Roy J. Riley 
A bike handlebar bag is simple.
It’s a fanny pack for your bike, built with consideration for all of your bike-specific needs, like being able to open it while you’re riding, or having access to a subway card or a key.
Although a good one can’t change your life, it can save you from showing up with a sweaty back after pedaling across town to the office, the party, or the office party. And maybe showing up less sweaty to that party will change your life.
After spending more than 30 hours interviewing cycling professionals and researching handlebar bags, we picked 20 bags, put them on our bikes, and started riding. And now we’re sure that the Ornot Handlebar Bag is the best choice for anyone looking to change their ride.
The Ornot Handlebar Bag is a simple tube-shaped handlebar bag, made of recycled nylon, that makes accessing your gear quick and easy. This 3.1-liter handlebar bag can carry three large burritos as well as bike tools, a phone, a light jacket, a wallet, and keys.
This bag improves on our former top pick (and now our runner-up), the Road Runner Bags California Burrito, by adding four accessible and secure exterior pockets made of stretch mesh, as well as an interior zipper pocket to safely hold your wallet and keys.
Two of the exterior pockets reside on the rear of the bag, facing you when you’re on your bike; a third sits on the right side and has an elastic cord to secure a smartphone in place, and a final pocket crosses the front of the bag. That front pocket is the perfect place to stash a light jacket for quick access as the weather changes, while you’re at a stoplight, for instance.
The zipper closure for the main compartment wraps across the top of the bag and onto the side, making the main compartment easier to access than that of our runner-up. This design choice makes a big difference when you’re stuffing the bag full, and as a result the bag seems bigger than it is.
The main drawback we’ve found is that Ornot doesn’t include (or sell separately) a strap for converting it to a shoulder bag for when you’re off the bike, so you’ll have to rig up your own. In addition, the bag comes in only three colors, and the stretchy mesh exterior pockets might eventually rip if you tend to carry hard, sharp objects in them.
The Road Runner Bags California Burrito is simply designed in a way that’s effective, elegant, and durable all at once. This 3.3-liter, tube-shaped bag, which is about the size of a six-pack, holds as much as our top pick, though it lacks the exterior pockets that we like on the Ornot bag.
This bag has a single zipper that’s easy to operate while you’re on your bike and side pockets for small items you might want to access quickly, though it doesn’t wrap around the bag like the zipper on the Ornot bag. Made of durable Cordura nylon, it comes in eight fun colors to match your bike, more than our top pick. The California Burrito also readily converts into a shoulder bag with Road Runner’s universal shoulder strap (sold separately for $17).
The Chrome Helix Handlebar Bag is sleek enough to bring with you anywhere, but in our tests we found that its Velcro harness attachment system wasn’t quite as functional on our bike as the buckles on our top pick and runner-up. Though some people might balk at a $65 bag being considered a “budget pick,” we determined that the $50 to $60 range was the least that one could expect to spend on a bag and still have it be sturdy enough not to bounce around on the handlebars.
This 3-liter rectangular bag is the size of two takeout containers (the classic white folding-box kind). Accessing items while you’re on your bike is easy since the lid opens toward you; while that feature isn’t unique, it isn’t common to all handlebar bags. The Helix doesn’t have any exterior pockets but does have two interior mesh pockets. It’s made of a durable and very water-resistant polyurethane-coated polyester material that’s stiff enough to keep its shape even when empty. This bag’s stowable sling belt makes it carry well off a bike, too.
