Owala FreeSip Kids vs Thermos Funtainer: Best Kids Water Bottle for Hiking

Short answer first, because that is what you came for. For a hike, neither of these bottles is the water. A bottle that a child carries in her hand is a bottle she has to stop walking to drink from, and stopping is what ends walks early. On our Mammoth Cave Saturdays the water lives in my granddaughter Hattie's hydration pack, and a bottle is what she drinks from in the car and at the kitchen table. Given that job, the Owala FreeSip Kids 16 oz is the one I would buy again. It has survived eight months of Saturdays, one drop onto the stone steps at Lost River Cave, and one unattended puddle in my Forester's cup holder.

The Thermos Funtainer is the bottle most parents already own or nearly buy. I have not walked a trail with one. What follows about the Funtainer comes from its published listing and from ten minutes of handling one on a store shelf in Bowling Green, and I will say plainly which is which every time it matters. I am not going to dress up a shelf as a trail.

	Owala FreeSip Kids 16 oz	Thermos Funtainer 12 oz
How a child drinks	FreeSip spout: sip upright through the built-in straw or tilt back to swig from the same opening	Straw only, and the straw is a soft silicone piece a child can chew
Capacity	16 fluid ounces	12 ounces
Keeping drinks cold	Double-wall insulation, listing says up to 24 hours	Double-wall vacuum insulation, and the Funtainer line has a long reputation for holding cold
Lid lock	Push-button lid with a carry loop that doubles as the lock	Push-button lid with a slide lock on most models
Carrying it	Integral carry loop sized for a small hand	Carry loop on the lid, and it is the handle children actually use
Washing	Cup is hand wash; only the lid goes on the dishwasher top rack	Funtainer bottles are commonly listed as top-rack dishwasher safe
Opening for ice and a brush	Wide opening, explicitly for cleaning and adding ice	Narrower neck on the models I have seen, harder to get a bottle brush into
Weight in a small hand	322 g listed, which is noticeable when full	Lighter empty, and the smaller capacity keeps the full weight down
Best for	A child who wants to sip or swig, and a parent willing to hand wash the cup	A child who only wants a straw and a parent who wants the dishwasher to do the work

Where Owala Wins

The two-way spout is the whole reason I bought it. Hattie sips upright through the built-in straw when she is doing something else with her attention, and she tilts it back to swig when she is actually thirsty. The Funtainer I handled gives her one option, and the straw on that one is a soft silicone piece. I have watched an eight year old chew a soft straw to rags by June. The Owala spout is a molded piece with the push-button lid sitting over it, and after eight months of Saturdays it still looks like it did in March. The bottle itself now has a small dent near the base, about the size of a pea, from the June morning Hattie set it down on the stone steps at Lost River and it rolled off the edge. It still holds cold, the lid still locks, and the dent has not spread. That one drop told me more about the thing than eight months of careful use would have. Children drop bottles. They drop them off picnic tables, out of open car doors and down porch steps. A bottle that has to be treated gently is a bottle that gets replaced by August. The Owala took the drop and kept working, and I stopped worrying about it after that morning.

Then there is the lid, and this is the part I did not expect to care about. The push-button lid keeps the spout covered, and the carry loop folds over as the lock. Locked, this bottle has never leaked in my car. Unlocked, it has leaked exactly once, a small puddle in the cup holder when Hattie set it down tipped over on the drive home from Lost River. That is a fair trade for a lid a child can work herself and a lock she can see with her own eyes is closed. The button was stiff for the first couple of weeks. Hattie needed two thumbs and had to press it against her knee, and she complained about it in the car every Saturday in March. By April her thumb had figured it out and she has not mentioned it since. I would rather have a stiff button that stays shut in a bag than a loose one that pops open against a car seat. If your child is five, that button is going to be a genuine obstacle for a month. Better to know that going in than to find out in a parking lot.

Cold is where the listing and the summer agreed. The bottle is double-wall insulated and the listing says up to 24 hours. What I can tell you is narrower and more useful than that number. On a hot July Saturday I filled it with water and four ice cubes before we left the house, it rode in the Forester to Mammoth Cave and then sat in the cup holder for the two hours we walked, and there was still ice rattling around in it on the drive home. I did not time anything and I am not going to pretend I did. The wide opening is what makes the whole thing easy. Ice goes in without a fight, and so does a bottle brush, which matters more to me than the ice does. The neck is wide enough that I can get my hand most of the way down with a brush and actually see the bottom while I am scrubbing it. I have owned narrow-necked bottles where I was cleaning by feel and hoping. This is not one of those.

