When consulted, consumer experts have produced several suggestions for the best choices in garage door openers:
Noise: The cheapest and most reliable openers are chain-drive, but they are also the noisiest. If you want a quieter model, you should go for a screw-drive opener since they have the fewest moving parts, even if they are a bit more expensive. The absolute quietest garage door openers are the belt-drive units, but you have to pay for the golden silence.
Strength: all you need to lift heavy doors is a ½ horsepower motor, and these motors are unlikely to burn out. If you have unusual or heavy-duty needs, you may want to go one step up for ¾ horsepower. Although other strengths of garage door opener are available, they are hard to get a hold of, and mostly unnecessary.
Control panel: some garage door opener units have just a button, like a doorbell, to open and close the door. Most these days come with a remote or two as well. Other systems have a much more complex digital control panel that allows you to program in options, and lock down the garage when you need to.
While most openers these days come equipped with rolling-code security, you need to double-check, otherwise code-grabbers can simply use a universal opener to open your garage door.