Should your tent be freestanding or pitch on trekking poles?

What each one actually gives you

Freestanding means the tent stands on its own poles with no stakes. You can pitch it anywhere flat, pick it up and shake it out, and move it after you discover the root under your hip. It is the reason this style still outsells everything else.

A trekking-pole shelter removes the pole set from the pack entirely, which is the single biggest weight saving available in a shelter. Some of them are roomier than freestanding tents twice their weight, because the geometry does not have to hang off a pole hub.

Semi-freestanding sits between: the head end stands, the foot corners must be staked. It behaves like a freestanding tent in a meadow and a non-freestanding one on a platform.

The learning curve is real but short

The common worry is that a trekking-pole pitch is fiddly. In practice it is three or four attempts in the garden. Modern designs pitch fly-first from four or six stakes and are square when they are right — if it looks wrong, a stake is in the wrong place, not the tent.

The genuine drawback is footprint. A trekking-pole shelter usually needs a bigger, flatter rectangle than a dome of the same floor area, and in a tight forest site or a busy alpine campground that is a real constraint rather than a theoretical one.

If you do not use poles

Buying a set of poles purely to hold the tent up usually cancels the weight saving, and at that point a light freestanding tent is the simpler purchase. Several makers sell dedicated tent poles for their trekking-pole shelters, which is a reasonable middle path but rarely the lightest one.