This is a tool for designing Pathfinder 2nd Edition weapons!
It is primarily intended for GMs seeking to homebrew items, but as a player you might also find it useful for proposing tweaks, or just getting a better understanding of how the game's balance works.
And remember! At the end of the day, Pathfinder is still a role-playing game so it's not all about micro-optimizing a weapon.
To avoid maintaining yet another dataset, weapon metadata is obtained from Foundry VTT's PF2e module using this little macro (can be ran in any world where you have permission to access macros).
If the world contains third-party modules, weapons from them will be picked up, which can be handy if you'd like a quick glance over these.
There is no official guideline on how weapons are rated, but you can do a little math.
For example, from the set of various polearms you can tell that all of the maneuver traits have the same "weight", as do Versatile traits (I assume 1);
By comparing a Fighting Oar to a Longspear you can tell that Sweep + Versatile S = Reach.
With this you can slowly work your way through the dataset, comparing the weapons' weights to see what makes the most sense and leaves the most weapons of comparable strength with comparable numbers.
Finally, the 1&2 handed budgets are decided based on what's the most common total weight across the category - here I picked 4 & 9 for Simple, 7 & 13 for Martial, and 9 & 15 for Advanced.
Different weapon groups may be favored by different players for their critical specializations or compatibility with class feats, but I found no evidence of these impacting a weapon's trait budget - only unspoken conventions for various categories, like swords always dealing Slashing and/or Piercing damage, or knives never having a d10/d12 damage die.
Given that these have visibly different weighting, I don't think I'll be getting to these too soon, but you can use this old guide in the meantime.
to show stat blocks for all base weapons! (might take a moment)