When you’re looking to paint a garage floor or cover up the concrete underlay of your hallways, paint is your best friend. Unfortunately, durability isn’t paint’s best friend, especially when it comes to floors. Unlike walls, floors receive a disproportionate amount of impact, traffic, and scuffs. Epoxy floor paints present the best of both paint and sealing by giving you a handy option to cover your floor and improve its impact resistance.
Four of the best epoxy floor paints are as follows.
- Rust-Oleum EPOXYSHIELD Concrete Floor Paint – for garages
- KILZ Concrete And Garage Floor Paint – For hallways and walk paths
- Drylok E-1 1-Part Epoxy Floor Paint – For living room, bedroom, etc.
- Behr Premium 1-Part Epoxy Stain – For driveways.
This article will be a deep-dive on each option exploring the brand, the product, and the application of each epoxy floor paint. More importantly, the drawbacks of each product will also be covered, so you have the complete picture before you make your decision. But before we get into the first product on our best epoxy floor paints list, let’s briefly cover the criteria and rating.
- The brand: How relevant is the brand to the product, and how reliable is the brand name in the market. This helps us navigate how much we rely on the manufacturer’s word and how much weight we give to the reviews.
- The product: This section looks at the product in the absence of brand merit. Doing so gives us the opportunity to have clarity regarding the product instead of getting blinded by an awe-striking brand name.
- The drawbacks: Not rated on a scale. Instead, you will see points worth noting to avoid disappointment.
Best for High Impact: Rust-oleum Epoxyshield Concrete Floor Paint
The Brand: 9/10
Rust-Oleum is one of the market leaders in protective coating and paints and has a history of making products that have stood the test of time. Some of the products offered by the brand today were initially formulated as far as the 1920s when the company was first launched by Robert Ferguson, a sea captain.
Needless to say, one doesn’t have to worry about water damage as most coatings with the Result-Oleum brand are incredibly water-resistant. With over half a century of brand history, the company isn’t the kind to make claims and underdeliver. The brand is consistent enough to deserve a sound degree of trust. I would personally believe most written claims from Rust-Oleum.
The Product: 9.5/10
I rate the product higher than the brand because while the brand isn’t too closely attached to epoxy and garages, this product is an excellent fit for those interested in getting a durable epoxy seal over their concrete floors. Its advantages start with its acrylic formula that lowers the cost while maintaining the durability often associated with Rust-Oleum.
The product stands against prolonged daylight exposure which means you can use it not just for your garage floor but also for your driveway. Whether you apply this as a garage floor coat or as floor paint in your home, the clean-up process becomes simple.
From petrol droplets to water spills, everything can be cleaned up mess-free. You don’t have to worry about chemical spills as long as the chemicals aren’t industrial. Most household chemicals can be quickly cleaned from the painted surface without residue.
If you use this paint to cover your garage, you can rest assured that it will not incur damage from hot tires. The paint is heat-resistant to a considerable degree, which has utility even in your house: it is compatible with standard floor heating. Moreover, its satin finish is aesthetic and conducive to aesthetic improvement, making it an okay choice even for bedrooms.
That said, its durability is its best feature, which is also its highest-rated aspect on Amazon, where the product itself has a global average rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars. More specifically, buyers have given it a 4.5-star rating for its durability, 4.3 for being easy to clean, and 4.2 for being easy to use. Its lowest specific rating is for the “easy to spread” aspect, which is rated at 4.1 out of 5 stars.
Drawbacks:
If you don’t like the grey look, you might be disappointed with this paint which is formulated to look consistent with garages and driveways. While it can work for cafes going for an industrial vibe and homes with exposed red brick wall interiors, most minimal-themed houses will not look good with this as the floor paint. It is best confined to garages and areas that are likely to be carpeted.
Best for High Foot-traffic Surfaces: Kilz Concrete and Garage Floor Paint
The Brand: 8.5/10
Kilz doesn’t have a history that goes as far back as Rust-Oleum and is more into paint-making than protection. Still, it has sufficient history to inspire trust, given that it was founded back in 1974. To stay in business that long, a company has to deliver what it promises. Therefore, I trust the manufacturer’s claims to an extent.
However, I believe that the brand is spread wide enough across different categories to have a varying degree of performance. That’s why I would see just the product before associating any brand credit with it. While one isn’t very likely to regret purchasing a KILZ product, it is advisable to see reviews and decide if the product is a situational fit.
The Product: 9/10
Again, the product outperforms the brand here, with KILZ 1-Part Epoxy Floor Paint being much more reliable than many of the brand’s lower-priced products. However, that’s to be expected with a company that offers products across drastically different price points.
This floor paint doesn’t scuff easily, and when it does, the marks are pretty easy to clean. This is why I consider it great for areas that receive a lot of foot traffic. Hallways, driveways, and even walk paths in backyards can all benefit from this epoxy paint.
