Sick of scrubbing with subpar tools? We lined up 11 of the best steam mops available today and scoured hundreds of square feet of stone, tile, and synthetic flooring to find out which ones will remove the pain of keeping your home clean. Pushed to their max against tough pet stains, kitchen messes, and grimy multi-year build-up, these mops did their best to clean it all. We tested them on floors, in showers, under furniture, and around corners. We measured tanks and cords and tested every accessory. Whether you're trying to wipe down a single muddy entryway or deep clean an entire home's worth of grout, we've got the right steam mop for your house and your wallet.
For a tried and true steam mop that we love to use, the Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe is hard to beat. It's easy to use and does a great job cleaning just about any floor mess, all for a reasonable price. It produces a powerful and even steam, glides smoothly, and has a nice, articulating cleaning head, making it a breeze to get into those hard-to-reach corners and edges. The cleaning pad's convenient pull tab allows for easy removal, presenting minimal risk of dirtying up your hands with grime from the floor. The PowerFresh Deluxe also has a handy step release on the back to quickly release the mop head, freeing a large patch of sturdy bristles for getting out those stubborn stains.
The only area in which the Deluxe falls short is regarding attachments. This simple model is solely meant for everyday floor cleaning and doesn't come with any other attachments or features beyond its two washable mop pads (one soft and one more coarse) and the built-in scrub brush. The mop pads can easily be removed and cleaned after use, though the elastic bands don't facilitate hands-free removal like some others we tested. But if you're after a steam mop that does a great job cleaning up floors from the regular spills and dirt of everyday life, the performance and price of the simple yet effective PowerFresh Deluxe will be right up your alley.
If you're the type of cleaner who starts wiping the floors and then gets distracted by the grime in the shower grout, the Bissell PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet is the steam mop for you. This powerful steamer is painless to maneuver on just about any surface, reaching into corners and narrow spots with ease. The removable water tank lets you attach a host of included accessories to clean far more than just your floors. A foot-activated scrub brush on the back also enables you to spot clean without breaking stride.
However, for larger areas that need scrubbing, this quick-fix step brush isn't a long-term solution. The Lift-Off has a host of possible attachments for whatever you're hoping to steam clean, though swapping between them can be cumbersome because the tank must be removed first. Yet once the unit is set up, every one of its clever attachments does a great job getting things clean. If you're after the steam mop for more than just your floors, this is the one for you.
The PurSteam 10-in-1 is a versatile steam-cleaning device. The unit's ten attachments allow the user to move from the kitchen floor to the carpet and even the sliding glass door, cleaning each surface effectively. The handle also detaches for easier management, storage, and water tank filling, and the heating element turns the water to steam in around a minute — impressively fast. Moreover, the PurSteam comes with three Velcro-backed pads that are machine washable. All these features and more come at a highly competitive price, and this unit is often available at well below its list price.
While we like the numerous attachments and quick heating time of the PurSteam, we did not like its flimsy feel. Specifically, the head of the mop is rather loose, requiring extra effort to keep it moving in a straight line. Additionally, this mop does not clean as well as some of the higher-priced mops. The PurSteam will get the job done on the tough stains and caked-on dirt, but cleaning these messes requires a little more time. With this in mind, we think that the unit is priced correctly and that the casual user will be happy with its performance. After all, the unit is among the more adaptable steam mops on the market.
The PurSteam 10-in-1 provides users with a host of attachments to deep clean the whole house, but it requires a little more effort than others we've tested.
Cord Length: 16' plus 6'6" hose | Water Tank: 1600 ml
REASONS TO BUY
Industrial strength cleaning accessories
Massive water tank with great pressure
Easy to swap between attachments
REASONS TO AVOID
Head only pivots side to side
Small cleaning pads soil quickly
Very expensive
The Dupray Neat Steam has by far the largest water tank of any model we tested, and that's just the beginning of what makes it an excellent choice for deep cleaning. So you don't get worn out moving the tank back and forth across the floor, this mop takes a unique approach, putting the water tank on wheels and letting it follow you around while you scrub. Not only does this make it easier to move around, swapping between attachments at the end of the hose is as simple as pressing the release button. A plethora of rugged accessories help you tackle serious grime just about anywhere in your home.