Where Thermos Wins

I will not pretend the Funtainer is the lesser bottle. Two things about it are plainly better for some families, and the first one is washing. The Owala cup is hand wash. I mean that literally: only the lid goes on the dishwasher top rack and the cup does not. I have stood at my sink on a Sunday night in July scrubbing a bottle that had juice in it on a hot day, with a brush, changing the water twice. It takes about three minutes and it is not difficult work. It is simply three minutes I do not have on a Sunday night, in a house with one child who only visits on Saturdays. A house with three children and a dishwasher running every night is a different arithmetic entirely. Funtainer bottles are commonly listed as top-rack dishwasher safe, cup and all, which means the whole thing goes in and you walk away. I cannot test that on a shelf and I am not going to claim I did. I can tell you that if hand washing a cup every night is the thing that would leave a bottle sitting in the cabinet, then this is the detail that decides your purchase, and it is not a small one.

The second is weight and capacity in proportion. My Owala is listed at 322 g empty, and a full 16 ounces of water on top of that is a lot hanging off a small wrist. The Funtainer holds 12 ounces and is the lighter bottle empty. For a five or six year old that is not a compromise, it is the right size. A bottle a child can lift one-handed and finish before the water goes warm and flat is doing its job better than a bigger one she abandons half full on a bench. I watched that play out with Hattie's old leaky plastic bottle, which held almost nothing and which she still managed to leave behind in the car more than once. Capacity on paper and capacity a child actually drinks are two different numbers. The 16 ounce Owala runs dry on a hot afternoon, and the 12 ounce Funtainer would run dry sooner. What matters is whether the child empties it, and on that question the smaller bottle sometimes wins.

I have not walked a trail with a Funtainer. What I know of it comes from its listing and ten minutes on a store shelf, and the two things it does better are washing and weight.

I should also be honest about what these bottles are not. Neither one is the water on a two or three mile walk. On Mammoth Cave mornings the Owala stays in the Forester for the ride home and the pack carries the water. The bottle's real job in our house is the Lost River Cave walking paths under an hour, the car, and school. Judged on that job, the Funtainer would do it too. It is a good bottle from a company that has been making them a long time. It is just not the one that solved the problem I actually had.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Owala FreeSip Kids 16 oz if your child is around seven or older, drinks a lot, wants to swig rather than suck, and you are willing to hand wash the cup. Buy it if the child has already destroyed a soft straw on another bottle. Buy it if you want one bottle that covers the car, the short walk and the school bag, and you would rather not own three. Buy it if your child is hard on her things, because ours has taken a drop onto stone and a full season of Saturdays and is still in service. The dent is a fact, not a defect, and I would buy the same bottle again tomorrow.

Buy the Thermos Funtainer if your child is five or six and a lighter, smaller bottle suits her hands. Buy it if it is going in a dishwasher every night. Buy it if your child only ever wants a straw and has never once asked to swig from an opening. Buy it if you have already lost the argument about hand washing and you know it. Neither choice is a mistake. What would be a mistake is buying a 16 ounce bottle for a five year old and then wondering why it keeps coming home full.

One more thing worth saying to a grandparent reading this. In February I took Hattie to Mammoth Cave in old sneakers with a leaky plastic bottle rattling around in my tote and a thin poncho that tore on a branch. She got wet socks, a blister on her left heel, and she kept stopping to ask me for water. We turned back after about a mile. That night I ordered the pack, the boots, the binoculars, the bottle and a rain jacket together in one order. They arrived within the week. The bottle was not the change that fixed our Saturdays. The pack was.

Before the pack, Hattie stopped every ten minutes or so to ask me for water, and every stop was a small negotiation about whether we ought to turn around. On the first Saturday in March she sipped while she walked and stopped asking. That is the fix. The bottle is what she uses at the car and at my kitchen table, and it does that job without complaint. So do not buy a bottle expecting it to change a walk. Buy it expecting it to hold cold water and not leak, and be pleasantly surprised by the rest.

If you are sorting out the rest of a first walking kit, I have written separately about the bottle over a longer stretch and about why a bottle belongs in a child's bag on every walk at all. Start with the pack, then the boots, then the water bottle. That order has held for us since March, through spring, a hot summer and now into fall, about thirty Saturdays in all.