Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
Customer Service: (253) 677-0290
By Daniel Rotaru, Owner and CEO at Decks Restore WA Contractor License # CC DECKSRL797P2
Every week somebody calls me and asks which composite decking brand is best. Trex, TimberTech, or Fiberon. The reviews online say all three are great. The guy at the lumber yard tells you whatever brand his store happens to stock the most of. Manufacturer warranties read like they were written by lawyers who never plan to pay one out.
What I can tell you is what I have actually seen with my own eyes on decks I built in Tacoma, Federal Way, Gig Harbor, and Renton between 2017 and 2019. Those decks are now seven, eight, and nine years old. I drive past most of them on my normal route. I have been back inside the yard at several. A couple of my older clients still call me for small touch-ups. Those boards have lived through nine Puget Sound winters now, and I have real answers about what holds up here and what does not.
This is what I would tell a friend across the fence if he asked which brand to put on his deck this spring.
I am only writing about boards I have personally installed and personally walked years later. I will not comment on lines I have not put down myself. Within those three brands, here is what I have on the ground:
Trex: Enhance Basics, Enhance Naturals, Transcend, and a few Select jobs. TimberTech: AZEK Vintage, AZEK Harvest, and PRO Reserve. Fiberon: Sanctuary, Concordia Horizon, and Good Life.
Every deck I will mention sits in the South Sound or Pierce County. Same weather. Same UV index in summer. Same eight months of damp and moss pressure between October and May. If you are researching composite decking and live somewhere drier than us, your mileage will be different.
I am also leaving out the substructure piece. Every deck I am referencing was built on properly sized joists at 16 on center or tighter where the manufacturer required it, with stainless or hot-dipped fasteners, with ground clearance, and with the right airflow underneath. A composite board sitting on a bad substructure will fail fast no matter whose name is on the box. None of the issues I describe below are substructure issues.
The honest answer on Trex is that the older entry-level lines and the newer premium lines feel like two different products to me now.
A Trex Enhance Basics deck I built in 2018 in Federal Way is, today, still functional but tired. The color has shifted noticeably toward gray, especially the south-facing run. Not faded in a streaky way. Just uniformly less saturated than it was the year we put it down. The homeowner does not mind. He tells me it looks “broken in,” which is a generous reading. I would describe it as a board that has visibly aged.
A 2017 Trex Transcend deck in North Tacoma is a different story. Transcend has Trex’s more protective shell wrapping all four sides of the board. That deck looks almost exactly like the day we finished it. Some surface scuffing where the homeowner’s dog runs the same line between the back door and the rail every morning. No real color shift. No mold staining. No edge problems where water sits.
What I have learned over time. The entry-level Trex lines do what they say they will do, but on a Puget Sound deck you are paying for low maintenance and getting low-but-not-zero maintenance. You will wash it. You will see fade. The structural promise is solid, and I have not had one Trex board rot, warp, or split in eight years of work, but the cosmetic promise is more conditional than the marketing makes it sound.
The mid and upper Trex lines hold up beautifully here. I would put a Transcend deck on my own house. Their official Trex residential warranty runs 25 to 50 years depending on the line, and on the higher-end boards I have actually seen them earn that.
AZEK is the line I install most often when the budget allows.
The reason is the construction itself. AZEK boards are capped polymer all the way through. Not a wood-plastic composite with a cap, a fully synthetic board. In our climate, that matters more than people realize. The wood content in a composite is the part most vulnerable to mold, mildew, and the kind of cosmetic staining you get when organic debris sits on the surface through a wet November. PVC does not feed mold the way wood-composite does.
An AZEK Vintage Coastline I installed in Gig Harbor in 2018, full water view, full salt fog, zero overhang, is the deck I would point to if you asked me what eight years of exposed Puget Sound conditions actually looks like. Those boards are nearly indistinguishable from new. There are two faint chalky spots where seagulls have done what seagulls do. The homeowner cleans them off with a soft brush and warm water once a year. No replacement boards. No fade I would call out without a side-by-side photo from 2018.
The trade-offs are real, though. AZEK costs more than Trex’s mid-tier and noticeably more than Fiberon’s mid-tier. AZEK also feels different underfoot than a composite. Some clients love that. A few have told me the surface feels too plasticky compared to the wood-plastic hybrid feel of Trex. That is a preference, not a defect, and you really should put a sample under your hand and your bare foot before you commit a deck-sized check to one of them.
TimberTech also makes a wood-composite line, branded PRO. That line has held up well in my experience, though not at quite the AZEK level. Think of PRO as TimberTech’s answer to Trex Enhance. Capped on four sides, decent fade resistance, easier on the budget. I have a few in Renton and Auburn from 2019 that at seven years look closer to a mid-tier Trex than to AZEK.