Of course, all this extra water takes far longer to heat than any other model. While most mops are ready to steam in under a minute, the Dupray requires a full 8 minutes to heat up. Its mop head attachment also only pivots from side to side, making it difficult to adequately clean under cabinets or furniture. Though it comes with three thick pads, they are all rather small and soil quickly during use. We're big fans of the seriously rugged scrubbing attachments, though, and every time there's a tough mess to tackle, we reach for the Dupray.
The Bissell Symphony steam cleans and vacuums simultaneously, allowing you to pick up debris and sanitize your kitchen floor in one fell swoop. For those who find themselves cleaning high-traffic areas several times a week, this can vastly cut down on overall cleaning time. Some do-it-all machines fall short, but the Symphony performs its double duties exceptionally well, keeping the contents of its dust tank dry, so it's easy to discard while still blasting away stuck-on filth and stains with steam. It comes with a scrubbing pad for extra stubborn stains, which easily cut through all of the set-in grime we threw at it during our testing. It's easy to turn off the steam and simply use this as a stick vacuum on your carpets, or you can purchase the carpet glide attachment to use the steam to deodorize your rugs.
If you need to clean up stubborn stains or deeply rooted grout grime, the relatively simplistic Symphony falls a little short. It lacks any additional accessories to really get into those harder areas or put extra elbow grease into serious stains. We're not particularly impressed with its performance on tile, without any scrubber pad, but it still does the job for everyday dirt. If you're more of a frequent-and-casual cleaner, this combo mop/vacuum may be exactly what you've been looking for to streamline your cleaning process.
For quick clean-ups, the Bissell Symphony Pet is a crowd favorite.
Credit: Laura Casner
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We adore the Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe for its impressive cleaning performance and usability on all kinds of floors.
Credit: Laura Casner
Why You Should Trust Us
We researched more than 50 mops for this review before compiling a list of the models most likely to serve our readers well. We then bought those mops and, as always, paid the full list price (we never want to be swayed by gifts from manufacturers). Next, we brought them into our testing lab to run them through their paces. This involved creating controlled messes of mud, ketchup, and grime and making cleaning passes with each mop, one right next to the other. We also filled and refilled water tanks, changed and washed cleaning pads, timed heating cycles, and ran each mop into the tightest crevices and most acute corners we could find, all to assess relative user-friendliness and maneuverability. To top it all off, we used all of the extra bells and whistles each mop offers to discover whether these additional features might be helpful in the average home.
Our comprehensive testing is grouped into four weighted rating metrics:
Cleaning Performance (40% of overall score weighting)
Ease of Use (25% weighting)
Maneuverability (20% weighting)
Features (15% weighting)
This review is headed by veteran Research Analyst Michelle Powell. Michelle has over a decade of experience working in the commercial foodservice industry, giving her a ton of hands-on experience with deep cleaning. She's backed up by Maggie Nichols, a longtime gear tester with a background in scientific research. Both of these analytic testers live in muddy mountain towns with pets and variable hard surface flooring, providing ample opportunity to test these mops.
In this most recent update, the review team was joined by Nick Miley, and Genaveve Bradshaw. Nick has over a decade of consumer product review work under his belt, backed by a master's degree in environmental sciences. Genaveve's diverse professional background makes her well suited to the practicalities of testing and rating products such as steam mops.
Attachments allowed much more diverse areas to be cleaned than just the floor.
How easily do these mops come apart? We tested that too.
There was a surprising amount of diversity between the different water tanks and how they get filled.
Analysis and Test Results
We did a deep dive to find the best steam mops, combing through spec sheets to find those most likely to deliver a good performance. We then spent over two weeks dirtying floors and cleaning them up to see which mops cleaned the best, were easiest to use, and were the most maneuverable. We also tested any extra features each mop offered. From there, we scored all of these attributes, weighting things like cleaning performance more highly than features, to arrive at scores on a scale of 0-100. The full results of all this testing are discussed below.
