This choice is usually settled by the building, not by the trucks. A counterbalance forklift needs a wide aisle and gives you the freedom to drive anywhere. A reach truck gives that freedom up and stores the pallets in a much narrower aisle. Which one you can afford depends on what the floor space is worth.
How each one holds the load
A counterbalance truck carries the load in front of the front axle and offsets it with a heavy counterweight at the back. Nothing sticks out in front of the forks, so it can drive straight up to a pallet, a lorry bed or a stack on the floor.
A reach truck puts its wheels out in front, under the load, on two legs. The mast or the carriage then moves forward to pick the pallet up. Because the load sits between the wheels rather than in front of them, the truck needs far less counterweight – and far less length.
The number that decides it
Look at the aisle width for right-angle stacking row, printed as Ast on a VDI 2198 sheet and shown on every model page here. It is the width of aisle the truck needs to turn and place a pallet into racking, and the gap between the two families is large rather than marginal.
In this database, counterbalance trucks in the 2 to 3.5 tonne range state stacking aisles between roughly 3,650 and 4,150 mm. The reach trucks state between 2,826 and 2,949 mm, while carrying similar loads to greater heights. That is around a metre of aisle, on every aisle in the building.
One caution when you read this row on a manufacturer’s own sheet: it is not always measured the same way. The VDI 2198 figure includes a 1000 x 1200 mm pallet on the forks. Several North American sheets instead quote the truck’s own requirement and footnote it “add load length and clearance”. The two differ by more than a metre, so a truck can look far narrower than it is. We keep them in separate rows here for that reason, labelled incl. load and excl. load.
That saved width is the entire commercial case. Narrower aisles mean more racking runs in the same building, or the same throughput in a smaller one.
What you give up
- Outdoors. A reach truck is an indoor machine on smooth floor. Its small load wheels and low ground clearance do not tolerate yards, gravel or ramps.
- Loading vehicles. The wheel arms that make a reach truck narrow also stop it driving onto a lorry bed or into a container in the way a counterbalance truck can.
- Floor quality. Reach trucks working at height need a flat, well-maintained floor. At 8 metres a small surface defect is a large sway.
- Operator familiarity. Reaching, and lifting to heights where the pallet is out of comfortable sight, is a different skill and a separate training sign-off.
What you gain besides aisle width
- Height. Reach trucks are built to lift where counterbalance trucks stop. The heavy-duty models in this database lift well beyond what a comparable counterbalance truck offers as standard.
- Weight on the floor. A reach truck carrying the same pallet weighs less overall than the counterbalance truck that would need enough counterweight to do it, which matters on upper floors and on slabs with a stated limit.
- Visibility of the fork tips, because the carriage comes to the operator rather than the operator driving the whole truck at the rack.
How to decide in practice
- Measure your existing aisles, or decide what you want them to be. That number filters the shortlist before anything else.
- Check the highest beam you have to reach, and compare it with the lift height row – not with the mast extended height, which includes the mast itself.
- Ask whether the same truck also has to load vehicles or work outside. If it does, you need a counterbalance truck, or you need two machines.
- Only then compare capacity, and read it at the load centre each manufacturer states.
Many sites end up with both: counterbalance trucks at the loading bay, reach trucks in the racking. That is not indecision, it is the right answer when the two jobs are genuinely different.