Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) electrolytes are usually co-sintered with one of the electrodes (support component) at temperatures ≥1400 °C to get a fully densified microstructure. Lowering this temperature to 1200–1300 °C offers several advantages such as prevention of microstructure coarsening of the electrode and undesirable reactions between the electrolyte and electrode materials, lower sintering cost, and shorter production cycle time. To lower the electrolyte sintering temperature, a thorough understanding of the densification behavior of the electrolyte materials is important. In the current work, we compared the densification behavior of three different types of 8 mol% yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte powders: (i) TZ-8Y from Tosoh (Japan), (ii) MELox 8Y from MEL Chemicals (UK), and (iii) YSZ-HT from Huatsing Power (China). The YSZ powders were pressed to form disc-shaped pellets that were sintered at different temperatures ranging 1200–1400 °C. The density and linear shrinkage of the sintered pellets were measured. Among the three YSZ powders, MELox 8Y showed the best densification behavior at lower sintering temperatures with 93 and 96% of the theoretical density at 1250 and 1300 °C, respectively. Although YSZ-HT showed higher sintering rate than TZ-8Y, a sintering temperature of 1350 °C was required for both the powders to reach a theoretical density ≥95%. Our results indicate that different factors besides the particle size play a significant role in determining the sintering rate and densification behavior of the YSZ electrolyte. These factors possibly include the powder synthesis method, post-processing of the powder (such as spray drying), and so on.