Value
In so many instances, you'll trade some amount of performance to get a great price on a product. But every now and then, a product manages to be the best of the bunch and save you money. That's the case with the Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe. This impressive steam mop outperformed the rest, snagging our top award while still being one of the less expensive models we tested. The PurSteam 10-in-1 is a solid budget pick if you can find it below its list price, which we commonly did. The PurSteam is not the best steam cleaner, but it offers a variety of attachments that make it useful throughout the house.
We put these mops to the test cleaning all kinds of floors to see which ones stand out in certain areas.
Credit: Laura Casner
Cleaning Performance
As you might guess, we consider cleaning performance the most important aspect of any steam mop. Therefore, we assigned 40% of each product's overall score based on its results in our cleaning tests. We purposefully tracked mud onto a variety of sealed stone and tile floors before we began our testing. We carefully pretreated our floors with stains, deep cleaned grout, and tested each mop's performance on standard wear in high-traffic areas.
General Tile/Stone Cleaning Performance
When cleaning tile and stone flooring (the only types of flooring where we would use a steam mop), all of the mops did an adequate job. However, there was a clear distinction between models that did great and those that simply did well. Two outstanding models excel at cleaning both synthetic flooring and tile — the Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe and Dupray Neat Steam. Three of the Bissell models — the PowerFresh Deluxe, Symphony Pet, and the Lift-Off Pet — as well as the Dupray Neat — all also do an exceptional job at synthetic floor cleaning. These mops could easily lift grime and dirt from hard floors, usually in a single pass.
The Bissell Symphony cleans exceptionally well and includes a built-in vacuum cleaner.
Credit: Laura Casner
With its integrated vacuum that works simultaneously with the steam mopping function, the Bissell Symphony sets itself apart from the competition. This one-two punch cuts your cleaning time in half since you don't have to sweep beforehand. The Bissell PowerFresh Slim 3-in-1, Shark Genius Steam Pocket, and Shark Lift-Away Pro also do an above-average job cleaning both tile and synthetic flooring. However, they lack the extra convenience of the Symphony's vacuum/mop combo.
The 'burst of steam' feature available on the Shark Lift-Away Pro and the Shark Genius Steam Pocket can cut through stubborn messes.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
A few models, including the PurSteam and the O-Cedar Microfiber, could clean hard surfaces decently well but require more passes and more effort overall to get the job done. We generally had to go over areas at least twice with these budget models before they were truly clean. Still, we found it faster to clean with all of these models than with your standard mop.
The Bissell PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet does a great job cleaning your floors.
Credit: Laura Casner
Stubborn Stain Performance
The majority of steam mops are most effective when used for regular cleaning rather than for removing stubborn stains that have spent a long time setting into the tile. That said, we went on a quest to find tile floors with old, set-in stains and were surprised at how well some of these models clean up old grime.
The water tank of the Bissell PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet lifts away from the main body of the mop, allowing you to attach a multitude of powerful scrubbing accessories to its included hose.
Credit: Laura Casner
By far, the most impressive contender for tackling heavy-duty build-up is the Dupray Neat Steam. This powerful mop puts out tons of steam when you need it most, with good pressure and a giant water tank to go the distance. It comes with a plethora of easily swapped-out attachments, so you always have the right tool for the job. We loved using this steamy cleaner on far more than just our floors and found it the perfect companion for scrubbing tile showers, countertops, and built-up backsplashes. When it comes to deep cleaning just about any hard surface in your home, the Neat Steam is tough to beat.
The Dupray Neat Steam comes with a host of attachments and powerful steam designed for deep cleaning.
Credit: Laura Casner
The Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe and PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet are two other impressive performers in this metric. These models both come with excellent mop pads that do a shockingly good job on their own, as well as scrubbing components when you need a little bit of extra oomph in your effort. The PowerFresh Deluxe quickly and easily pops away from the mop head using a simple step release, leaving you with a large scrubbing brush to dig into tough stains. The Lift-Off Pet features a flip-down scrubber behind the mop head that you push down with your foot to spot clean difficult areas. Both have top-notch steam pressure that makes cleaning that much easier.