Fiberon is the brand where I have to give a more layered answer.
The Fiberon Sanctuary decks I built in 2017 and 2018 in Puyallup and Tacoma are performing well. Sanctuary is Fiberon’s premium PVC line, and like AZEK it is fully polymer, which buys it the same advantages I just talked about. Two Sanctuary decks I have walked recently look excellent. Minor surface marks, no fade I would flag, no edge problems.
Concordia Horizon, which is Fiberon’s mid-tier wood-composite line, has been more mixed for me. One of my 2018 Concordia decks in Federal Way developed dark mottled spots in the second winter. Looked like mold colonies sitting in the cap. A pressure wash brought it back, but it came back every fall. The homeowner now treats the deck once a year with a deck cleaner, which is not what he signed up for when the salesman told him “low maintenance.” The boards are structurally fine. They are not what the showroom pitch implied.
What I tell people about Fiberon. The top line is genuinely competitive with AZEK at a slightly lower price point. The mid-tier lines are okay but I have personally seen more cosmetic issues from them in our climate than I have seen from comparable mid-tier Trex boards. The Good Life line at the bottom of Fiberon’s range, I personally would not put on a Puget Sound deck. Too much wood content in the board, not enough protective cap, and the few I have inspected (not built, inspected) had problems by year four.
If the budget supports it, AZEK is what I most often recommend, and what I would put on my own house. The all-PVC construction handles our mold and moisture better than anything else I have installed in this climate, and the seven and eight-year-old AZEK decks I revisit confirm it for me every time.
If the budget is in the middle, Trex Transcend. It is a wood-composite, not a full PVC, but the shell on Transcend is real and it has held up cosmetically on every Transcend deck I have built here. Fiberon Sanctuary is a fine alternative if your retailer carries it and the pricing comes in lower than Transcend, but Sanctuary can be harder to source in the South Sound on short notice.
If you are shopping at the entry level, Trex Enhance and TimberTech PRO Reserve are both reasonable. Either will give you a deck that looks acceptable in year seven. I would skip Fiberon Good Life. And at this price tier, please manage your expectations. Entry-level composite is not maintenance-free in our climate. It is maintenance-light. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling, not building.
A few things that matter regardless of which brand you pick.
Board spacing. Tight spacing traps moisture and debris. The manufacturer specs gaps for a reason. Use the gaps they tell you to use.
Picture-framing and breaker boards in long runs. Every long composite deck I have built without a breaker board developed creep at the joints by year five. The ones with breaker boards did not.
Joist tape. I now tape every joist on every composite deck we build in Tacoma. It costs maybe $150 on a 300 square foot deck and it has measurably extended the life of every substructure I have gone back to on a taped job.
All three brands print attractive warranty numbers. 25, 30, 50 years on the premium lines. They are real, but they are limited residential warranties with conditions about how the deck was installed, whether the warranty was transferred, what counts as a covered defect, and what threshold of fade the manufacturer will agree to call a failure. Read the actual document, not just the marketing summary, before you assume your problem will be covered. The Trex link above is a good example of how a real warranty actually reads. TimberTech and Fiberon publish similar documents on their own sites.
Here is what none of the warranties cover. A deck that looks tired. A board that has shifted color or shows surface wear after five wet winters has not failed. It has aged. Composite is durable. It is not eternal.
If I were building a new deck on my own Tacoma place this spring and I wanted to look at it in 2035 and not think about it in between, AZEK Vintage. That is what I would build. If the budget said good not great, Trex Transcend. If the budget said we are moving in four years and we just need a deck that works, Trex Enhance Basics, knowing that whoever buys the house in 2030 is inheriting a deck that looks well-used.
The right way to figure out which one fits your project is to look at real, aged decks in our climate before you decide. I am happy to walk you through ones we have done. You can see a sample in our project gallery or read about how we approach a new composite deck build. If you are not sure whether your existing deck frame can take a new composite surface, our deck resurfacing page covers that situation. And if you want to see how we work specifically in Tacoma, our Tacoma deck builder page gives the full picture.
When you are ready for an on-site estimate, call (253) 677-0290 or request a free quote. Every estimate at Decks Restore comes through me personally before it goes to the customer.
About the author. Daniel Rotaru is the owner and CEO of Decks Restore LLC, a fully licensed, bonded, and insured deck builder serving Tacoma, Federal Way, Gig Harbor, Renton, Puyallup, Auburn, Kent, and the surrounding Puget Sound area. Washington Contractor License # CC DECKSRL797P2. Daniel personally walks every project at quote and at final inspection.