Painting will be your lease expensive option. Priming over those knots to prevent bleed through will be critical.

Forget about trimming around the balusters please. That will never look good. Removal and reinstallation is expensive.

I removed the carpet on my stairs and painted them. There were knots in the wood. I tried some sort of filler I found online and it did not work at all. I painted a dark color. My guess is the knots will be less noticeable with darker paint colors. I did not try priming the knots as Joseph Corlett suggested. I think that would be a great idea. I planned on covering the stairs with a runner and therefore it was not that big of a deal to me.

Here are some examples of a runner going in different directions.

Thanks everyone who has commented so far. So that is three people now suggesting to paint vs stain. Why is that? Also the pics are really helping so thank you for sharing!

My staircase was a DIY project. If I were paying someone to do the work I may or may not have selected a different option. I went with paint because it is easier to use, dries faster, has an endless supply of colors that I can change on a whim, fewer fumes, and no need for as much dusty sanding that I loathe.

@abbrian if the wood species on the first floor is different than the wood species on the stairs, the stain will look different on the stairs, even if it's the same stain color. I think that's why most are suggesting paint instead of stain. I agree.

Thanks, ok just for more context: the floor is vinyl. We were going to get a stain and match the existing railing for the treads. If we are painting what color should we try to match? My concern is that it will look a little hokey?

I think it rarely looks good when someone tries to match a paint color to look like wood. I would go with a color other than brown. When I did my stairs, I painted them black.

You will never stain pine (which is notoriously tough to stain generally) to match your vinyl. Black paint will look like an intentional decision. Paint the handrail black as well.

I just wanted to post back with an update because we finally finished the project yesterday (except for a tiny detail up on the landing to address) and we LOVE how it came out. Everyone we talked to said we should be using paint and that stain wouldn't look good. Part of that is because we initially boxed ourselves in on what could be done with the landing. But on the steps themselves, some folks on the various forums, our GC, people at the hardware store all sorta frowned on gel stain and said we wouldn't be able to achieve what we wanted. I'm happy we tried anyway.

I don't consider myself handy and usually don't do my own work, but I spent a couple hundred bucks in supplies and just dove in. Watching a lot of youtube videos, then getting to work sanding (and sanding and sanding and vacuuming and vacuuming and vacuuming), stripping paint, pulling staples, filling holes and YES, staining. I think the pics below speak for themselves. Is the job perfect, NO it is isn't. Does it look better than if we just gave up and painted, YES i really think it does. We didn't even need to go the carpet runner route because the stairs really came out looking so much better than expected. We were even able to go right over our railings with the same stain to better match the colors.

Thought I'd leave some pics here for anyone else brave enough to give it a try!

EDIT: Updated this post because i forgot about a lot of the parameters we artificially put in place for ourselves in the beginning of this project and that definitely influenced what everyone was recommending. I'll get into the whole landing aspect in a couple days as soon as we finish that up!

Do you have a picture of how the landing turned out?

Wow!

@chiefy give me til the end of the weekend on the landing, have to button a couple things up! It's definitely the weak point of the project, but I'll explain what we did there.