From small budget-friendly family day boats to luxurious mini-cruisers, here's our pick of the very best day boats we've tested in recent years
If you’re in the market for the perfect day boat, 2025 is already shaping up to be an exceptional year. From sleek high-performance runabouts to luxurious open cruisers, the latest crop of the best day boats offers something for every kind of boater—whether you’re chasing speed, comfort, or Mediterannean style.
The Motor Boat & Yachting team spends a huge amount of time putting the best of the best through their paces, rigorously testing each model in real-world conditions to see which ones truly deliver on the water.
In this guide, we round up our top-rated day boats of 2025—each one thoroughly reviewed and tested by our expert team.
We should note, however, that the term ‘day boat’ is a pretty vague and contentious term. Most day boats will have a cabin of some sort and allow you to spend the night onboard. So most day boats can also be considered weekenders.
Best Day Boats 2025
Makai M37
While power cats are hardly famed for their sex appeal, Makai is committed to making them genuinely desirable, starting with this new Makai M37
Developed in collaboration with Italian sports car designer, Emanuele Rossi, and built at Makai’s production facility in Split, Croatia, the firm’s new Makai M37 is being marketed as a high-end sportscruiser which draws direct inspiration from both classic and modern supercars.
Whether this stylish compact cruising cat is enough to tempt people away from premium monohulls is of course open to question. But as the race for power cat supremacy continues to hot up, it’s certainly refreshing to see a builder entering the fray with something so unashamedly different
Length: 11.4m
Top speed: 29 knots
Price (when tested): £461,566
Jeanneau DB 37
This is a really effective multi-purpose leisure platform. Its capacity to combine authentic cruising facilities with the space, styling and flexibility of a day boat makes the DB/37 a natural stablemate for the DB/43, and a very credible competitor for the award-winning De Antonio range. The bow might be limited, the hardtop might be one-dimensional and the engines might be noisy, but that’s ably counterbalanced by a top cockpit, surprising accommodation, a good drive and styling that feels every bit as cool as the original DB/43.
Length: 11.84m
Top speed: 40.9 knots
Price (when tested): £366,338
Invincible 33 Cat
If you specced it up with the optional benches and sunshades, plus a portable outboard barbecue and a bow ladder, it’s easy to see how family gatherings and inshore cruises could work perfectly well. But the truth is that if you’re in the market for a family dayboat, there are plenty of manufacturers that can offer more boat and more versatility for less money.
However, if you are in the market for a seriously fast, focused, premium quality sportsfisher, then fill your boots. The Invincible 33 Catamaran may not do much but it does what it does extraordinarily well.
Length: 10.3m
Top speed: 38.3 knots
Price (when tested): £599,875
Sirena 48 (coupe)
When you chop off a flybridge, you want to know that the weight distribution, the style and the saloon ambience will all be direct and immediate beneficiaries – and that is absolutely the case here. This is a very pretty and well conceived coupé that retains all of the flybridge’s merits, flexibilities and options with the sole exception of the upper deck itself.
Little wonder then that Sirena is set to make the Coupé variant an option on some of its larger models, including the 58, 68, 78 and 88. As for the hybrid powertrain, well that’s more likely to split opinion. On the one hand, it makes quiet, emissions-free operation an immediate and very straightforward reality for mixed use boaters.
On the other, it all but halves your top end without substantially extending your low-speed operating range. But it’s not for us to baulk at the luxury of choice. Because while once, there was only a single option at the entry point to Sirena’s award-winning fleet of liveaboard cruisers, now there are three – and what’s not to like about that?
Length: 16.4m
Top speed: 11.7 knots
Price (when tested): £1,286,000
Zeelander Z5
The Zeelander 5 is an extraordinary boat – and we mean extraordinary in the literal sense of the word because, outside of the Zeelander fleet, there’s nothing else quite like it. It looks and feels every bit as bespoke, elegant and exclusive as its supremely beautiful predecessor, and its day boating environments, like its styling, are absolutely first rate.
That’s not the whole story of course. After all, there are dozens of bigger, more accommodating and more practical boats to be had for way less money than this pretty ‘POA’ platform is likely to cost – and the same could be said in relation to the Z5’s design and execution. While the quality is certainly strong, it’s by no means peerless; and while the deck layout is undoubtedly distinctive, it’s by no means the best resolved.
But the fact of the matter is that the Z5 was never designed to get bogged down in crass market comparisons. It was designed to stand apart, with a style, a layout, a finish and a price tag that reinforce that tangible sense of separation. It’s a platform that only a handful of people in the world will ever be able to own – and however you feel about its abilities as a boat, that in itself will be a huge part of the appeal.
Length: 14.7
Top speed: 31 knots
Price (when tested): POA (if you have to ask…)