What I find tangentially useful is the variety of surfaces this paint can reliably coat quite permanently. These include bricks, stone, and coated as well as uncoated concrete. That means you can use this for multiple floors even if different materials were used in different areas.
As I covered in the brand section, I make sure to consider buyers’ experience before making a KILZ purchase as the social proof helps reinforce trust. Thankfully, this product has over 1,500 reviews, well over the 500-review mark I look for to get a product’s performance temperature. Its average rating is at 4.4 out of 5 stars, slightly lower than how I rate it from my personal experience.
Still, it is good to see that when it comes to the specific aspects of this epoxy floor paint, the majority of the customers hold similar opinions to mine. The coating is rated at 4.4 stars for its ease of use, and I’ve found it easy to use as well.
I didn’t present this as an outright advantage because my experience might make certain paints seem easier to use. But given that an average of over 1,500 buyers has rated it highly for ease of use, I can deduce it to be easy to work with in general.
In terms of sheerness, the paint is rated at 4 stars, which is in line with my own experience. However, when it comes to ease of cleaning, it is rated at 4 stars though I would personally give it 5 stars. I believe this difference comes from most people trying to clean scuff marks without soap and water. Given that this product is water-resistant and mostly chemical-proof, one should use a household detergent to clean marks off of it. And they’re pretty easy to clean.
The Drawbacks
While the product is positioned as ideal for garages, it starts peeling off with standard garage use. I recommend other paints for garages and advise you to use this only for areas that receive impact from foot traffic, bicycles, scooters, and skateboards. It also has a high dry-to-function waiting time though its dry-to-touch time is relatively short. Here, the problem would be to make an area inaccessible for a while, which can be a problem for most in-use houses.
Best for improving floor appearance: Drylok E-1 1-Part Epoxy Floor Paint
Brand: 9/10
United Gilsonite is a company with nearly 90 years of experience in painting and coating products. What I like is that despite broadening the range of products it offers, the business has stayed very intentional about branding. Drylok is one of the two flagship brands of UGL and is a stand-in for waterproofing.
So, when I see a Drylok product, I can be sure of its water resistance. Still, the paint or coat could be in a category where water damage isn’t even a factor, which is why judging the product on its merits in the context of its use is important. That said, I give weight to the manufacturer’s claims because the brand is too valuable to risk its reputation to sell me a subpar bucket of paint and lose my business.
The Product: 9/10
Epoxy paint is durable, but if durability was all that mattered, we would all live in reinforced metal bunkers. Beauty and function are two aspects of the human experience that inform most of our shelter-building and living space arrangement instincts. That’s why I found it essential to include at least one epoxy paint with visual merit. Within the context of making your indoor flooring great, no epoxy paint will outperform this.
First of all, unlike garage-grade epoxy paints, this one is available in a variety of colors and tints. Most of these are fairly neutral, and even the brighter colors are saturation-mute, which is perfect for beautifying your living room, bedrooms, and hallways. I must admit, I have not tried all the tints to even recommend the best one, but the ones I have tried are pretty true to the displayed image. So, I have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the color range.
The advantages of this product do not stop at its color range, though. It can be great for DIY applications because you can apply it using a brush or a roller. I would recommend the roller as it is easier to level without leaving traces of unevenness. The product also has excellent adhesion, which means you can coat a wall with it too, but since we’re talking about floors here, the paint’s durability matters. It is durable enough for foot traffic but ideal for garages with heavy vehicles. This can also be seen as a drawback.
Drawbacks
Even though most products mentioned in this post are formulated for garages, this paint doesn’t seem to be garage-friendly. What it gains in beauty it seems to lose in durability, which is obvious from its “durability” being rated at an average of 3.8 stars out of 5.
However, that’s only from a review pool of under 100 buyers, as most people buy the product directly from the DryLok website, where a wider range of colors is offered. I’ve personally found the paint sufficiently durable for interior use but am also skeptical of its performance as a garage floor paint. Use this for your rooms, not your garage.
Best for driveways: Behr Premium 1-Part Epoxy Stain Pain
The Brand: 6/10
Behr premium is an international brand that offers great value for money. It is a Chinese brand, which has earned trust in the interior paints market. But because of the business juggling enamel and other non-epoxy paints under the same brand umbrella, I don’t feel confident enough about its epoxy products to skip looking at reviews.
The product: 7/10
This epoxy paint is self-priming and resists hot tires very well. Its UV protection is superior to many epoxy paints on the market, making it better suited for driveways. While it is alleged by the manufacturer to be weather and water-resistant, I am skeptical of accepting that without experience. For now, the product’s UV resistance and its ability to withstand hot wheels make it a great option for driveways.
Drawbacks:
Despite being a product offered by a “budget” brand, this epoxy paint costs more than some of the premium American brands.
Final Thoughts
Epoxy Floor paints are great for weather resistance, easy clean-up, and avoiding water damage. To make sure you get the right epoxy floor paint, make sure to judge the paints by brand, product features, and context drawbacks, and opt for the paint that fits your situation.