A portable unit and a standby system solve different problems. Here's how to tell which one you actually need.
A portable generator costs $800–$2,500 and covers a refrigerator, a few lights, and phone chargers through an extension cord — for as long as you keep feeding it gasoline. A whole-home standby system costs $11,000–$22,000 installed and covers the house automatically, on natural gas or propane, for days. They are not two versions of the same product.
If your outages are short (under a day), your home is on city water and sewer, you heat with gas, and you can be home to run the unit, a portable generator plus a manual transfer setup can be a reasonable stopgap. It is also the right answer for a rental or a home you plan to leave within a couple of years.
Standby earns its price when any of these are true: you are on a well (no power means no water), you have a sump pump protecting a finished basement, you heat electrically or with a heat pump, outages in your area run multiple days, or you travel and need the house protected while you are away. After Isaias, Connecticut households that waited out week-long outages on portables were the ones calling installers first.
Gasoline storage, stabilizer, manual refueling in storms, carbon monoxide risk from improper placement, and the simple fact that a portable unit only helps if someone is home, awake, and able to run it. Those costs don't appear in the $1,200 price tag, but they are real.
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