Eight Sleep Pod Mattress Review: A Comprehensive Guide

Smart beds have radically changed our understanding of what a home mattress means. Once an unimaginable idea from the future, smart beds are now a reality, offering remarkable and unprecedented supporting features to help you achieve better sleep. Eight Sleep is a smart bed company developing some of the most advanced sleep products available today.

Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro mattress and Pod Pro Mattress Cover uniquely provide the sleeper with thermostat-style temperature regulation. Their luxury mattress stands on its own for its pressure-relieving design, while the portable cover allows you to radically transform what your existing bed is capable of.  Additionally, with support from the app, the Eight Sleep smart bed or cover both offer a variety of other features, including smart alarms, guided meditation, sleep-inducing white noise and a sleep tracker that can help you better understand your sleep patterns and the bed to accommodate your particular sleeping needs automatically.

Their products have changed what we can expect from our beds and reportedly improved the lives of many. Here, we offer an in-depth Eight Sleep mattress review, as well as its Pod 3 Cover, breaking down and addressing their innovative smart mattress and cover to help you decide if Eight Sleep meets the hype and can help you achieve a perfect night’s sleep. 

Sleeping warm can be horribly disruptive to some people’s ability to get quality rest. Also, some couples may have different temperature preferences for falling asleep. The Eight Sleep mattress offers temperature regulating technology that could be considered a solution for both issues, once unimaginable. Despite its uncomparable temperature regulation, the Eight Sleep competes across the board by providing various features one would expect in a smart bed and a luxury mattress. 

Eight Sleep offers unique smart alarm technology and includes guided meditation and white noise in the Eight Sleep app to help you wake up right and fall asleep more easily. In addition, state-of-the-art sleep tracking and noninvasive biometric data collected by the bed’s Active Grid layer will help you understand your sleeping needs while also helping you determine Eight Sleep’s settings precisely based on these needs. Beyond its smart features, the Eight Sleep is a luxury mattress in and of itself. The bed is made with layers of support and comfort and quality materials you would expect from top-tier hotel-style mattresses. Overall, the Eight Sleep is hard to compete with, and its perks validate such a claim. 

Temperature Regulation: The Eight Sleep mattress offers customizable temperature regulation on the bed’s sleeping surface. Easily controlled from the comfort of your smartphone (Apple and Android compatible), the Eight Sleep mattress allows you to choose a precise sleep surface temperature between 55°F and 110°F. Remarkably, this temperature control feature is also designed to be customizable on each side of the bed’s surface. Helping couples to each find their ideal sleep temperature and quickly helping to resolve any potential disagreements about air conditioning or heat. This ability to control sleeping temperature can also help lower AC or heating bills, helping to make every season more sleep-friendly!

Sleep Tracking: Eight Sleep’s mattress uses an Active Grid layer that offers its high-tech sleep tracking and temperature control features. In addition, by connecting to the bed’s sensors via wifi, Eight Sleep’s app provides health and sleep metrics that help you learn better sleep patterns while suggesting the best ways to adjust the bed to accommodate them automatically. The Eight Sleep is a high-tech bed that is a great fit for anyone looking to build or advance their smart home.

Smart Alarms: The bed’s technology competes across the board, even offering a smart alarm. This alarm allows you to customize a chest-level vibration-based alarm on each side of the bed without disturbing your partner or waking up to the typically stressful alarm sounds you may be used to. 

Luxury Build: Beyond Eight Sleep’s incredible sleep technology, the bed’s build doesn’t cut corners with its five-layer luxury construction that delivers supportive and pressure-relieving comfort. 

While some smart beds offer similar tracking and tech features, Eight Sleep’s temperature control is hard to beat, with the company claiming that within the first three months, a third of users experienced higher-quality and deeper REM during a night’s sleep!

The Eight Sleep Pod Pro 3 is a five-layer foam-based smart bed. The bed’s bottom two durable foam layers help create a sturdy foundation for sleepers, preventing unhealthy sinkage and disruptive motion isolation throughout the bed’s core. Its top three layers deliver comfort without trapping heat. The bed’s versatile design and medium firmness help to make it suitable for all sleeper types. However, like many all-foam beds, it may not be ideal for heavier sleepers (over 250 lbs.).

