Springfield Echelon Review — Our 2023 Gun of the Year

We did a mini review of the Springfield Echelon on Instagram a while back, so we came out to the ranch to give you the full treatment. The basics: it's a polymer striker-fired pistol, just released this year, holding 17 rounds in the standard magazine and 20 in the included plus-three extended mag. Today it's wearing a Swampfox Kingslayer, and I've also run it with just the irons — it ran like a champ either way.

The closest comparison — and those of you who follow me on social know I'm a huge Sig P320 fan — is that this is about the closest anybody has come to that weapon. The heart of it is a modular chassis: the serialized 'gun' is the fire control unit inside, which means you can change the grip, change the slide, change basically everything without buying a new firearm. Slide off, fire control unit out, new grip on — voila. It's the same philosophy that's in the P365 and P320, and it's exactly why we've been able to turn a 365XL into an X-Macro and a law-enforcement trade-in 320 into an X5. That flexibility matters.

The catch, for now, is the ecosystem. The gun just came out a few months ago, so there simply aren't that many options yet — you're not going to find a wall of aftermarket grip modules and slides the way you can for a 320. I'd imagine over the next year or two you'll start seeing aftermarket modules and more factory options, but today the modularity is more promise than practice.

Two more honest notes. First, this is not a made-in-USA product — it's built in Croatia, which is worth knowing given Springfield's historic American tradition. Second, I struggled for a while with whether it was as good as a 320. I've had it about a month and a half, and at first I just wasn't feeling it. Somewhere around 500–600 rounds, that changed.

Because man, this gun feels good. The grip is angled perfectly. The trigger has a nice break, minimal play, and a reset so short and quiet you can barely hear it. The optic mounting system is a standout: it accepts multiple optic footprints directly — no plates — and the Kingslayer with its RMR footprint locked down with no wiggle at all. Honestly, there's no wiggle anywhere in this gun. It's easy to clean, easy to shoot, and at right around the $600 mark — I think Classic Firearms had it down around $549 — that's a hell of a price for a gun like this. There's a reason it ended up as our 2023 gun of the year.