PLUSINNO All-in-One Tackle Box vs a Classic Plano Box

Every tackle shop I walk into sells the same two answers to the same question, and neither answer is wrong. The box that comes loaded with lures, ready the day it lands on your tailgate. Or the classic empty tray you fill with the tackle you already trust. I have spent a full season with both, the PLUSINNO all-in-one kit on the front deck of my 16-foot aluminum boat and a Plano 3740 StowAway sharing the truck for my bank trips. The question is not which one is better. The question is which one matches the tackle you already own.

Here is the short version. The PLUSINNO wins on price, on readiness, and on being the cheapest way I know to have a full tackle tray by sunset. The Plano StowAway wins on organization, on hook quality, and on being the piece of your system you will still own in ten years. For most of the season I reached for the PLUSINNO first. But the reasons I reached for it, and the reasons I started packing the Plano anyway, are the whole story of this comparison.

	PLUSINNO All-in-One Tackle Box	Plano 3740 StowAway
Price	A fully loaded kit for around the cost of a couple of empty trays. The tackle is the point of the price.	One empty tray that costs little on its own. The real spending starts the day you fill it.
Readiness	Open the box and it is ready. Bass and trout lures, hooks, weights, snaps, all sorted and fishing tonight.	Ready to hold things and empty of everything. You shop, sort, and choose before it ever fishes.
Organization	Fixed tray layout pre-sorted by type. Convenient out of the box, inflexible once you have opinions about it.	Movable dividers in the StowAway. You set the compartment sizes for the rigs you actually carry.
Lure and hook quality	Useful starter lures with honest limits. The treble hooks are soft, and the biggest baits are the first thing you will replace.	Nothing included, so every hook on board is one you already trust and paid for.
Durability	Clean-molded plastic that took a full season of truck beds and boat decks without a crack.	The same design has lived in boats, garages, and tackle bags for decades for a reason.
Room to grow	The fixed trays have a ceiling. When your kit grows, the box does not grow with it.	Empty trays stack in any tote, and a StowAway is the building block of a real tackle system.
Best for	First boxes, kids, gifts, and anglers who want to be fishing tonight.	Anglers with an established tackle drawer who need to get it organized for good.

How I Ran Both This Season

Both boxes fished the same water all season. The PLUSINNO rode the front deck of my boat on the weekend trips, came out of the truck for the bank sessions, and the Plano StowAway sat in a canvas tote holding the crankbaits and spinnerbaits I have carried for years. Same trips, same casts, two completely different ways of deciding what comes with you.

My home water is a 900-acre impoundment with gravel banks, flooded timber, and a main drop-off that holds smallmouth through most of the summer. That mix asks a tackle box two things at once. It has to keep sixty lures from tangling in a hot truck bed from Friday night to Sunday, and it has to hand you the right piece at the right moment when the bite window is short. The PLUSINNO did the first job easily. The second job is where the two boxes disagree.

I also gave my buddy's ten-year-old free run of the PLUSINNO for an afternoon at the camp bank, because a starter box needs to survive the exact person it is sold to. He dumped the trays, mixed the lures, and re-sorted them his own way, and the box took all of it. The Plano never got that test. It did not come with anything a kid wants to dump out, and you will see that difference come back in the honest half of this comparison.

In May I put the box in a daypack with one spin rod and walked a mile of shoreline above the dam, fishing pockets and timber blowdowns. The Plano stayed in the truck that day and did me no good at all. Gear you will not carry past the end of the road is gear that does not fish, and that is the quiet argument for a box you can consolidate to one carry.

Where the PLUSINNO Wins

Start with the math, because the math is the whole argument. The PLUSINNO box ships with roughly 120 pieces across six trays: hard baits, spinnerbaits, soft plastics, hooks, weights, snaps and swivels, sorted and ready. Buy that same list loose at a tackle shop and you will spend several times the price of this kit, and you will still come home missing half the terminal tackle. For an angler with a rod and nothing else, this is the cheapest way to a stocked box there is.

The second win is that it is ready when you are. I unboxed mine on the tailgate and was making casts within the hour, no tackle shop stop, no second trip for the tray of hooks you forgot, no standing in the aisle trying to remember what size weight actually fits the rig you have in your head. The box arrived organized and it stayed organized. That instant readiness is the entire product, and for a beginner it is the entire point.

The single-box carry is the quiet win. I have hauled the PLUSINNO from the truck to a gravel bank, up onto the front deck, and over to the camp table where I tie rigs at dusk. Everything goes in one lid and nothing stays behind in a second box you forgot on the tailgate. On a trip where you camp on the same water you fish, gear that consolidates to one carry is the difference between a ten-minute setup and spreading your hooks out across the campsite kitchen table.

What the kit actually holds is worth naming tray by tray, because that is where the value hides. One tray is terminal tackle, hooks in several sizes, split shot, egg sinkers, snaps, swivels and a couple of bobbers. Another carries the hard baits, including a compact crankbait that still caught fish a month in and a popper that drew most of my smallmouth topwater strikes. A third tray holds spinnerbaits, and the soft-plastic tray has worms and a creature bait. Not tournament gear. A working kit, and for a lot of people the first one they ever own.

