If you’ve got tools and batteries from both Milwaukee and Makita, you might be tempted to mix and match them. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
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Name-brand hardware, including both power tools and batteries, isn’t cheap. Most tools from the major brands like Milwaukee and Makita will run you at least $100, baseline, to say nothing of battery packs to actually power everything. If you have both Milwaukee and Makita tools in your cabinet, that means you need to spend around $160 twice just so you can power all of them. Maybe the best solution for that is to just try and stay within one brand’s ecosystem as much as possible, but as much as the brand itself would probably appreciate that, life isn’t always so accommodating.
If this feels like an obvious problem to encounter in your work, such as when you’re buying Makita tools for personal projects, Milwaukee tools for professional metal work, or various other permutations of handiwork, you’re not the first one to notice it. The equally obvious solution would be to just use Milwaukee’s batteries on Makita tools and save yourself $160, but unfortunately, that’s one solution that won’t fly. Due to differences in physical connections and power transfer technologies, Milwaukee batteries are wholly incompatible with Makita tools, and while there are technically third-party adapters available that could facilitate a connection, using them may end up causing you more headaches than it alleviates in the long run.
