KLIM Adventure GTX Short vs Alpinestars SMX-Z Drystar

The certification is a tie, and that is the finding

Read the two certification lines next to each other and you are looking at the same sentence written by two marketing departments. KLIM publishes “CE CERTIFIED TO EN13594:2015, KP LEVEL 1”. Alpinestars’ spec sheet publishes “CE EN 13594 2015, Level 1 KP safety certification”. Same standard, same 2015 revision, same performance level, same optional knuckle-impact test passed.

That matters more than it sounds, because the certificate is the only part of a glove description that is a test result. EN 13594 puts a glove through abrasion, cut, tear and seam-strength testing in a lab, with a separate optional impact test at the knuckle that earns the KP marking. Everything else on a glove listing — the leather grade, the knuckle material, the palm slider, the stitching pattern — is a description of what the glove is made of, written by the company selling it. When two gloves publish the same EN 13594 result, the independently checkable part of the comparison is over.

So the honest version of this page is not “which glove is safer”. It is “what does roughly double the money buy you on top of an identical test result”. There are two real answers and one that we think is mostly noise.

What the KLIM premium actually buys

1. GORE-TEX, and a promise attached to it

KLIM does not publish its own waterproofing numbers for this glove — it publishes a membrane brand, GORE-TEX with GORE GRIP technology, which comes with Gore’s own “guaranteed to keep you dry” language. GORE GRIP is the construction where the membrane is laminated out towards the shell rather than floating inside a liner, which is why a Gore-Grip glove can be thin and still waterproof, and why it does not get that slack, shifting feeling a loose membrane liner gives you when your hand is wet.

Alpinestars names Drystar, which is its own in-house membrane, and publishes no hydrostatic head or breathability figure for this particular glove. This is the one place where Alpinestars could have won the argument on paper and chose not to: for the more expensive Andes V3 Drystar glove, Alpinestars publishes “5000mm waterproof protection” and “5000g/m2” breathability. So the company clearly can put a number on a Drystar membrane. For the SMX-Z it simply does not, and we are not going to borrow the Andes V3’s figure and attach it to a different glove. If you want a published waterproofing spec rather than a published brand, neither of these two gloves gives you one — and the brand with the external guarantee is KLIM’s. Our waterproofing explainer goes through why that trade keeps recurring across the category, and why rain performance is the one gear spec with no standard behind it at all.

2. A palm pad, which the Alpinestars does not publish

The KLIM lists a PORON XRD impact-absorbing pad in the palm, sitting under the carbon fiber knuckle protector, plus 3D silicone finger pads. The Alpinestars spec sheet publishes a full-grain goat leather palm with suede side-hand reinforcement and no palm armor at all.

This is a bigger deal than the knuckle, and it is the part of a glove most riders think about least. In a low-side you do not land on your knuckles, you land on your palms and then slide on them, and the heel of the hand takes both the impact and the abrasion. Leather handles the abrasion. A foam pad handles the impact. EN 13594 Level 1 certification tests the glove for abrasion, cut, tear and seam strength and the KP marking tests the knuckle — none of those four tests is an impact test at the palm. So the palm pad is a real difference the certificate does not capture, which is exactly why it is worth naming.

3. The carbon fiber knuckle, which is mostly noise

KLIM’s knuckle protector is carbon fiber and Alpinestars’ is nylon, and we think this difference is worth close to nothing to you. Both gloves passed the same optional knuckle-impact test to earn the same KP marking at the same level. That is the comparison. Carbon fiber is lighter and looks better through a visor; it is not a published improvement in the result of the only knuckle test either glove has been through. If a glove listing leads with its knuckle material rather than its KP marking, it is telling you about the part of the glove it can photograph.

The asymmetry nobody mentions: who publishes it

One difference between these two gloves has nothing to do with the gloves. KLIM publishes its certification, its membrane, its knuckle and palm construction and its size range on klim.com, on its own product page for this exact model, where we read them. The alpinestars.com product URL for the SMX-Z Drystar returned a 404 when we went looking, so the Alpinestars specification on this page comes from the maker’s published spec sheet as carried by an authoritative retailer.

