They both offer a beautiful look with clean and modern lines. The one major difference between the two is price. Inset cabinets can cost approximately 15-30% more than overlay cabinets. You can also lose some storage space for those larger dinner dishes in inset cabinets.
The Full Overlay door is a more current design look and is a more expensive cabinet option because more wood is used to completely cover the cabinet boxes. Partial Overlay Doors, sometimes also called Standard, Traditional or Half Overlay..
The Pros of Full Overlay Cabinets
This is different from the partial overlay cabinets popular a few decades ago, which showed the face frame in the spaces between doors and drawer fronts. Lower Cost: Full overlay cabinets take less skill to install and are therefore less expensive.
A Standard Overlay door will lay on top of (overlay) this 1.5” face frame 3/8”, leaving 1-1/8” revealed on all rails and stiles. A Full Overlay door will overlay that same 1.5” face frame 1.25”, leaving a ¼” reveal on the sides (stiles) and bottom (rail).
Since they are not set inside the cabinet frame, full overlay provides the greatest amount of storage with ample room for items such as pots and pans. Double doors in full overlay style come without the vertical stile on the face frame which allows for even better storage capacity and easier access of stored items.
Because a frameless cabinet will likely be made of thicker materials to compensate for the lack of frame, frameless cabinets usually cost more. However, you can find framed and frameless cabinets made of the same thickness and type of wood.
Is Full Overlay the Same As Frameless? Full overlay cabinets still show approximately 1/4-inch reveal of the face frame while frameless cabinets do not show a frame reveal.
Double door cabinets with full overlay come with an additional benefit. They do not have a vertical face frame stile between the two doors, which allows homeowners to store larger items in the cabinet without having to work around the center stile needed in a standard overlay cabinet.
Full Overlay Cabinets
The doors and drawers on a full overlay cabinet cover the face frame almost completely with a ¼ inch of space between the doors and drawers. This differs from a standard overlay which has at least 1 ¼ inches on all sides of the doors and drawers.
Full overlay doors cover all or nearly all the front edge of the cabinet side on a frameless cabinet. Half overlay doors cover a little less than half (typically 5/16") of the cabinet side, so that two doors hinging on opposite sides of a 3/4'' partition will have 1/8'' of space between them.
A full overlay cabinet door style means that there is very little cabinet face frame showing around each door and drawer front, creating a living space with a modern style and seamless appearance.
In this type of construction doors and drawer fronts overlap the face frame of the cabinet, leaving a ¼” reveal of the framework around all doors and drawer fronts.
They cost more. They need more care – door and drawer adjustment. They are framed cabinets so less storage space than frameless cabinets. They don't work well in modern design.
Frameless cabinets do not have a face-frame like inset cabinets. Frameless boxes are constructed with ½” – ¾” thick sides, tops, and bottoms. The doors on frameless construction fully overlap the box and always conceal the door hinges.
Half overlay is a reference to a particular measurement that allows for doors and drawers to be placed so they reveal dividing strips of the front face frame, but it can reference a particular characteristic associated with Euro box cabinets too.
A "true" full-overlay door style leaves roughly a 1/8" clearance on the left and right edge with 1/4" reveal top and bottom. Often when referring to full-overlay many manufacturers have a 1/4" reveal on the left and right which is most common.
If your cabinets are designed for full overlay, it means that the doors completely overlap the opening on all four sides. The correct determination for full overlay is typically 3/4 inch on all sides.
Overlay refers to how much the door overlaps on the hinge side. You can determine this by measuring the width of the door, subtract the width of the opening and divide that in half. For example, if the door is 1” wider than the opening, that means it overlays 1/2" on each side, so you would select 1/2" overlay hinges.
Most common are half and three-quarter overlays which, as you might expect, conceal half and three-fourths respectively of the cabinet frame.
Door reveal refers to the portion of a cabinet frame left exposed after the door is attached. The size of your reveal is determined by the size of your doors in relation to your cabinet case frame.
An overlay door is a door which, when closed, lays “on top” of the cabinet opening (no part of the door goes into the opening since the door is larger than the opening). The overlay dimension is simply how much bigger the door is than the opening of the cabinet (as measured on the hinged side of the door).
“Full-overlay” cabinets leave very little of the cabinet frame or box exposed and have become very popular because of this continuous, more modern look. Frameless cabinets are always full-overlay, while framed cabinets can be either full overlay, inset (see above), or partial overlay.
Frameless cabinets only offer one overlay style, Full Overlay. The Full Overlay of a frameless cabinet completely covers the entire box, leaving only a 2mm reveal that creates a sleek, seamless appearance, making it a popular choice for modern and contemporary styled kitchens.
Frameless cabinets are a better option for smaller kitchens in which every inch matters. They offer a modern look, more drawer and cabinet space, and no center stiles that get in your way. Plus you get to seem wildly exotic when you tell your friends you went with the European style.