Card Multitool vs Leatherman: When Each One Wins
I collect multitools. Not in the way people say that when they own two.
Two Victorinox SwissTool Spirit MXBS, one black and one steel. Three Leathermans — an ARC, a Charge+ in orange, a MUT. A Roxon with swappable blades. A NexTool. A SOG PowerPint that fits more into less space than it has any right to. A couple of multitool knives on top of that. I have never counted properly. Somewhere around ten.
If I could keep exactly one, it would be the SwissTool Spirit MXBS. Best-executed multitool I have handled, and it is not close. The Charge+ is the workhorse. The ARC and the MUT are the two I pick up when I want to look at engineering rather than use it.
Every one of them is a better tool than the thing I design for a living.
And not one of them was in my pocket on any of the evenings this article is actually about.
01The evenings that produced the Universal line
Here is the actual origin story, and there is nothing heroic in it.
Phone in one pocket. Cardholder in the other — two bank cards, an ID, that is the entire loadout. No bag, no belt sheath, no reason to expect to need anything. And then something needs opening, tightening, cutting or prying, and I am standing there solving it with a coin and a fingernail.
That happened often enough that I stopped filing it under bad luck and started filing it under specification.
Because the obvious fix does not survive contact with a Tuesday. The obvious fix is: carry the Charge+. It weighs 235 grams. A current flagship phone weighs about 220. Two of those in the same trousers is not an everyday carry, it is a decision you make at eight in the morning and reconsider by lunch.
Plenty of people do solve it another way. A sling bag with a tool roll in it is a completely legitimate way to live, and the people who carry one are usually the people who need tools most. It is not how I dress, and it is not how most of the people who buy from me dress either.
The constraint was never what is the best tool. It was: whatever solves this has to fit where the cards already are. Because if it does not get carried, it does not exist.
And a tool that does not exist has a specification sheet of exactly zero. That is the sentence the whole Universal line came out of.
02Two objects that share a shelf and nothing else
The Wave+ is 241 grams and 20 millimetres thick when closed. The Universal 4.0 in titanium is about 26 grams and 2 millimetres. That is 9.3 times the mass and ten times the thickness. Those are not competing numbers. They are numbers from different product categories that happen to share a shelf on Amazon.
Price: a full-size premium multitool lists at roughly three times a card in 440C steel — the live numbers sit on the product pages, where they can't go stale. Warranty: twenty-five years against ours, which I will come back to, because it is the row where I lose.
03About that tool count, since I am the one who prints it
Our page says 80+. Leatherman's says 18. Those numbers are not measured the same way and I am not going to let you compare them without saying so.
Leatherman's eighteen are eighteen mechanisms. Pliers that open and close. Scissors with a spring. A saw with real teeth. Each one is a moving part that had to be designed, toleranced and assembled, and each one can be counted by picking the tool up and unfolding it.
Our eighty are functions cut into a plate. Some are mechanisms in the meaningful sense — the bit driver, the modular slot, the wrench cut-outs that do turn a nut. Many are passive: a ruler is a function, a protractor is a function, a drill gauge is a function. They work and people use them. But a laser-etched millimetre scale and a spring-action pair of scissors are not the same kind of object, and any comparison that puts them in one column is doing arithmetic instead of engineering.
Every card brand in this category counts the way we count. That is the convention, and I am not going to unilaterally renumber our catalogue. What I can do is tell you here what the number means, so that when you see 80 against 18 you know exactly which parts of that gap are real.
See every cutout in 3D → Tool Explorer
The gap that is real is carry.
04The number nobody puts on the box
An 18-tool multitool in a drawer has zero tools. A 40-function card in the wallet you are already carrying has forty.
This is the whole argument, and it is not a clever argument — it is arithmetic that applies on the days you did not plan for. My ten multitools get carried when I expect to need them: the workshop, the trip where I packed deliberately, the job that has tools in the brief. They stay on the shelf on the ordinary Tuesday when a screw comes loose on a chair in a meeting room, which is precisely when a tool would have been useful and precisely why nobody brought one.
