If you’re on the hunt for a new mattress, you’ve probably run across the Brooklyn Bedding Bowery mattress and the Nectar mattress. Both of these mattresses provide comfort for a wide range of sleepers at affordable prices, and because of that they’re enormously popular among sleepers. Both of these mattresses have a lot of benefits to offer for your sleeping comfort, but if you’re trying to choose between Brooklyn Bedding vs. Nectar there are some important differences to know about.
The most important of these is how the mattresses feel. The Brooklyn Bedding Bowery mattress uses a highly responsive Energex foam layer for comfort, while the Nectar mattress is built with two layers of gel-infused memory foam to cushion and conform to your body. To find out more about who these mattresses are best for, let’s dive into a head-to-head comparison of the Brooklyn Bedding vs. Nectar mattresses.
Brooklyn Bedding is a long-time veteran of the bed-in-a-box industry, while Nectar is a relative newcomer founded in 2016. Both companies offer fully foam mattresses, although their approach to comfort and pricing differs.
Brooklyn Bedding offers a highly affordable mattress – you can get a queen-sized bed for under $600 – and forgoes memory foam in favor of bouncy and responsive Energex foam. The Nectar mattress is slightly more expensive, yet still affordable at around $800 for a queen-sized bed. It is built with two layers of gel-infused memory foam that conform to your body while allowing efficient heat transfer to keep you cool throughout the night. In addition, the Nectar mattress is slightly firmer than the Brooklyn Bedding mattress, although many sleepers won’t be able to tell the difference.
| Brooklin Bedding | Nectar |
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| VIEW ON AMAZON | VIEW ON AMAZON |
| Brooklyn Bedding | Nectar | |
| Type | Foam | Foam |
| Firmness | Medium (5.5) | Medium-firm (6.5) |
| Thickness | 10″ | 11″ |
| Weight | 70 lbs | 74 lbs |
| Sleep trial | 120 nights | 365 nights |
| Warranty | 10 years | Lifetime |
| Price (Queen) | $559 | $899 |
| Certification | CertiPUR-US | CertiPUR-US |
| Brooklyn Bedding | Nectar | |
| Support core | 5″ HD polyfoam | 6″ HD Polyfoam |
| Comfort layers | 3″ gel polyfoam 2″ polyfoam |
1″ Quilted Gel Memory Foam 1″ 4 PCF Gel Memory Foam 3″ 3.5 PCF Memory Foam |
| Cover | Quilted polyfoam with cotton top | Cotton and Tencel® Lyocell |
Both of these mattresses are fully constructed from foam and use thick slabs of high-density foam to provide support. However, they diverge in the types of foam used to provide comfort and cushioning.
The Brooklyn Bedding mattress starts out with a three-inch layer of Energex foam on the top of the bed, which is a proprietary gel-infused foam that offers springiness rather than conformity. Underneath that, there is an additional two inches of transitional foam to help provide support without a jarring transition to the high-density support core.
The Nectar mattress is constructed with two layers of gel-infused memory foam on. Using two layers of foam allows the mattress to breathe better than most other memory foam mattresses, as well as vary the support and firmness as you sink into the bed. A three-inch layer of standard memory foam beneath those gel-infused layers ensures that you are sleeping entirely on memory foam when you lay on this mattress.
It’s also worth noting the covers on these mattresses. The Brooklyn Bedding mattress uses an inexpensive quilted polyfoam cover with a soft cotton top, which is comfortable and breathable. The Nectar mattress uses a more premium cotton and Tencel Lyocell cover, which actively works to wick away moisture and keep you cool throughout the night.
The Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar mattresses are designed to be highly comfortable for a wide range of sleepers and sleeping positions. But the two mattresses do differ in how they approach comfort and how they fare when faced with different metrics of what makes a mattress comfortable. Here, we’ll take a closer look at how these two mattresses stack up for the sleeping experience.
Both mattresses are rated as medium firm, with the Nectar mattress scored as slightly more firm than the Brooklyn Bedding mattress (6.5/10 vs. 5.5/10). This difference in firmness is somewhat negligible, especially as the memory foam comfort layer on the Nectar mattress offers and entirely different feel than the Energex foam on the Brooklyn Bedding bed. Users feel that both mattresses are accurately rated and complaints that either mattress is too firm are rare.
In terms of support, the Nectar bed actually offers slightly more than the Brooklyn Bedding mattress. Neither mattress will dump you down onto the high-density support core, but heavyset users in particular will appreciate the high-density nature of the memory foam. While the Brooklyn Bedding’s transitional foam will support the average sleeper with no problem, it can feel a little bit airy for heavier sleepers.
Normally, non-memory foam mattresses like the Brooklyn Bedding bed would win out over a memory foam mattress like the Nectar bed every time. But, the Nectar mattress’s construction is dialed for breathability and cooling. The two layers of gel-infused memory foam allow the bed to conduct heat away from your body, while the split between the layers encourages air circulation. Plus, the Tencel Lyocell cover wicks moisture away throughout the night to help keep you cool.
