also cover what types of movable toilets there are and what are the problems you can encounter (and how to fix them quickly).
Let’s start off with the overall summary you can quickly check in the infographics below to get a bit of a grip on what to look for when buying a portable toilet:
1 – SereneLife Outdoor Camping Toilet Review (Best Of All)
When it comes to outdoor toilets, the overall best pick is SereneLife and it’s quite easy to see why just from the picture. It is robust and durable; these are two very important qualities when it comes to portable toilets for camping where you need for a toilet to withstand dirt, rain and other nasty problems.
As you can see from the list of best camping toilets, they all have 5-6 gallon capacity. What makes SereneLife an outdoor toilet better than all the rest is the flushing technique and convenience.
How to flush a portable toilet? Most of them have a flushing method but the SereneLife toilet is the easiest and more reliable to use. You can see the flush nozzle of the outdoor toilet that you just press like a normal toilet button and start the flush.
Being above 11 pounds, it is the heaviest reviewed toilet for camping. Well, how heavy are the best camping toilets for outdoor? About 10 pounds is the short answer. We’ll see a toilet that weighs only 3 pounds and is very movable. However, when designing a camping toilet, you really need to have two separate parts – the water tank and the bowl, along with the sealing waste valve, waste tang tube with cap and so on. All of these add weight to the camping toilet making it a bit less portable but much more comfortable and useful.
The SereneLife toilet holds 5.3 gallons in the portable toilet water tank which is enough for more than 50 flushes. Oh, and just look at the reviews on Amazon. Have you seen a product that would have a 4.9/5 star rating? Pretty much everybody loves the reliability of the SereneLife toilet.
How much does the best portable camping toilet cost? About $100. If you’re spending $300+ for a tent, then $100 for doing your business conveniently shouldn’t be a problem at all. You can check the price of the portable toilet here:
2 – Luggable Camping Loo Review (Cheapest Outdoor Toilet + Low Weight)
At first sight, Luggable Loo looks pretty much like a bucket you do your business in. And guess what, it’s exactly that! With an addition of a toilet seat, the Luggable Loo is the cheapest camping toilet on the list.
Admittedly, it looks like a bucket but this portable toilet bucket is the only one of all camping toilets that has more than 1,000 positive reviews on Amazon. And most of them are very positive at that! What makes this bucket with toilet seat the most talked-about outdoor toilet?
It’s simple. It’s light. It’s cheap. That’s right, you literally get what you see. A 5-gallon bucket you can do your business in.
Being light is very important for a portable toilet. In fact, how portable a toilet pretty much comes down to size and weight, and this bucket with toilet seat weighs only 3 pounds. Which camping toilet is perfect for camping or fishing? Well, Luggable Loo is one strong choice.
The Luggable Loo doesn’t have the option to flush. Do all camping toilets flush? Some do, some don’t, but the ones who don’t are easier to clean and less can go wrong with them.
But the real reason everybody loves Luggable Loo is the price. How much should you spend on a camping toilet? You can spend $200 for a luxury version but the Luggable Loo is pretty much the cheapest portable toilet you can get. You’ll need $40 for one of these and you don’t have to worry much about it breaking down. For this price, the camping toilet is pretty much expendable.
If you want a simple and light toilet for fishing, camping or hiking, you can check the price below:
3 – Porta Potti Portable Toilet Review (The Luxurious One)
You can even find some luxury even as far as outdoor toilets are concerned. The Porta Potti toilet is a choice for everybody who wants to go to the loo at a camping trip the same way you do at home. The Porta Potti is basically a mini standard toilet. It comes with a big 5.5-gallon waste tank and a 4-gallon water tank that is enough for about 70 flushes.
If you’re looking for an RV portable toilet or for longer trips, the Porta Potti will do the job. The design of the outdoor toilet is quite impressive – it’s sleek and modern, and it even comes with comfortable seat height.
The height of a camping toilet seat is on average quite lower than for an ordinary toilet (even below 13 inches). Porta Potti offers a considerable 15-inch height from the floor to the seat.
When you’re asking yourself what is the best portable toilet for camping, RVs, vans and so on, you have your answer. The great thing about this high-end outdoor toilet is that using it feels like you’re at home in your own bathroom. It even has a compartment for a toilet roll.
