Saatva vs Sleep Number - Which One Is The Best Choice For Your Bedroom?

Innerspring mattresses have been around for decades and are the most popular bedding solutions across the globe. However, they aren’t for everyone because of their usually stiff, resilient response and a number of manufacturers have come up with workarounds for people who are uncomfortable sleeping on traditional spring mattresses.

Saatva is one modern mattress that has taken the hybrid route: they’ve combined a memory foam top with a coil-on-coil structure to create a blend of viscoelastic conformity with springy resilience – and their mattress enjoys a lot of popularity. Sleep Number, on the other hand, is a manufacturer who has taken a more novel approach: inflatable mattresses filled with air, whose firmness can be adjusted on the fly to suit any sleeper’s needs.

Both solutions have their own merits and demerits, and the purpose of this Saatva vs Sleep Number comparison is to explore them in a contrasting setting so that you know which of these two mattress products is more suitable for your needs.

Saatva Breakdown

The Saatva is a hybrid mattress that can be summed up as a typical innerspring with an adaptive viscoelastic twist.

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Construction

Cover

The mattress incorporates a cover made from 100% organic cotton, giving it a traditionally elegant, soft, and cool contact surface.

Euro top

The Saatva has a luxurious 1.25” thick Euro pillow top right beneath the cover that lends its initial response a degree of plushness, while also enhancing the aesthetic appeal of the mattress because of its clean, tight incorporation into the overall design.

First Layer

The topmost layer of the mattress is comprised of memory foam at a meager thickness of 3/8 inches. This is about the right amount for letting the mattress adapt to the contours of your body without making you feel like you’re sinking into the bed you’re sleeping on (a frequent complaint with viscoelastic products).

Moreover, this layer serves to cushion some of the stiff reaction force exerted by the coil-on-coil structure without dulling its responsiveness.

Second Layer

This layer comprises of 4-inch long, 14-gauge thick individually wrapped coils that are able to respond to your weight independent of their neighbors i.e. they yield a mixture of support and comfort that adapts to the shape of your body.

Their individuality also ensures a localized reaction to impacts and disturbances, ensuring that the force doesn’t spill over into the adjoining locations of the bed, thus preventing you or your partner from being disturbed by each other – a frequent concern with conventional spring mattresses with interconnected spring cores.

It is worth noting that these springs are wrapped in special foam to boost the edge support of the mattress.

Third Layer

This is another spring layer comprising of longer and thicker interconnected springs (13-gauge and 5.5-inch) so that they yield stiffer compressive support needed to sustain the complete weight of your body overnight as you sleep after the upper layers have absorbed the initial impact and have adapted themselves to your posture.

The deep support thus achieved ensures that your body is held in correct spinal alignment, which is essential for preventing back pain.

Edge Support Border

A dedicated foam encased edge support perimeter is incorporated into the Saatva to ensure that it does not sink on the sides when force is exerted (you may have noticed a ‘crunch down’ when you sit on the edge of an innerspring mattress sometimes).

Firmness and Feel

Comfort and Support

The Saatva is available in the three separate models with regards to firmness – so in that sense, it is far more conventional than the Sleep Number (as you’ll find out shortly):

Plush

At an ILD of 18, this is the most yielding variant of the mattress, offering the greatest degree of contouring and pressure relief, and thanks to the softness of its structure, it also boasts the highest relative level of motion isolation since the soft structure is better able to absorb shocks within itself.

On the manufacturer’s custom 1 to 10 firmness scale (1 is soft as quicksand while 10 is hard as a piece of wood), the mattress is rated at 3.

Luxury Firm

The manufacturer regards this as the ‘flagship’ variant of the Saatva, owing to its popularity among the customers, which most likely stems from the manner in which it strikes a perfect balance between support and comfort by offering both springy resilience and viscoelastic pressure relief in moderate proportions.

To keep their secret formula for this mattress from being copied by others, Saatva keeps its actual ILD rating under wraps, but on their own 1 to 10 scale, they rate it between 5 and 7, which is about the right number for a medium-firm mattress that just leans ever so slightly towards the firm camp.