Eight Sleep uses a portable Hub that operates as a water pump and wifi-controlled computer. The Hub controls the Active Grid layer of the bed, which sits underneath a plush 1-inch cotton topper. The Active Grid layer, in collaboration with the Hub, is responsible for the smart features of the Eight Sleep. This layer is essentially a mattress topper; It uniquely combines foam, cotton, water tubes and sensors that span the entirety of the bed’s perimeter. This is the layer of the bed that manages to deliver the features that distinguish the Eight Sleep mattress. The sensors and water tubes are strategically constructed with foam and cotton not to deter comfort for the sleeper. The sensors in this brilliant tech layer of the mattress are what record and report your sleep patterns and help create tips to help you improve your sleep fitness. The water tubes are also silent and well-placed: Apart from the heating or cooling they are intended for, you can barely tell the Active Grid is equipped with so much of this tech. 

The Hub’s functionality is simple, but manages to accomplish a host of tasks. By heating or cooling water in the bed’s Active Grid layer, the Hub controls the sleeper’s preferred temperature on each side of the bed. As for the information reports gathered on your sleep quality, the Active Grid’s sensors consolidate its sleep tracking data to educate the sleeper on their patterns and make proposals for bed settings that enable the best quality rest. This data and conclusions by the Active Grid’s sensors are channeled to the Hub and then made accessible to you via the Eight Sleep app.

If you are okay with your current mattress but find that it runs too warm and don’t want to buy a new one, the Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover is likely a perfect solution. The Pod Pro Cover offers many of the same temperature-regulating and sleep-tracking features of the Eight Sleep smart bed. However, it doesn’t require throwing away your current mattress. The Cover’s components are also customizable on each side and controlled by the Hub and your Eight Sleep app. Furthermore, the cover also offers Eight Sleep’s GentleRise smart alarm and essentially acts as a portable version of the Eight Sleep smart bed’s Active Grid layer. The Pod Cover’s 1-inch cotton-based mattress topper that sits between you and its sensors is also quite cozy.

The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover works just like the Eight Sleep mattress’s Active Grid layer (which delivers its smart features). Using water-powered temperature control, the Hub and Eight Sleep app allow the sleeper to determine if they want a warm or hot surface. Like the mattress, the Eight Sleep cover offers a customizable surface temperature between 55°F and 110°F on each side (perfect for couples). The cover’s sensors also deliver sleep patterns and biometric reports to the Hub for viewing on the Eight Sleep app. The Cover is also easily installed. Simply set up the Hub, and then zip and attach the cover, which should flawlessly cover your existing mattress as if it were another sheet (instantly turning it into a smart bed).

Buyer’s Guide

Eight Sleep Mattress Features 

Responsiveness: This is a mattress’s ability to contour to your body as it moves across the bed’s surface. Consistently delivering quality and supportive comfort regardless of where you rest. The Eight Sleep mattress has a contouring core that accommodates its top three comfort layers, helping to provide excellent responsiveness.

Pressure Relief: This is a mattress’s ability to disperse and comfort a sleeper’s body weight evenly across the bed’s surface. Quality pressure relief delivers a hugging feeling while preventing disruptive sinkage that may lead to inflammation in some isolated pressure points of the body. The Eight Sleep mattress is almost entirely foam, with multiple foam comfort layers working with highly-durable supporting foam layers; You can expect significant pressure relief on this bed. 

Durability: A durable mattress is made with quality materials that should offer adequate long-term support. Durable beds made with luxury-grade components should be able to retain their bounce and not let you sink in for years after purchase. With time, all-foam mattresses such as the Eight Sleep end up being less durable than a hybrid mattress or innerspring. Fortunately, Eight Sleep offers an industry standard 10-year warranty for any issues with the bed’s foam components. 

Heating & Cooling: Thermostat-style heating and cooling in a mattress are unique to the Eight Sleep Pro Pod 3. Many luxury mattresses cater to hot sleepers by advertising airflow or cooling features built into the bed’s fabric. Eight Sleep is a smart bed that renders the unbeatable hydro-powered temperature-controlled Active Grid layer that no cooling mattress could compete with. This Active Grid layer distinguishes the Eight Sleep from the rest, allowing for a precisely determined warm or cold Fahrenheit on the bed’s sleeping surface with a simple tap on your phone.

Motion Isolation: This determines how well a mattress can isolate and prevent disruptive motion transfer from one sleeper to another. This is particularly important for couples with different sleeping patterns, who tend to wake each other up at night. Due to Eight Sleep’s foam-based construction, the bed reportedly offers great motion isolation. 

