During our seven-plus years of testing mattresses, our team has refined a strict testing process focusing on key characteristics, including firmness and feel, construction and design and performance. Performance includes qualities such as edge support, motion isolation and temperature regulation.
Our team of mattress testers and certified sleep coaches includes individuals of varying genders, heights, body types, sleep positions and preferences. We thoroughly analyze each bed with all kinds of sleepers in mind and use our extensive experience to compare and contrast all the mattresses that enter the doors of our testing facility.Firmness and feel
Firmness and feel
Aside from the bed's general appearance, firmness and feel are the first elements we assess. These elements will help narrow down which beds are most suitable for you.
Simply put, firmness is how hard or soft the mattress is. The industry standard for rating mattress firmness is a scale of one to 10, with one being the softest and 10 being the firmest. Our team measures this in both subjective and objective ways. We find the objective firmness level of each bed using our super cool Mattress Smasher 9000 machine, designed by the engineers at CNET Labs. We run each bed through the device multiple times, taking the average as the final objective score and comparing it to our subjective analyses.
The Mattress Smasher gets ready to smash a bed and provide us with an objective firmness score. Aly Lopez/CNET
Below are the objective firmness levels of the best hybrid beds on this list, sorted from softest to firmest.
Feel is where we get handsy with the mattresses. What does it feel like when lying on the bed? Does it bounce back quickly when we move around on it? Does it have the traditional feel of dense, sinking memory foam, or is it more responsive like latex foam? We thoroughly examine and review the firmness and feel of each bed in our reviews so you can picture exactly what it feels like to lie on it, since we know you can't test the online bed-in-a-box mattresses before buying one.
Construction and design
We can estimate the durability and performance of a mattress based on what it's made of. Individually wrapped coils help hybrid mattresses last longer than all-foam mattresses because they have a more solid structure that won't degrade or break down as fast. All-foam mattresses are generally more susceptible to sagging over time, but many higher-end bed brands now use high-density foams that will last 7 to 10 years or beyond if taken care of properly.
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