Firm

This model resembles a conventional innerspring mattress the most with its loftier 30 ILD rating – it dials down the softness of the upper layers and instead focuses on bringing out the stiffness of the steel coils underneath more so that you experience a highly resilient surface that pushes back on your body instead of adapting to it.
The firm variant has a rating of 8 on the manufacturer’s scale.

Motion Transfer

While traditional innerspring mattresses are quite famous for a springy, unyielding feel wherein the motion is reflected back as opposed to absorbed in, the Saatva treads the other path due to its hybrid nature: the memory foam in its Euro top and uppermost layer is able to absorb most of the motion so that it doesn’t resonate in the entire mattress core.

In fact, the pocketed coil spring layer also helps to counter some of the wobbles that would inevitably arise from the interconnected springs underneath: the independent action of the former ensures that only springs in the vicinity of the force are affected, keeping the resulting motion restricted as well.

Edge Support

Thanks to the multiple edge support measures that I’ve discussed above, the Saatva is able to prevent your backside from sinking into its sides quite well; you won’t even experience the springs sinking under your weight a little bit (this can sometimes make it a bit awkward to sit on a spring mattress if you’re overweight).

Cooling

The Saatva’s dual spring layers set up plenty of air flow inside the mattress, and the breathable cotton cover also assists in transporting heat away from the surface, but these positive aspects are somewhat negated by the viscoelastic present between the cotton cover and the spring coils which traps some of the heat in its own structure. Because of this, the Saatva suffers from slightly below average cooling – but not so much that you would feel uncomfortable unless you were an exceptionally sensitive sleeper living in a humid climate.

Unique Features

Reactive, springy response with some contouring blended in

The hybrid design of the Saatva makes for a bed that is able to offer the traditional feel of an innerspring mattress with less inconvenient bounce-back that accompanies any move you make on them. Of course, precisely how much contouring is present in the mattress is dependent on the firmness level you choose, but rest assured, there will be some pressure relief guaranteed by the action of the thin memory foam layer and the pocketed coils combined.

More value for the money

Provided that you’re okay with the particular kind of response that a hybrid innerspring has to offer, the Saatva is by far the more premium mattress when compared with the Sleep Number mattress priced most similarly to it.

The Sleep Number mattress in question is quite basic – without even the SleepIQ feature that is present in most other offerings, and the height, too, is low compared to the Saatva, which, on the other hand, packs a luxurious combination of organic cotton cover, high-quality memory foam, and a durable coil-on-coil structure.

Simple firmness scale

You may want to read: Saatva HD Coupon

The Saatva has a simple three level firmness scale that presents a clear image of what you should expect from the model you choose, instead of leaving you to finetune the mattress’s firmness level to your requirements manually after purchase (as is the case with the Sleep Number).

Longer trial period

The Saatva comes with a 120-day trial compared to the Sleep Number’s 100-day trial. This means a considerably longer time to test the mattress out to see if it improves the quality of your sleep as advertised or not.

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Sleep Number Breakdown

The Sleep Number brand sells a number of different mattresses with the same core idea of being inflatable to varying degrees to provide varying levels of firmness.

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Construction

Cover

The cover of Sleep Number mattresses is made from knit fabric that is soft to the touch and breathable to boot.

DualAir™ Adjustability

For sizes meant to accommodate two sleepers, all Sleep Number mattresses come with separate air chambers for each side that can be adjusted to their own level of firmness independent of the other.

Core structure

One of the Sleep Number’s chief selling points is its ability to be customized exactly to any sleeper’s desired level of comfort, and it does so through a combination of viscoelastic foam and air-filled chambers. The foam layer covers the air chambers, providing a basic degree of adaptability at all inflation levels – you can adjust this further through a handheld control.

Advanced Wireless Sensors

With the exception of a few of the cheapest models, all Sleep Numbers have ‘SleepIQ’ technology built into them – wireless sensors that measure your heartbeat, temperature, breathing rate, and motion. The data are then sent to a smartphone app which lets you assess the quality of your sleep based on these metrics.