We are telling you that because it is the honest description of our own sourcing, and because it has a practical consequence: if you want to check a claim about the SMX-Z Drystar yourself before you spend money, you are going to be reading a retailer rather than Alpinestars. That is a real, if minor, cost of buying the cheaper glove, and it is the kind of thing a comparison that only reads listings never notices. It does not change the certification, which is Alpinestars’ own published claim either way.

What neither glove does

Both of these are waterproof gloves. Neither of them is a warm glove, and the two are not the same thing.

• No insulation, in either.KLIM lists none for the Adventure GTX Short, and Alpinestars lists none for the SMX-Z. For comparison, KLIM’s gauntlet-length Badlands GTX publishes “60 Grams 3M Thinsulate insulation on backhand” — so when KLIM insulates a glove it says so, and for this one it does not. Below roughly 50 °F these are both going to need help. Our winter glove ranking and heated glove ranking are the pages for that problem, and the cold-weather gear guide covers the layering order.
• Neither is a gauntlet.Both are short-cuff gloves designed to sit under a jacket cuff. In sustained heavy rain, water runs down your sleeve and finds the gap at the wrist regardless of how good the membrane is — the membrane keeps water out of the leather, not off your forearm. If your riding is genuinely wet for hours at a time, a gauntlet that seals over the jacket is the right shape, and gauntlet vs short cuff is the page that argues it out.
• Neither publishes a weight. No glove in our registry does, which is worth stating because helmet makers publish weights and glove makers almost never do. If you read a gram figure for either of these, somebody weighed one themselves or made it up.
• Neither publishes Level 2.Both are Level 1. If you are looking at track use rather than road and touring, Level 1 is the street tier and you want to be reading EN 13594 Level 2 gauntlets — a category we do not currently track a single example of, which tells you how thin it is in the US market.

Fit and sizing, which decides more than either spec

KLIM publishes SM–3X for the Adventure GTX Short; Alpinestars publishes SM–3XL for the SMX-Z. Those ranges are effectively the same, and neither maker publishes a measurement-to-size table we could read for this glove, so we are not going to print one.

What we will tell you is the rule that matters more than any spec on this page. A glove that is loose in the palm is a glove that will rotate on your hand in a slide, and a seam is the first thing that fails when it does. EN 13594 tests seam strength precisely because seams are the weak point. Buy a glove that is snug across the palm with no slack fabric, with the fingertips just short of the ends, and accept that leather will give you a little room after a few rides rather than buying a size up to get there immediately. If you cannot try them on, buy from a retailer whose return policy lets you send the wrong size back — which, with a glove, is most of the purchase decision. Our gear fit guide goes through this joint by joint.

The verdict

Most riders should buy the Alpinestars SMX-Z Drystar. It is the cheapest glove we track that publishes both halves of the job — a real EN 13594 Level 1 KP certification and a named waterproof membrane — and it publishes the identical certification to a glove that costs roughly twice as much. For commuting, touring and mixed-weather road riding, that is the sane default, and the money you do not spend here buys a serious amount of the gear you are probably still missing.

Buy the KLIM Adventure GTX Short in two situations. The first is sustained wet riding where you want GORE-TEX and the external guarantee that comes with it rather than an in-house membrane with no published figure. The second is if the published palm pad matters to you — it is a genuine protective feature the Alpinestars does not list, in the place hands actually land. Adventure riders doing multi-day trips in weather they cannot choose are the clearest case for both of those at once.

What should not decide it: the carbon fiber knuckle, the brand on the cuff, or a belief that the pricier glove is better certified. It is not. They publish the same result. If you want to see where both of these sit against the rest of the category, including the gauntlet version of the KLIM and the certified glove we could not stock-verify, start with the adventure and touring glove ranking.

One stock note, because it changed what this page could compare. We checked availability live on 5 November 2026 before writing a word. The KLIM Badlands GTX Long — the gauntlet version, and the fourth certified glove in our registry — returned “Only 3 left in stock”, which is below the depth we will feature a product at on a new page. That is why this comparison is the short-cuff KLIM rather than the gauntlet, and it is the better pairing anyway: two short-cuff gloves at different prices isolate the money question instead of confusing it with cuff length.