The short version: conduction cooks your herb against a hot surface, and convection bakes it in a stream of hot air. That one difference shapes how a vaporizer tastes, how fast it gets going, how careful you have to be packing it, and what you pay. Neither is “better” outright. They just suit different people.
Most dry herb vaporisers lean one way or the other, and a fair few do a bit of both. Worth knowing which is which before you spend.
Conduction: heat by contact
In a conduction vape, the herb sits in a bowl and the bowl gets hot. Heat moves from the metal or ceramic walls straight into whatever’s touching them. Simple, cheap to build, and quick.
The upside is speed and ease. Press the button, wait twenty or thirty seconds, draw. There’s no technique to learn and no airflow to fuss over. Conduction also tends to give you a thicker, denser hit early on, which a lot of people just prefer.
The catch is evenness. Whatever’s pressed against the wall cooks first, and the stuff in the middle lags behind. So you get hot spots, and if you pack it tight and leave it sitting on the heat, the bottom layer can scorch while the top’s barely touched. You learn to stir halfway through. Leave a conduction vape switched on with herb in it and it keeps cooking, even between draws, so your bowl ages faster.
Examples people know: the older Pax models, the DynaVap when you torch the tip hard, and plenty of cheaper pocket units. They’re forgiving on the wallet and rough on consistency.
Convection: heat by airflow
A convection vape keeps the heat source away from the herb and pulls hot air through it instead. Nothing cooks until air’s actually moving, which usually means it only extracts when you draw.
That gets you two things. Flavour, first. Convection is gentler and more even, so the terpenes come through cleaner and you can taste the difference between strains rather than just getting generic “vape” taste. Second, control. Because extraction happens on the draw, the bowl isn’t slowly roasting between hits, so a packed chamber lasts longer and wastes less.
The downsides are real though. Convection costs more to build, so the devices cost more to buy. On-demand convection can need a firmer, slower pull than people expect, and a loose pack can channel, where the air carves a tunnel through the herb and leaves the rest untouched. You pack a bit differently, usually a touch looser, and there’s a small knack to it.
Examples: the Arizer Air and Solo lean heavily convection, the Firefly 2 is true on-demand convection, and the old Volcano desktop is convection through and through.
The bit nobody mentions: most vapes are hybrids
Plenty of popular devices do both. The Mighty and the Crafty are conduction at the bowl with a convection assist from the airflow, which is a big reason they taste good and stay easy to use. So if a device feels nicer than its spec sheet suggests, a hybrid heater is often why. There’s a longer write-up on that in dry herb vaporizers if you want to compare specific models.
So which one suits you
Want it simple, quick and cheap, and you don’t mind a stir and the odd uneven bowl? Conduction. It’s the easiest place to start and there’s nothing wrong with that.
After the best flavour, the least waste, and happy to learn a slightly slower draw and a looser pack? Convection, or a good hybrid that splits the difference.
And honestly, for most people a hybrid like the Mighty is the sweet spot. You get most of convection’s flavour without convection’s fuss. Try a mate’s gear if you can before you commit. Heating style is one of those things that reads as a spec but feels completely different in the hand.