Alpine snowboarding is a very small niche of the snowboarding scene. Alpine snowboards are primarily used by riders concerned with speed and clean carving. The boards are characteristically narrower than freestyle and freeride snowboarde, are longer, stiffer and are directional. Within the Alpine Snowboard niche there are three sub categories of board; all-mountain, freecarve and race. These represent different degrees on the spectrum between speed and all-terrain multi-purpose boarding.

Alpine snowboard equipment is generally not available in mainstream board stores and needs to be sourced from specialist retailers.