The Woodridge Pro is Traeger’s current mid-tier pellet grill: a hopper of wood pellets, an auger that feeds them into a fire pot, a fan, and a PID controller that decides how fast to feed. You set a temperature; the machine holds it. For brisket — the longest common barbecue cook, and the one most often run overnight — that automation is the entire proposition.
As always, we haven’t run this unit in a lab and don’t claim to; our methodology pagesets out exactly what we do and don’t do. What follows is the published specification weighed against what a brisket actually needs.
#1Best hands-off brisket cooker
Traeger Woodridge Pro Wood Pellet Grill
Traeger's current mid-tier pellet grill and the most hands-off way to a good brisket: set 225°F, let the WiFIRE controller and auger hold it, and monitor the internal temp from your phone through the stall. It is 'cheating' only if you think a thermostat is cheating — the results speak.
Strengths
- +PID controller + auger hold your set temp within a tight band
- +WiFIRE app monitoring is genuinely useful on a 12-hour cook
- +Pellets give clean, consistent smoke with zero fire tending
Trade-offs
- −Pellet smoke is milder than a stick-burner's — less heavy bark
- −Depends on electronics and power; a bag of pellets per long cook
| Fuel / power | Wood pellets |
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| Fuel | Wood pellets |
|---|
| Temperature control | Digital PID (WiFIRE app) |
|---|
| Cooking area | Not published |
|---|
| Temp range | 165-500°F (stated) |
|---|
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi + app |
|---|
Specs read from the manufacturer listing, on July 22, 2026. “Not published” means the maker does not state that figure.
What a PID controller does for brisket
A PID controller does not simply switch the auger on when the temperature drops below target and off when it rises above. It uses the size of the error, how long it has persisted and how fast it is changing to decide the feed rate — which means it anticipates rather than reacts, and holds a much tighter band than a simple on-off thermostat.
In practice this means a set temperature that stays genuinely set: through a temperature drop when you open the lid, through a cold night, through the long flat stretch of a stall. For a cook where a swinging pit is the main cause of unpredictable timing, that stability is worth real money.
It is worth being calibrated about how much it matters, though. Brisket is fairly tolerant of variation — a pit swinging between 240 and 265°F produces brisket essentially indistinguishable from one held rigidly at 250°F, because the meat smooths the variation out. The controller’s real value is that it holds unattended, not that it holds precisely.
The app, and what to actually do with it
Wi-Fi monitoring is more useful on brisket than on any other cut, for one reason: the stall. A brisket parks somewhere around 150-170°F for hours and then breaks out at an hour nobody can predict, and that moment is your wrap decision. Being able to see the curve from indoors is the difference between catching it and guessing.
Set an alert around 160°F for the wrap, and another around 195°F to start checking tenderness. What you should notdo is set an alert at a target pull temperature and treat it as a finish line — brisket is done when a probe slides in with almost no resistance, which can happen anywhere from roughly 195 to 210°F. See what temp brisket is done.
The smoke question, honestly
This is the trade, and it should not be soft-pedaled. Pellet grills produce less smoke flavor than charcoal or wood fires. The mechanism is straightforward: uniform pellets fed into a fan-assisted fire pot burn very efficiently, and efficient combustion leaves fewer aromatic compounds available to deposit on the meat. The same clean burn that makes the grill easy to control is what limits its flavor. You cannot have one without the other.
The gap is narrowable. Run the lowest temperature the grill will hold for the first several hours; use a filler-free or single-species pelletso the named wood is genuinely doing the work; wrap later; add a smoke tube. Stacked, these get you meaningfully closer. They do not close it, and the smoke ring will typically still be fainter than a charcoal brisket’s — which is cosmetic, but people notice.
Running costs and dependencies
Budget roughly a 20-pound bag of pellets per brisket, more in winter. That is a real ongoing cost that charcoal cooks largely do not carry, since unburned charcoal is reusable once the vents are shut.
And note the dependency: this grill needs mains power. An outage ends the cook, which is a failure mode no charcoal smoker has. It also has more to go wrong over a decade — a controller, an auger motor, an igniter and a fan, versus a steel body and some vents. Traeger’s parts availability is among the best in the category, which mitigates this, but it is a consideration on a fifteen-year horizon.
Who should buy it
Anyone for whom the realistic alternative is not cooking brisket. If overnight fire management is the thing that stops you, a grill that removes it entirely will get more good brisket onto your table than a better cooker you never fire up. That is not a consolation prize; it is the correct trade for a lot of people.
Look elsewhere if smoke depth is the point of brisket for you — in which case a charcoal bulletcosts far less and delivers more flavor — or if capacity per dollar is the binding constraint, where Pit Boss generally wins.