Even big-name brands like Olympic, Behr, and Valspar, which make highly rated solid deck stains, also make some semi-transparent and clear options that don’t hold up in our tests. If you want ...

Valspar Valspar is the house brand of paint ... it offers solid and semi-transparent stains for decking. A newly built wood deck is ready to stain four to eight weeks after it’s installed.

Archrival Lowe's Valspar Duramax ... handily beat Benjamin Moore's $46 Arborcoat Deck & Siding Solid—and left similarly pricey stains from Sherwin-Williams and Sikkens on the mat.