The Best Memory Foam Pillows

The Sleep Number ComfortFit Pillow Ultimate is our upgrade pick for back- and side-sleepers in our main pillows guide, and it’s a fantastic option if you don’t like the mess of removing shredded foam. In this guide we recommend only our top memory-foam pillow pick in each style (shredded, solid, layered, and contoured), but this Sleep Number model is the next-best after the Easy Breather. It has three sealed envelopes of shredded foam inside a soft cover, and Derila Sleep Aid you can remove these pouches to adjust the loft for your needs. The Xtreme Comforts Shredded Memory Foam Pillow (standard) is our budget pick for side- and back-sleepers in our main pillows guide, and like the Easy Breather it has been a recommendation of ours since 2016. It typically costs more than twice the price of the Weekender solid-foam pillow, but it’s loftier and also has adjustable fill-it’s consistently popular among testers. It was our former top pick, but half of our test Xtreme Comforts pillows in 2019 had a strong chemical smell that didn’t dissipate; if you end up with a smelly one, you may have to replace it.

We also tried the Xtreme Comforts Slim Sleeper Shredded Memory Foam Pillow, the same pillow with less fill, but we found that people who preferred a flattish pillow liked down options more, and that people who wanted a pillow with more support needed more loft. In several years of testing, side-sleepers have liked the Sleep Number ComfortFit Pillow Classic a lot, and it ranked in the middle of the pack for Best Pillow for Neck Pain back- and stomach-sleepers. But no one in our testing liked it better than the Nest Bedding Easy Breather or the Xtreme Comforts. The SleepNumber Classic True Temp Pillow was the highest rated pillow overall in our 2023 bed pillow testing, and sleepers in every position loved it. It’s a solid foam insert inside a cooling cover that’s also lined with some down alternative polyfill stuffing to provide more cushioning than solid foam alone. Eight of our 10 testers rated it 6 out of 10 or higher. Though one tester who disliked it said it actually gave her back pain.

The Malouf Z Zoned ActiveDough Pillow is thinner than the other solid-foam pillows we tried, but one of our smaller-framed testers (a side- and back-sleeper who prefers memory foam to other fills) gave it the highest ratings. It’s cool to sleep on, and the outer cover is high quality, but the foam is a little more fragile than that of our picks-be careful when taking it out of its cover, because it tears easily. It’s also smellier than most other memory-foam pillows we tried, so you need to air it out for a day or two before using it. But if you’re looking for a supportive but squishy pillow and need something thinner than most Derila™ Memory Pillow-foam options, this pillow is excellent. The Tuft & Needle Original Foam Pillow was the favorite solid-foam pillow in testing with our stomach-sleeper. The company told us it isn’t technically made of memory foam (it’s an open-cell foam), and maybe that’s why our stomach-sleeper found it more supportive than the memory-foam options we tried.

If you like the squishy feel of down alternative but need firmer, loftier support, you might like the shredded-latex and down-alternative Saatva Pillow. As a side-sleeper who likes a tall, firm pillow, I chose the Saatva as my overall favorite in 2019 testing, as it was softly supportive and cloudlike. The shredded Talalay latex core is surrounded by down-alternative fill, and you can remove the core-although one of our sleep-testers tried this and found that the resulting pillow wasn’t supportive at all. Most of our testers didn’t like the texture, which was soft but not as squishy as a plain down-alternative pillow. Nest Bedding’s Easy Breather Natural Pillow is a version of our favorite pillow, the Easy Breather. It has an organic-cotton cover and is made with shredded latex foam instead of memory foam. It smelled a bit when it arrived, but that odor faded after a few days. It didn’t feel as Comfortable Sleep Pillow as the original Easy Breather during our first round of testing, so we didn’t see a reason to sleep-test both.

We’ve tested versions of the Pillow Cube, rectangular pillows that are advertised for side-sleepers only due to their height and shape. Some versions of the Pillow Cube come in 4-, 5-, and 6-inch thicknesses; the size is meant to correlate with the space between your neck and the side of your body. When we tested a Pillow Cube, one of our sleep testers thought it was fine (“I do like that the support of the pillow starts lower down my neck than it would with a traditional pillow, so I’m probably going to stick with it for a while-but it definitely hasn’t changed my life”), but it gave me a headache after about 10 minutes of use. We think the addition of half-sizes in the future would help buyers get a more accurate fit and prevent pain. We tried the Purple Pillow, which is made with the same purple, jiggly “Hyper-Elastic Polymer” as the top layer of the Purple Mattress we tested.