It is important to note that while each style is unique, there is overlap between each style, and often no visible difference. The most common styles today are freeride, freestyle, and freecarve/race.

Freeride

The freeride style is the most common and easily accessible style of snowboarding. It involves, in the most simple terms, riding down any terrain available. This could include the beginner's first time down the bunny slope, or riding down a 60° slope in the backcountry. All the while freeriders may include aerial tricks and jib tricks borrowed from freestyle, utilizing whatever natural terrain they may encounter.

The freeride equipment usually used is a soft boot with a directional twin snowboard. Since the freeride style may encounter many different types of snow conditions, from ice to deep powder, the freeride snowboard is usually longer and has stiffer overall flex. A good example of a binding stance used is the forward stance with both leading and trailing feet in positive degree of arc ranges e.g. +9°/+15°.

Freestyle

This style incorporates the rider with man-made terrain features such as rails, boxes, handrails, jumps, half pipes, quarter pipes and a myriad of other features. The intent of freestyle is to use these terrain features to perform a number of aerial or jib tricks.

The equipment used in freestyle is usually a soft boot with a twin tipped board, though freeride equipment is often used successfully. The most common binding stance used in freestyle is called "duck foot" which the trailing foot has a negative degree of arc setup while the leading foot is in the positive range i.e. -9°/+12°. Freestyle riders who specialize in jibbing often use boards that are shorter than usual, ones that have additional flex and ones that have filed down edges between both feet.

The majority of snowboard competitions concern this style of snowboarding.

Freecarve / Race

This often overlooked style of snowboarding focuses on carving and racing. Sometimes called alpine snowboarding, or the 'euro-carve', freecarving takes place on hard-pack or groomed runs and focuses on the ultimate carving turn. Little or no jumping takes place in this discipline. Freecarve equipment is a hard boot and plate binding system with a true directional snowboard that is usually very stiff and narrow to facilitate fast and responsive turns.