How do you carry the camping toilet around? That’s very important because you don’t want to just touch one of these all over the place. As you can see from the image on the left, the Porta Potti has a handle between the water tank and toilet bowl. That’s how you can pick it up and carry it wherever you want. Nonetheless, be aware that despite weighing 10 pounds, it can weigh more than 30 pounds when fully filled with water.
It’s also easy to clean it. We go through the section on how to clean and how to dispose of the camping toilet waste further on. For example, some RV or camping places have a designated ‘dump space’ where you can empty a camping toilet. Cleaning it can be a messy business but the curly edges and few joints Porta Potti has makes cleaning an outdoor toilet easier. On top of that, it has a rotating pour-out spout that’s useful when you’re emptying the portable toilet water tank – you won’t get the backsplashes.
Sealed valve: it is golden. Portable toilets can start to give away a bad odor, especially if left for a few days in the sun, as you might imagine. The Porta Potti has a special sealed valve that prevents bad odor from spreading. Like all high-end toilets, it’s leak-proof which further prevents odor from spreading from the camping toilet.
Being a high-end toilet, it also has the highest price. Nonetheless, for $30 or so extra you’re buying the most expensive portable toilet but also the most comfortable and best-looking one. Check the current price here:
4 – Zimmer Comfort Camping Toilet Review (Easiest To Carry)
Zimmer Comfort is a small and practical outdoor toilet for travel and camping. It has two separate parts made out of polyethylene – the 5-gallon waste tank that you can easily empty, and the 3-gallon freshwater holding tank.
The 15″ high x 14″ wide x 14.5″ dimensions make it one of the smallest camping toilets that you can normally seat on. Sure, there are some even smaller toilets for hiking, but doing your business sitting on those feels like trying to hit a paper cup with your business.
A great thing about the Zimmer camping toilet is that it can both be neatly packed for trips and camping, and, above all, it is light. While an average toilet for camping has a weigh of about 10 pounds, the Zimmer Comfort toilet weighs less than 6 pounds. You can pick it up quite easily, even if it’s filled with 3 gallons of water.
Here is how it works in 3 easy steps:
As you can see from the toilet photos, the upper compartment holds the water and uses a sophisticated flush to use as little as possible water to flush. The lower compartment holds the waste and it can be cleaned out quite easily with some portable toilet cleaning chemicals and water.
The key feature of the Zimmer Comfort toilet is the sealing waste valve that is a must for all decent camping toilets. The seal makes a permanent barrier between the upper compartment and the lower waste compartment. This, in turn, keeps the waste and the bad odor trapped in the lower compartment. If you worry about the stink from the portable toilet, your best bet to keep down the odor is by buying a camping toilet with a sealing waste valve.
To even further keep down the smell when you’re on vacation and use an outdoor toilet on a daily basis, you can use deodorizing tablets that sanitize the smell of the toilet even further.
You can buy one of the smallest outdoor toilets below and add the deodorizing tablets as well:
5 – Camco Standard Travel Toilet Review (Standard Toilet For Outdoors)
There is nothing special about the Camco Standard toilet for camping. And that is exactly the point! The Camco Standard has all the standard specifications that a good camping toilet should have.
What is the portable toilet made out of? The standard polyethylene hard plastic, of course. It has all that an outdoor toilet needs; a 5.3-gallon waste tank that is well-connected to the 2.5-gallon water flush tank. You can get something like 40 flushes from that 2.5-gallon camping toilet tank.
The upper water part of the toilet bowl is separated from the lower waste tank by a valve lock that seals perfectly and takes care of the odor. On top of that, it prevents leakage from the Camco portable toilet. To keep the two parts together, the connection is reinforced with side latches as well.
What are the dimensions of a standard camping toilet? 15.5″ x 14″ x 16″, which is larger than a small toilet for camping (#4 pick) but smaller than the high-end toilet for the entire family (#3 pick).
Nonetheless, if you need a sturdy-looking and reliable toilet for camping, RV or a boat, and you’re not picky about how it looks like, the Camco toilet is a suitable option: