Squarebill or lipless: one has a running depth, the other sinks

The published figures

The running depth row is the whole comparison. One lure has a depth built into it and the other has a depth you choose on every cast.

A bill is a depth control, and it costs you everything else

A crankbait lip catches water and drives the bait down until the pull of the line balances it. That is why the depth is a published figure rather than a technique — it is a property of the lure.

The upside is repeatability. You can fish a 4 ft flat all afternoon and know the lure is at 4 ft on every single cast, with no counting, no line watching and no judgment.

The downside is that 6 ft is a hard ceiling. There is no way to fish a squarebill at 15 ft. For that you need a different bill entirely, which is what the deep-diving class exists for — our crankbaits page lays the bills out by depth.

No bill means you are the depth control

A lipless crankbait is denser than water and published as sinking. Cast it, and it goes down at a steady rate until you start winding.

Count as it falls. Three seconds might be 6 ft, eight seconds might be 16 ft, depending on the weight you chose. Start winding at the count you want and the bait swims roughly level.

This makes one lure cover the entire water column, which is genuinely useful when you do not yet know where the fish are. It is also why it is the better choice on a strange lake: you can search vertically as well as horizontally.

Cover decides it more often than depth does

Here is the practical rule that matters more than any specification on this page.

Wood and rock: squarebill. The square lip deflects instead of wedging, and the whole design assumes contact. Fishing a lipless through a laydown costs you lures.

Grass: lipless. You can rip it free of vegetation and the snap triggers strikes. A squarebill fouls and stays fouled.

Nothing at all: lipless. On a bare flat or over deep structure the squarebill has nothing to deflect off, so its main advantage is switched off.

Our lure color page makes a similar argument about water clarity — the conditions pick the lure far more often than the fish do.

Season is a decent proxy for both

Squarebills shine when bass are shallow and near cover, which is most of spring and much of autumn. Our spring lures page carries the squarebill for exactly that reason.

Lipless baits shine when fish are deeper or when you need to cover water fast, which is winter, early spring before the water warms, and any day when the fish have moved off the bank. Our winter lures page leads with one.

That is a generalization and generalizations about bass are wrong roughly a third of the time. Treat it as a starting point rather than a rule.

The silent specification is worth a paragraph

Strike King publishes this KVD 1.5 as silent. Most squarebills rattle, and the silent version exists because on heavily fished water a quiet bait sometimes out-fishes a loud one.

It cuts the other way in stained or muddy water, where sound is one of the few ways a bass locates a lure at all. In that water a rattling bait is the better tool, and this specific model is the wrong one.

Strike King does not publish a sound specification for the Red Eye Shad in the source used here, so we are not going to tell you what it does or does not do. Buy the silent squarebill for clear, pressured water and buy on published depth everywhere else.

If you only buy one

Buy the lipless. It covers the entire water column, it searches water faster, and it works in grass and open water — which between them is most freshwater bass fishing.

Buy the squarebill second, as soon as you find yourself fishing wood or rock in less than 6 ft of water. At that point it stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the only right tool in the box.