Reviewing HydraPak Breakaway From a Backpacking Perspective
Can these hard sided filter bottles take on Sawyer + Smartwater?
The new-for-2025 HydraPak Breakaway Filter Bottle is designed for mountain biking, but secretly great for hiking and backpacking too. This hard-sided bottle is lightweight, well-balanced, front-mountable, easy to drink from, and filters water quickly; a distinct user-experience upgrade over the much more popular Smartwater + Sawyer filter combo. This review reflects our experience after a four day backpacking trip on Oregon’s Rogue River Trail, and compares Breakaway to other popular backpacking water filtration, treatment, and storage systems. Shop now.
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HydraPak Breakaway Filter Bottle Stats
- Price: $46 | $48
- Volume: 600ml | 880 ml
- Weight: 114g/4.0 oz | 139g/4.9oz
- Materials: TPU Bottle, Hollow Fiber Filter
- Filter Lifespan: 1500L
- Pair With: HydraPak Seeker 2L Bladder, CNOC VectoX2L Bladder
- Compare To: Katadyn BeFree AC, Sawyer Squeeze, HydraPak UltraFlask Filter, LifeStraw Peak Squeeze
- Pros: Relatively lightweight. Hard sided. Self-burping. High flow rate. Not a smartwater bottle. Cleans with shake, swish, or back flush. 600ml unit is perfect for front mounting. Sunken filter is less top heavy and easy to drink from.
- Cons: Shorter lifespan than Sawyer. Not the lightest possible. Expensive. Can spill a bit while drinking.
Pro Tip: hikers should remove the muck guard, which dangles awkwardly, adds an extra step, and isn’t necessary if not mounted on a bike.
Compare to more great options in our guide to soft flask filter bottles. Front-mount the 600ml version in a shoulder strap water bottle holder.
Expanded Pros: The Good Stuff
Hard-sided: Lightweight hard sided bottles that fit filters are rare, highly desirable, and an important component of a complete backcountry water treatment and storage system. The ideal system features 1-2 hard sided bottles because they’re impenetrably durable, and compared to soft flasks, are easier to drink from one handed, less floppy, and stand upright with good balance. That being said, you don’t want only hard-sided bottles, because the drawback of hard sidedness is that it’s not collapsible. Notably, this bottle is much easier to use and highly preferable to hybrid hard-soft bottles like CNOC Vesica and HydraPak Flux.
Self Burping: One of the best and most unique things about the HydraPak breakaway is that, unlike Smartwater + Sawyer Squeeze, you do not need to unscrew the filter periodically to allow air back in. While drinking, all you have to do is temporarily stop squeezing or sucking water out, and it will immediately re-inflate to its resting state. This makes chugging much easier.
High Flow Rate: While all filters have a high flow rate at first that decreases over time, we can confirm that HydraPak breakaway definitely starts out pretty fast. The claimed rate is 1L per minute.
Easy to Drink From: Unlike Sawyer, which protrudes awkwardly off the top of a Smartwater, the filter of HydraPak Breakaway is sunken into the bottle. This drastically improves the user experience, and makes the entire unit shorter, more wieldy, and less top heavy.
Easy to Clean and Flush: Like Katadyn BeFree AC and HydraPak UltraFlask Filter, the Breakaway can be easily cleaned in the field using a shake and swish method. But unlike BeFree, it can also be backflushed. And unlike the gigantic, clunky syringes that come with Sawyer Squeeze, the HydraPak Breakaway comes with a 28mm threaded backflush tap which weighs only a few grams. It can be easily added to your knickknack kit and used to improve flow rate whenever shake and swish isn’t getting the job done.
Relatively Lightweight: The HydraPak Breakaway bottle filter combo is reasonably lightweight, coming in about an ounce lighter than Smartwater + Sawyer, but an ounce heavier than Katadyn BeFree and two ounces heavier than Aquamira.
Not Smartwater: Collectively, we need a better solution to ultralight hard sided bottles, because despite their incredible efficacy, choosing Smartwater means supporting the wasteful single use water bottle industry. Another possible downside to Smartwater bottles is that they aren’t designed for long term use and nobody has a full grasp on the long term health consequences (nanoplastics much?). The simple fact that HydraPak Breakaway is a viable, reusable, lightweight hard sided bottle that is not a Smartwater bottle is a major pro.