Firmness and Feel

Comfort and Support

Since all Sleep Number mattresses can be adjusted via the amount of air in their chambers to achieve an entire spectrum of firmness levels, it is pointless to discuss comfort and support in discrete levels as we usually do.

It is true that there will be some variation in the basic surface feel of each model because of the different top layers they incorporate – pillow top, Euro top, memory foam and so on, but by and large, the air adjustment is predominantly responsible for the overall response of the bed.

Motion Transfer

Compared to the Saatva, since there are no springs involved, you can expect there to be slightly less springiness in the response of the mattress, and the memory foam blocks motion in its own right – so overall, the Sleep Number is quite good at absorbing the impact of your movements and shielding your partner from it – especially since they’re sleeping on their own separate air chamber.

Compared to a purely viscoelastic or latex bed, there is some motion transferred between partners in the event of impactful movements that tend to displace a little bit of air in the neighboring chamber, but when taken in the comparison with an innerspring mattress like the Saatva, this isn’t saying much.

Edge Support

Edge support, again, will be dependent on the inflation level that you have set for your mattress – a high level of inflation will mean a firm response, regardless of whether you sit on the side of the bed or lay on it. Conversely, setting a low inflation number will reduce the rigidity of the bed, leading to a greater amount of sinkage.

This adjustability presents a unique opportunity: instead of having to compromise between comfort and edge support, you can simply modify the inflation level on the fly to suit your immediate needs!

Cooling

This will be dependent on the surface material of the Sleep Number mattress you go for, but in general, memory foam models may suffer from some heating problems due to the materials inherent heat retention, and the fact that the underlying air chamber is airtight i.e. the air inside it will not be able to dissipate into its surroundings and will thus start holding the heat from the upper layers too.

Unique Features

Continuously adjustable response

As mentioned above, the Sleep Number can be inflated with different amounts of air to get different levels of comfort and support. In other words, the mattress can be plush, medium-firm, firm and anything in between at your discretion.

However, as I mentioned before, the absence of springs compared to the Saatva means a fundamental difference in the response from it: the Sleep Number will have inherently less push-back and resilience because air is a fluid, and fluids don’t compress the way metal springs do.

SleepIQ sleep tracker

The SleepIQ tracker technology embedded into most Sleep Number mattresses gives you the opportunity to assess the quality of your sleep in clear, hard numeric metrics. For instance, if you’re having trouble sleeping at a particular firmness setting, you could try adjusting it accordingly and then monitor the effect on your sleep via the smartphone app.

In other words, you’re essentially able to fine-tune the quality of your sleep.

Separately adjustable firmness for each sleep partner

As mentioned above, Sleep Number mattresses allow you to adjust the level of firmness of each side independently of the other thanks to the dual air chambers they incorporate. This means that you and your sleep partner won’t have to compromise on a fixed level of comfort/support.

However, keep in mind that some people have reported that when the difference in inflation levels between the two sides becomes excessive, the upper layer develops a sag in the middle as one side essentially sinks more than the other based on the difference in firmness; you typically won’t notice it unless you stick to your side of the bed though.

Longevity

Normally, when a mattress breaks down, there is no fixing it. Be it deformed springs or cratered base foam, once a fault occurs, you have to replace the whole mattress. With Sleep Number, things are a little different because it is composed of different parts that work together to achieve an inflatable support core. There is a good chance that, in the event of a fault, you can simply replace the faulty part and your mattress will be good as new.

Conveniently, the manufacturer sells replacement parts directly from their website. Note that this does not mean that Sleep Number mattresses break down frequently, it’s just that they’re easier to fix in the rare event that it does happen.

Otherwise, the mattress comes with a 25-year standard warranty followed by a prorated warranty for the duration of its lifetime, indicating that the manufacturer has a considerable amount of confidence in their products. This is significantly more than the Saatva’s 15-year warranty.

 

Which One To Get?