Of course, the Brooklyn Bedding mattress is still at least as good as the Nectar bed for temperature control. The Energex foam is gel-infused for heat dissipation, and heat buildup around your body isn’t nearly as much of an issue since you don’t sink into the mattress while you sleep.
Since both of these mattresses are constructed entirely from foam, they each do a very good job of dampening motion transfer across the bed. However, the Nectar mattress wins out in this respect because of the high-density nature of the memory foam. Where Brooklyn Bedding’s Energex foam will still allow some vibration to travel across the bed, the memory foam in the Nectar mattress largely isolates all motion.
When it comes to responsiveness, the Brooklyn Bedding mattress is the clear winner. The proprietary Energex foam comfort layer is specifically designed to retain bounce and to quickly adjust as you move around. If you switch sleeping positions on this mattress, there is no delay in the foam changing its conformation. The memory foam in the Nectar mattress, on the other hand, can provide some resistant to motion and will require a minute to fully compress after you change positions.
The Brooklyn Bedding mattress also provides more bounce than the Nectar mattress. This is not surprising since the Energex foam doesn’t allow you to sink into the bed, while the memory foam in the Nectar mattress will suck up a lot of the impact from your motion by compressing.
Both mattresses offer excellent resilience and will spring back to their original shapes after you get out of the bed. The Brooklyn Bedding bed does this more or less instantly since it only compresses slightly beneath your body, while the Nectar mattress decompresses more slowly. Both mattresses offer extremely high longevity, so you never have to worry about long-term resilience with these beds.
While you might expect that the Brooklyn Bedding mattress would provide better edge support, the Nectar bed exceeds expectations in this category. Despite being constructed from memory foam on top, the Nectar bed doesn’t compress overly much around the edges of the bed and leave you with the feeling of rolling off the mattress that memory foam is infamous for. The Brooklyn Bedding mattress also won’t leave you feeling as if you’re about to fall off the bed, but it doesn’t feel quite as secure and supportive around the edges as the Nectar mattress.
Odor is not an issue with either of these mattresses after the first week of use. While both Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar advise that an odor may stick around for the first few nights of sleeping on your new mattress, the vast majority of users report that any chemical smell is gone by the end of the day that the bed is unpacked from its box.
| SLEEP POSITION | Light sleepers (less than 130 lbs) | Average sleepers (130 lbs to 230 lbs) | Heavy sleepers (greater than 230 lbs) |
| Brooklyn Bedding | |||
| Side | 8 | 7 | 6 |
| Back | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Stomach | 7 | 6 | 6 |
| Nectar | |||
| Side | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| Back | 9 | 8 | 9 |
| Stomach | 5 | 6 | 8 |
The Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar mattresses are each designed to cater to a wide variety of sleepers. In doing so, they necessarily perform best for back sleepers, who generally fall somewhere in the middle between side and stomach sleepers in their comfort preferences. The Nectar mattress is particularly comfortable for back sleepers because the memory foam conforms to match the natural curvature of your spine. The Nectar mattress also tends to be more comfortable for heavyset sleepers in any sleeping position because the high-density memory foam offers a greater degree of support.
| SIZE | Brooklyn Bedding | Nectar |
| Twin | $399 | $474 |
| Twin XL | $399 | $558 |
| Full | $519 | $699 |
| Queen | $559 | $799 |
| King | $759 | $999 |
| California King | $679 | $999 |
| Sleep trial | Warranty and refund | Delivery | |
| Brooklyn Bedding | 120 days | 10-year warrantyfull refund | Within the U.S. and Canada |
| Nectar | 365 days | Lifetime warrantyfull refund | Within the U.S. |
Both Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar exceed the industry-standard 100-night sleep trial. But Brooklyn Bedding’s normally generous 120-night sleep trial pales in comparison to Nectar’s one-year trial period, which gives you a ton of time to evaluate the bed. Both companies offer free pickups from your home if you decide that you want to return the bed at the end of the trial period.
Brooklyn Bedding offers a relatively standard – but quite good – 10-year warranty. If you find a defect with your mattress during that time, the company will replace your mattress at absolutely no cost to you. Nectar takes the same policy and extends it forever, which is one of the best warranty policies in the mattress industry. Beyond 10 years there’s a $50 each way shipping charge to send your mattress in to Nectar, but that’s waived if there is a manufacturing defect present.
Both Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar offer free standard shipping (typically within a week) anywhere in the contiguous US. Shipping to Alaska or Hawaii is available for $150 from Nectar and $125 from Brooklyn Bedding. Brooklyn Bedding will also ship to Canada starting at $250, but Nectar will not ship internationally.
Neither Brooklyn Bedding nor Nectar offer trade-in programs at this time.
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Both the Brooklyn Bedding and Nectar mattresses are good bedding options for getting the best night’s sleep. The Brooklyn Bedding mattress is perfect for sleepers who like the feel of a responsive and springy comfort layer. The Nectar mattress has a lot of good things to offer, including a full-year sleep trial and lifetime warranty, but it’s most comfortable for sleepers who prefer the sinking feeling and conforming support of memory foam. There’s no wrong choice when deciding between the Nectar vs. Brooklyn Bedding mattresses and which is better for you ultimately comes down to what style of bedding you find most comfortable.
