2 International Laptop Brands That Can Compete With Dell

Choosing a brand of laptop from overseas can be a bit of a minefield. There are dozens of options, despite U.S. restrictions on some of the major brands like Huawei. While it would be grand to talk about all the cool budget laptops from other regions, like China, unfortunately, none of them can compete with Dell in one area: customer service.

We've surfaced two brands that have a global presence and have respectable customer service and warranty situations. There are plenty of horror stories of smaller brands not being the best to get in contact with or to solve the problem. There have also been recent concerns with some smaller brands hosting malware on their own support pages. With Dell, at least you know there's a customer service agent to contact, and there's a clear warranty.

The brands chosen also bring a variety of options for you to select from, similar to Dell. Gaming centric or strictly for business, these are the best two options aside from Dell.

Good old classic American brands, brought to you by a Chinese giant. Lenovo's purchase of IBM's hardware arm in 2005 cemented itself as a pivotal moment in the company's reach in the United States. After a few years of various ThinkPads, Lenovo phased out the IBM name and started to branch out to other brands.

As with Dell, each brand has its own target market. ThinkPads used to be for those steeped in tech, and older models are still actively used in tech spaces, owing to their repairability. Some newer models are less hardy, but iFixIt rates two 2026 models a 10 out of 10. These offer good performance for the price, considering how AI data centers have caused rocketing prices lately. For the top-end ThinkPads, you might need to look toward a bank loan — and then there's the Mobile Workstation line, which offers 128 GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX PRO 4000 graphics card for the low, low price of $10,459. For an additional $1,370, you can get a 5000 GPU instead.

Lenovo's Yoga brand features many hybrid tablet-laptops. IdeaPads range from the latest Intel Core Series 3 chips to a Snapdragon X2 ARM processor. Lenovo also has two gaming brands, Legion and LOQ, offering high specs. All that being said, one of the core reasons Lenovo competes with Dell, again, is that there's U.S.-based customer service and reliable warranties to back it up, so you won't be on your own if something goes wrong.

Offering a wide range of laptops, from gaming to the office, Asus is a Taiwanese brand that can also go head-to-head with Dell. Again, this is partly thanks to a clear warranty and solid customer support — but as you'll see from the brand's Trustpilot score, your mileage may vary. That said, at 1.5 stars, it's still 0.2 points higher than Dell's score on the same scale. Maybe it's good that Asus' warranty is easy to find. In fact, it's rated as one of the best laptop warranties on the market right now.

Asus doesn't skimp on the options, with nine categories to choose from in just the "Home" section of its online store alone. Currently, the company has ProArt, with a focus on editing work. Zenbooks offer the latest in laptop chips, sporting a Snapdragon X or X2 ARM chip or an Intel Core Series 3 chip. Vivobook offers the latest generation hardware at the moment, and it's all massively overpriced in the current climate. Asus also has Chromebooks, which users online have said are worth the cash. Its ExpertBook range recently received a refresh, with a couple of laptops already available for purchase in the United States.

Asus has been around in America for decades at this point. It became best known for the Eee PC netbooks, then became even more prevalent through the gaming sphere with its components under the Republic of Gamers (ROG) and The Ultimate Force (TUF) sub-brands. Its first big splash might have become a weird fad that vanished, but for those who need an alternative to Dell, it's a good option.