A card does not get left behind, because leaving it behind requires leaving your wallet behind. The proof is the least heroic function on the plate — the bottle opener, which gets used more times a year than everything else on the card put together.
05Where we cannot compete, and I will not pretend otherwise
Pliers. We make a Pliers KIT — needle-nose jaws that click into the modular slot on any Universal card. It grips wire, it bends, it pulls a nail out of a board. It is useful and I designed it, which is exactly why I will be the first to say it is not a Wave+. Full-size pliers have two 100 mm handles and a pivot built to take a two-handed squeeze. A card-format insert has neither. Physics is not a matter of opinion and neither is grip force.
Leverage. Same problem, stated differently. The Wave+ closed is 102 mm of steel handle you can wrap a fist around. The card is a flat plate that you either grip at the edge or slot into a modular handle. The Extreme narrows this — its Full Kit adds a torque handle that clicks into the card and gives you a real lever — but narrowing a gap is not closing it. And a flat plate transfers cost along with torque: under real load a 2 mm edge presses every newton straight into your palm. Handles don't just add leverage — they distribute pain. That is half of why the torque handle exists at all.
Sawing. Their saw has offset teeth and a spine to push against. Ours is an insert in a 2 mm plate. It cuts. It cuts slowly.
The warranty. Twenty-five years, repairs done in Portland, on a company that has been building these since 1983. That is forty-three years of standing behind a product, and it is a real reason to buy one. Ours is a 60-day guarantee — that is the number, and I am not going to dress it up as something larger. We are ten years and ten Kickstarter campaigns in. What those ten years already contain: when Adventurs came back broken, we replaced them — and then went after the cause, taking the heat-treat down from the original spec to 50–54 HRC so the plate bends before it snaps. A replacement is a promise kept; a revised spec is the mistake removed. I would like to be having this conversation again in 2050.
06The constraint that produced the format
Every item on that list has one root cause, and it is worth naming, because it explains why we did not simply design a better one.
The envelope is ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1: 85.60 by 53.98 millimetres, standardised in 1985 and originally laid out in inches — three and three-eighths by two and one-eighth. A bank card in that format is 0.76 mm thick. Ours are 2 mm, already 2.6 times a bank card, and past roughly 3 mm a wallet stops closing the way its owner expects. That is the entire design space, set by an object standardised before I was machining anything, and it will not move because I would like more room.
Everything on the list follows. No handles, because a handle needs thickness in the axis we do not have. No sprung pivot, because a spring needs a cavity. The format does not permit a Wave+ and it never will, regardless of how good the machining gets.
What it permits instead is being present, which takes us back to the coin and the fingernail. Ten years in, the summary is simple: the format covers most of what a full-size multitool covers, at eleven percent of the weight. The remainder is the part that needs handles, and there is no version of this where I get it.
07The card I built for people who own the other thing
Here is the part that surprises people who assume a card brand is trying to replace anybody.
The bit driver on a Wave+, a Charge or a Skeletool takes Leatherman's own double-sided flat bits — a proprietary format, not the 1/4 inch hex you have in a drill case. Which means every Leatherman owner has a small pile of flat bits and no sane way to carry more than the two that ride in the tool.
The Bit Store Card holds eight of them. Sixteen tips, locked in silicone bands, in a credit card. And it has three drivers cut into the plate: 1/4 inch hex for everything standard, 1/8 inch flat, which is the size those bits are, and 4 mm precision for phones and eyeglasses.
That is not an accident of design. It is a card built specifically for people who already own the other thing.
08The matter of scale
There are three leagues in this category and I am not in the top one.
Leatherman makes about three million tools a year. That is roughly eight thousand a day. Our ten Kickstarter campaigns, spread over ten years, brought in a little over four thousand backers — Leatherman produces that many tools before lunch on a Wednesday.