The scrubbing brush of the PowerFresh Deluxe is the best tool we've found for stubborn stains.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
The Bissell Symphony Pet and PowerFresh Slim also have great pressure for consistent cleaning and mop pads that do an above-average job cleaning difficult stains without having to switch out for additional attachments. However, they don't score quite as well as the previously mentioned models, as they lack any additional scrubbing or scraping attachments for those times when you need a little something extra.
The Bissell PowerFresh Slim is one of several models that does a great cleaning job even without adding in the many attachments.
Credit: Laura Casner
Ease of Use
Though generally simple to operate, some steam mops are more user-friendly than others. We based each mop's ease of use score on the functionality of three main components: the water tank, steamer, and cleaning pads. We judged the water tanks based on size, how easy they were to fill and empty, and how long they took to heat up. We rated cleaning pads by how easy they are to swap out during use and their ease of cleaning once soiled.
Overall, almost every mop we tested heats up rapidly, producing steam within one minute of being plugged in. The only exception to this quick heat-up time is the Dupray Neat Steam, which takes a full eight minutes to heat up. However, it also holds 3-4 times the amount of water as most models — and up to 8x as much water as some — in its 1600ml tank.
Filling and using the Dupray is easy and always helps us get tough jobs done.
Credit: Laura Casner
By a slim margin, the Bissell PowerFresh Deluxe proved itself overall the easiest to use. It feels quite solid and can reliably stand up on its own — an underrated feature that makes storing and stepping away from the mop for a moment vastly easier to do. It comes with two thick, elastic pads of different textures that are easy to get on and off and simple to toss in the washing machine to clean. It has one of the larger tank capacities we tested, fitting 562ml of water when full, with a flip-open lid on a clear tank that makes it easy to see how much water you have left.
The large water tank opening and included measuring cup of the PowerFresh Deluxe.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
The Shark Genius Steam Pocket is near the top of the pack too. This model separates itself from the rest of the field with its touch-free pad changing, nearly-instant steam, and a water tank that is easy to fill. Its water tank is clear, and everything heats up in under a minute. The included pad is double-sided, and the power button features hands-free operation. It only falls short in its slightly squirrelly handling. The mop head pivots in every direction very easily, making it a bit challenging to push it in a straight line, particularly over textured surfaces. The Bissell Symphony Pet also performs quite well in this metric. It can easily stand on its own when you need your hands elsewhere, and the elastic pads are easy and simple to change in and out during use.
The ergonomic handle of the Bissell Symphony.
Credit: Laura Casner
The Bissell PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet is another fairly easy-to-use model. It has easily changed washable pads and can stand up on its own. It feels solid to use and has a clear tank. It only loses points because of its slightly oddly placed tank opening that forces you to turn the mop on its side to fill. The Bissell PowerFresh Slim and Shark Lift-Away Pro are also worth mentioning in this metric. The Slim is only slightly less impressive than other Bissell models because of its top-heavy design, making it slightly more awkward to use and preventing it from standing up on its own. The Shark Lift-Away Pro has hands-free mop pad changing but also the same overly-mobile head that pivots a bit too much and prevents it from standing upright. Its water tank is also closed by a screw-top, and the sides are semi-opaque, making it difficult to see the water level.
The hands-free pad changing of both the Shark Lift-Away Pro and the Shark Genius Steam Pocket is incredibly convenient for big cleaning jobs.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Maneuverability
One of the most tedious aspects of cleaning floors can be scrubbing hard-to-reach spots, including corners and narrow sections between appliances. We tested maneuverability by mopping various spaces and assessing mop head glide, corner and edge cleaning, and cord length. The top scorers in this metric glided smoothly across any surface and left no nooks or crannies unclean.