Expanded Cons: The Not Good Stuff
Shorter Lifespan: As filtration lifespan goes, HydraPak Breakaway is rated to 1500L, which is shorter than its competitors like Katadyn Befree AC and LifeStraw Peak Squeeze, and much shorter than Sawyer Squeeze.
Not the Lightest Possible: This bottle filter combo is based on a wide lid opening that involves excess hard-sided plastic that adds weight. The system is heavier than Katadyn BeFree (and its clones), and heavier than Aquamira pre-mix + ultralight bottle. While it’s lighter weight than a Smartwater + Sawyer combo, it is less reliable and users may feel compelled to carry two filters for redundancy in order to replace a single Sawyer, which ultimately makes it heavier.
Can Spill a Bit of Water: I can’t figure out exactly when and how this happens, but my collective experience while drinking out of a HydraPak Breakaway is that a bit more water will spill onto my hands than if I was using a Sawyer, BeFree, or drinking pre-treated water out of a bottle.
Standard Drawbacks: Freezing will damage the hollow fiber filter. Hard sided bottles are not collapsible. Slower to drink from than chemically treated water. etc.
HydraPak Breakaway vs its Competitors
Sawyer Squeeze + Smartwater vs HydraPak Breakaway
Compared to Sawyer Squeeze + Smartwater, the HydraPak Breakaway is a much more user friendly filtration system, but by no means strictly superior. The Breakaway is lighter weight, better shaped, better balanced, easier to drink from with one hand, faster flow rate, self burping, and does not finance the single-use water bottle industry. However, Sawyer Squeeze + Smart Water is much longer lasting, less expensive, and proven most reliable (no redundancy required). Another advantage is that the Sawyer Squeeze can mount to a 2L bladder, while the larger opening of BreakAway makes it less versatile.
Katadyn BeFree AC or HydraPak UltraFlask vs HydraPak Breakaway
Compared to soft flask filters like Katadyn BeFree AC and HydraPak UltraFlask, the HydraPak Breakaway bottle stands upright and is easier to handle (less floppy), puncture proof, but a bit heavier and non-collapsible. All of these systems use extremely similar filter technology, except the HydraPak filters have an added advantaged of back flush cleaning, while the Katadyn offers a secondary activated carbon filter for taste improvement. Both the HydraPak Breakway 600 and Katadyn BeFree 500 or HydraPak UltraFlask 500 can be easily front-mounted in a shoulder strap pocket. See more in our guide to the best soft flask filters.
HydraPak Flux or CNOC Vesica Soft-Hard-Hybrid Bottles + 42mm Filter Head vs HydraPak Breakaway
Compared to soft-hard sided hybrid bottles like HydraPak Flux and CNOC Vesica, the HydraPak Breakaway comes out looking pretty advantaged. The bottom line is that Flux and Vesica don’t balance or sit upright well, and are very floppy and awkward to handle and drink from. The Breakaway is also more durable. The primary advantage to Vesica and Flux is that they’re more collapsible, but still kind of bulky and inferior for mass storage and collapsibility than 2L bladder.
Choose The Hydrapak Breakaway Filter Bottle if
Choose It If:
- You like drinking straight out of a squeeze filter
- You value the benefits of a hard sided bottle
- You don’t want to support Smartwater and the single-use industry
- You want to front mount a small filter (the 600ml Breakaway is perfect for this)
- You also mountain bike or bikepack, in which case the Breakaway is perfect
Don’t Choose It If:
- You want to carry only one filter and for it to be the single most reliable option (in which case choose Sawyer)
- You’re thru hiking and need something rated to a longer lifespan (in which case choose Sawyer)
- You want the lightest water purification system possible (UltraFlask, Katadyn BeFree AC, and AquaMira are all lighter)
HydraPak Breakaway Review Conclusion
The HydraPak Breakaway is an extremely compelling filter bottle that delivers a majority of desirable characteristics including: hard-sided durability; well-balanced and easy to drink from; self-burping; fast flow; swish cleans and back flushes; front mounts well; and is not manufactured by Smartwater. While no filter bottle combo is perfect, the Breakaway is one of the most advantaged. Pair BreakAway with a 2L soft-sided bladder with a 28mm head for a complete system. Happy trails!