Below us, and I mean below only on price, is the stamped-steel end of the category. The volume leader there has sold over four million cards at twelve dollars and change. They outsell us by orders of magnitude and they should: at twelve dollars a flat stamped card is real value, and for a great many people it is the correct purchase.
So we are the ones in the middle, milling titanium one card at a time, outsold in both directions. That is either a poor business plan or a niche. I have settled on niche, and the deciding argument is one thing stamping cannot do.
Stamping is a two-dimensional process: it punches a profile out of a sheet, and every feature lives on that one plane. Milling removes material in three dimensions. That is where the recessed cutting edge comes from — the one that cuts cord without an exposed blade and walks through a checkpoint. It is where a wrench slot gets actual depth in the jaw instead of a notch in an outline. And it is where the modular slot comes from, with its sprung tabs and a Cut Tool that clicks in and locks — no rings, no screws.
None of that exists in a stamped world. Not because nobody thought of it, but because the process ends before you get there. The Universal 4.0 and the Pliers KIT are not better ideas than a twelve-dollar card. They are ideas that require a different machine.
That is the entire business. It is not a large one. It is a specific one.
09So which one
If you work with your hands for a living, buy the Leatherman. Not as a compromise — as the correct tool. Then put a card in your wallet for the days the Leatherman is in the truck, on a plane, or in the drawer where mine spent last year.
If you work in an office, travel often, or have ever surrendered something at a checkpoint, start with the card. It covers more of your actual week than the specification comparison suggests, and it costs a fraction of what a full-size plier tool does — the live number sits on the product page, where it cannot go stale.
And if you own a Leatherman and were reading this to see whether I would trash it: no. It is a good tool, it is better than mine at the things it is better at, and I keep three. What I would sell you is the card that carries its bits.
One last thing, because it is the part of this story I find funniest. The Universal 3.0 had a blade. The 4.0 took the blade out and moved it onto a removable insert, because I wanted a card that clears airport security. Then people carried on buying the 3.0 anyway — which is a market telling an engineer, politely and with its wallet, that his clever solution addressed a problem most of them did not have.
So the 5.0 has two edges: a plain one at the end, and a serrated main edge, because what urban carry actually cuts is cardboard, and cardboard is full of clay filler and glue and takes a plain edge apart in a week.
That is a different article.
Can you fly with a Leatherman? +
Not in carry-on if it has a knife on it, and almost every Leatherman does — the TSA prohibits multi-tools with blades of any length in the cabin, and the EU and UK rules are stricter still. In checked baggage it is fine. That is the gap a blade-free card fills: it clears on edge geometry rather than on size, and the officer at the checkpoint still gets the final word.
Is a card multitool worth it if I own a Leatherman? +
It is worth it precisely because you own one. The Leatherman is the better tool on every job that needs handles and grip force. It is also the tool that stays in the truck, in the checked bag, or in a drawer on the ordinary Tuesday when a screw comes loose in a meeting room. A card lives in the wallet you are carrying anyway, so it is the one that is present. They are not competitors: one is the tool you planned for, the other is the tool for the day you did not.
Which card should a Leatherman owner buy? +
The Bit Store Card. A Leatherman bit driver takes the brand's own double-sided flat bits, so every owner ends up with a pile of them and room to carry two. The Bit Store Card holds eight of them — sixteen tips — in silicone bands, and cuts three drivers into the plate: 1/4 inch hex, 1/8 inch flat, which is the size those bits are, and 4 mm precision. If what you want instead is one card that replaces the Leatherman on flights, that is the blade-free route, and the Card Finder sorts it in four questions.
Andrii Gurskyi, founder & engineer, MRF.Tools
In 2015 he went looking for a real tool for his own wallet, found only stamped junk or overpriced steel — and started machining his own. Ten funded Kickstarter campaigns, 4,000+ backers, every reward shipped — several of them through a war. Designed and developed in Ukraine. About MRF →