The most maneuverable model we tested is the Bissell PowerFresh Slim. Though many others glide just as well or have cords just as long, this nifty little steam mop outstrips the rest when it comes to getting into tight spots. Its elastic pads cover all edges of the mop head, allowing you to use any side, and it easily turns sideways to fit into narrow areas. Unlike other Bissell models, the Slim's mop head is straight on all four sides to better follow the edges in your home from any angle. It's also a touch smaller than the Shark models we tested, helping it to squeeze into all but the tightest spots.
It's hard to find fault with the maneuverability of the super narrow and impressively dextrous Bissell PowerFresh Slim.
Credit: Laura Casner
Second place in this metric is a four-way tie between two Bissell models — the PowerFresh Deluxe and PowerFresh Lift-Off Pet — and two Shark models — the Lift-Away Pro and Genius Steam Pocket. The Bissells glide very smoothly on all but the roughest of floors, with just a few points lost for the curved backs of their mop heads, making them more difficult to use all four sides. The Shark models are the opposite — they have huge pads with straight sides that easily turn sideways and pivot in any direction. However, their large pads catch a bit on more textured floors, like ceramic tile and stone.
The Genius slides under cabinets quite easily.
Credit: Laura Casner
The Dupray Neat Steam glides like a pro but loses out here with its unidirectional head that only tilts from side to side, making it difficult to get under furniture. The Bissell Symphony Pet glides smoothly, even with its added wheels to support vacuum functionality. However, the vacuum section sets the mop pad slightly behind when going straight forward, leaving a small portion of the floor unmopped.
The Dupray Neat Steam has a slender profile that moves easily, but it only pivots from side to side, making it harder to clean under furniture.
Credit: Laura Casner
Features
While some of the mops we tested are spartan in their features, others come with an array of attachments and accessories that make them much more functional cleaning machines. We put every attachment and feature to the test, scrubbing anything in our homes that we could reach, and we also tested included functionalities like cleaning brushes and steam adjustability.
The Black+Decker 7-in-1, PurSteam 10-in-1, and Shark Lift-Away Pro lead the pack in this metric. All of these mops come with a ton of additional (and useful) components and accessories, as well as extra mop pads. The steam settings on these devices remain adjustable in their various configurations. However, it's worth keeping in mind that swapping between tools isn't always the easiest on the PurSteam and Shark Lift-Away Pro.
The vast tool chest of attachments that come with the Black+Decker 7-in-1 makes this mop a formidable cleaning tool.
Credit: Abriah Wofford
The Dupray Neat also comes with many extra tools and features. It has extra mop pads, a cleaning brush, and a hose attachment to further your reach. Swapping accessories in and out with just a simple push of a button is effortless. However, there's no adjustability to its steam setting, so it loses a few points in that arena.
The Dupray Neat Steam comes with a ton of accessories built for deep cleaning far more than just your floors.
Credit: Laura Casner
The Bissell PowerFresh Slim 3-in-1 and Bissell Lift-Off Pet also include numerous accessories, but it's not quite as easy to swap between them. They both also only include a single mop head and two steam settings — low and high. The PowerFresh Deluxe and Symphony Pet also have just low and high settings for their steam expulsion. The Symphony Pet is the only model we tested with both vacuum and steam mop functions, allowing you to clean faster and with fewer tools. However, it lacks any other accessories, coming with just an extra mop pad. The Shark Genius Steam Pocket lacks any extra pads, features, or cleaning accessories but has the most adjustable steam levels of any model we tested.
The Bissell Symphony Pet may not come with other fancy features, but still has the unique combo of vacuum and mop we love.
Credit: Laura Casner
Conclusion
Anyone with a sealed hard surface floor in their home (i.e., not hardwood) can benefit from having a steam mop around for at least occasional cleanings. Whether you're after something simple to take the hassle out of the old mop and bucket set up or something that tackles showers and countertops just as easily as floors, there's a steam mop for your home, lifestyle, and budget.
—
Genaveve Bradshaw, Nick Miley, Maggie Nichols, and Michelle Powell
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