And it is the best gift box I have bought in years. My buddy's kid went from a cardboard box of loose hooks to a real tackle setup in one handoff, and it costs little enough that giving it away does not feel like a decision. New anglers, kids, fathers who have not fished in a decade, all of them land on the same answer. This box is how you get started.

Where the Plano StowAway Wins

Now the honest half, and Plano owners are right about it. The StowAway lets you decide how the box is packed. The 3740 comes with movable dividers, so one compartment can swallow a spinnerbait while the next one holds a dozen hooks without them rattling together. The PLUSINNO trays are locked into a factory layout, and that layout is somebody else's opinion about how a box should be organized. By the second month you will find yourself disagreeing with it.

The divider mattered most one windy evening in August. The fish wanted a smaller profile by seven o'clock, and I was re-rigging as the light died. I shrank a StowAway compartment for a finesse rig, gave the spinnerbait its own cell, and knew exactly where the next three setups sat in the dark. The PLUSINNO trays are cast where they are, and no amount of re-sorting changes that.

The other thing an empty tray does is spare you the kit lures. The weakest part of the PLUSINNO box is the treble hooks on the biggest included baits. They are soft, they dull fast, and on the fish I catch most weekends you will be changing them out. An empty StowAway has nothing to forgive because you load it with the hooks you already trust. There is nothing included that needs replacing.

Then there is the long game. A StowAway tray is a building block. Two trays and a tote is a system that holds a real collection, and when the collection grows the trays still fit. This is the tackle storage equivalent of a good reel. Unexciting, dependable, still in your truck a decade from now. The PLUSINNO will earn its spot too, but fixed trays have a ceiling, and there comes a day when you outgrow it.

What a Season Does to the Kit Lures

Let me be straight about the weak spot, because it is real. The soft-plastic baits in the kit are fine, and the small hard baits hook fish all season. But the biggest treble hooks are the budget part of a budget box. They open up on a good fish more often than I would like, and by mid-summer I had swapped the worst of them for the hooks in my tote. Budget in a small pack of replacement trebles and you have fixed the only part of this box that actually fails.

I finally changed hooks after one lost fish. A July morning smallmouth took the popper, and halfway to the boat the treble opened and came back with a straightened point. Ten minutes with a small pack of replacement trebles fixed every suspect bait, and after that afternoon the box fished like a far more expensive one. That is the honest math of this kit, one small upgrade buys the whole box.

The box itself, though, took everything. Six months of truck beds, boat decks, one drop onto gravel, and a kid who re-sorted the whole layout, and the trays still latch, the hinge still holds, and nothing cracked. For the money, the case is the most surprising part of the kit. It is the hooks, not the box, that tell you the price point.

Carrying Both on a Camp-and-Fish Weekend

Here is how the two boxes actually live together on my trips. The PLUSINNO stays in the boat or the bank pack for the lures I am willing to lose, the kit baits and the cheap spinners, the stuff I hand to someone who needs a box. The Plano stays in the truck with the crankbaits I have thrown for years, the ones I would rather dig for than sacrifice. Cut lines happen, and banks eat lures, and I would rather a kit bait take the hit than a favorite.

On a camp weekend I pack the PLUSINNO to the bank in the morning, and the same box serves as the sorting tray on the camp table at night while the Plano trays stay safe in the tote. That split is the honest answer to the whole loaded-versus-empty question. They do not really compete. They cover different decades of your fishing.

Three Trade-Offs Up Close

Small items first. Hooks and split shot share a fixed compartment in the PLUSINNO, and when you empty a pocket of weights the pocket stays that size and the space goes to waste. The StowAway gives it back the same day, because the divider moves to where your tackle actually runs low.

The second is how the boxes behave on a moving deck. The PLUSINNO opens flat and wide, a joy at a camp table and a handful in a chop, with everything loose at the moment the boat rocks. The StowAway usually rides inside a tote, so it is half contained before the wave arrives. Calm mornings, neither one matters. Windy August afternoons are when you notice.

The third is the honest money one. The PLUSINNO is a finished purchase, hand over the money and you fish tonight. The Plano is the start of shopping, because the day you buy it you also buy the trays of hooks and weights that used to live loose in a drawer. Cheap is not the same as free, and the StowAway brings its real cost in across two or three trips.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the PLUSINNO if you are starting from nothing. No tackle drawer, no favorites, no inherited box of lures. It is also the right call when the box is a gift, or when you want to be fishing tonight instead of this weekend after a shopping trip. Its whole job is to lower the barrier to your first caught fish, and it does that job as well as anything I have used.

Buy the Plano 3740 StowAway if the tackle already exists. You have the lures, you know which ones work on your water, and what you are missing is a way to stop hunting through a heap of hooks on the camp table. Two trays and the discipline to pack them is the upgrade. The box is not the thing you are buying. The organization is.

If you are on the fence, buy the loaded box first and fish a season with it. Let it show you which pieces you actually reach for and which pockets you wish were bigger. By the time you know that, you will know exactly what the empty tray should hold, and the StowAway will make sense as the second purchase, not the first.

The full season, tray by tray and worn hook by worn hook, is in my long-term PLUSINNO tackle box review. And if you want to skip the debate and just have a system, the reasons an organized tackle box keeps you fishing cover what the organization is actually for out on the water.