Edge Support: This determines the stability of a bed’s edges when someone sits or lies on them. Receiving consistent side-to-side support is important for side sleepers and couples who need to spread out.  Older sleepers also appreciate quality edge support because it makes getting in and out of bed easier. Despite being an all-foam bed, the Eight Sleep mattress reportedly showed quality edge support due to its bounce and sturdy design.

Smart Alarm:  Eight Sleep’s smart alarm is an innovative way of waking you up without the noisy stress of typical alarms. Instead, eight Sleep’s GentleRise smart alarm offers a thermal and vibration-based wake-up. Beyond the temperature control of the Eight Sleep, many consider Eight Sleep’s smart alarm one of their favorite features. 

The thermal-based alarm allows you to set the alarm for a friendly burst of heat or coolness to wake you up. For hot sleepers, this is a great way to start the day. In contrast, those who choose the burst of heat found it to deliver a cozy wake-up feeling. 

Additionally, the GentleRise smart alarm also offers a vibration-based alarm. This alarm is silent and customizable to each side of the bed so that it won’t disturb your partner sleeping. By sending gentle vibrations to your body to wake up, you can gradually come out of a deep sleep rather than be startled by noises and lights from typical alarms. Vibration intensity is also customizable. 

Finally, both smart alarms can be automatically set to a schedule.

Sleep & Health Tracking: The Active Grid layer of the Eight Sleep mattress is equipped with smart sensors that respond to the sleeper. These sensors track breathing, heart rate variability, general sleep patterns and similar data regarding the quality of your sleep. The sleep data is collected by the Hub and easily viewed on the Eight Sleep app. This data helps you understand your sleep patterns and is evaluated by the bed’s computer. The Eight Sleep app makes sleep scores to let you know your sleep fitness each night. Furthermore, Eight Sleep uses this sleep data to offer algorithm-based temperature suggestions and ways the bed can better accommodate you according to its understanding of your sleeping needs.

Spinal Alignment:  This determines a mattress’s ability to maintain the healthy and natural alignment of the spine. This is a crucial feature to consider if you struggle with back pain. While many all-foam beds lack proper spinal support due to their lack of bounce or firmness, the Eight Sleep has higher quality spinal support for an all-foam bed due to its medium firmness and sturdy foundation. Unfortunately, heavier sleepers may experience a lack of adequate spinal support due to potential sinkage. 

Shipping and Warranty: The Eight Sleep mattress offers a 100-night trial period with free shipping and free returns. Eight Sleep also provides a 10-year warranty for foam-related mattress issues and a 2-year warranty for technical problems with the Active Grid layer or the Hub. 

Side Sleepers: Side sleepers should enjoy the pressure-relieving qualities of the Eight Sleep mattress. While side sleepers may be concerned about the bed’s medium firmness, its top three comfort layers should help to offer the sufficient pressure relief that side sleepers need. The durable foundation of the bed that gives it good edge support should also comfort side sleepers who sleep close to the bed’s edges.

Back Sleepers: Back sleepers are more naturally aligned when they sleep and tend to want a firm level of support to retain their inherently healthier sleeping position. Despite being an all-foam bed, Eight Sleep’s medium firmness should make it more accessible to back sleepers who typically may shy away from memory foam or all-foam mattresses. Furthermore, the bed’s sturdy polyfoam layers should help to offer enough support for back sleepers to enjoy the comfort of this all-foam bed without worrying about posture-disrupting sinkage.

Stomach Sleepers: Stomach sleepers, like back sleepers, also prefer medium to hard firmness in a mattress. Stomach sleepers sleep more naturally aligned than side sleepers. However, they may experience inflammation around their neck and shoulders due to the isolated pressure exerted on these pressure points when they sleep. Stomach sleepers should enjoy the medium firmness of the Eight Sleep Pod mattress. Furthermore, stomach sleepers can also find comfort in the quality pressure relief of the Eight Sleep’s foam layers. 

Combination Sleepers: The Eight Sleep is a good choice for combination sleepers due to its versatility in accommodating various sleep positions. In addition, the bed’s firmness should accommodate most sleepers. The Eight Sleep mattress is reportedly quite responsive and can deliver quality comfort and support across the entirety of the bed’s surface. Quality responsiveness can help to ensure that fidgety or unpredictable combination sleepers will likely find comfort and support wherever they end up on the bed.