10 Best Baby Product Review Websites

https://mommyhood101.com

This website made it to the top of our list for 5 main reasons. First, they do not have any ads at all, so there are no annoying pop-ups or opt-in boxes that cover the screen at random times. Second, they responded NO (kindly, I might add!) to our offer to pay for sponsoring our baby bottle on their best baby bottles list. Third, they provide super comprehensive baby gear reviews that get highly in depth, more than any other website. Fourth, the website was really easy to navigate and find what we wanted. Finally, we loved how they have an "overall best baby gear" page that lists every #1 pick from all the different lists; that made it super convenient to find what we were looking for. Products are reviewed by experts and the site was founded by doctors, making it a trustworthy source for baby gear reviews. Only drawback we found was that they do not review some baby products we wanted to learn about, such as changing tables and nursery furniture. They don't have an online storefront like Babylist or Parenting.com, but to be honest that made us believe they were more impartial than those sites, especially relative to Parenting.com (their storefront is just a list of affiliate links masquerading as an online store). The Babylist online store, in contrast, appears to be primarily aimed at their baby registry customers.

https://www.babygearlab.com/
This website was a close 2nd place to Mommyhood101, and has some awesome things going for it. First, they provide comprehensive reviews of each product, including quantitative metrics derived from their hands-on testing. This was a really unique feature of BabyGearLab, and we'd imagine it's one of the reasons people keep going back; but on the other hand, it's really just too much information sometimes. For instance, when researching baby bottles, they itemize all these different performance outcomes and provide correlation plots to make it look science-y. That's great if you're serving a purely academic audience, but for most parents we think it's over-kill. Second, they responded NO to our offer to pay for sponsoring our baby bottle on their best baby bottles list (in fact, they didn't reply at all), so that was a good sign for this trustworthiness. Third, the website was pretty easy to navigate, but not quite as simple as Mommyhood101, and they didn't seem to have a single aggregated list of all the best products of the year (all the #1 products). Good stuff though, and definitely worthy of this #2 spot on the list!

https://www.thebump.com
This is another awesome baby gear review website that has some serious chops in parenting and maternity domain. They have very popular forums where parents (mostly moms) share their experiences and ask questions; their forums are a great resource. Over the past couple years, it looks like TheBump has slowly gotten into the baby gear review niche, probably trying to supplement their advertising revenue with some affiliate revenue. Their product reviews are brief and nowhere near as in-depth as with Mommyhood101 or BabyGearLab, but they seem to do a pretty good job getting down to business in their articles and providing you with the information you need quickly and without a fuss. But they also have a lot of advertisements, which gets pretty annoying pretty quickly. It's also unclear whether they actually review any of the products they recommend, or just go with popular opinions. But they do have awesome baby gear round-up pages that summarize the winners from each baby gear category, which is pretty helpful!

https://www.babylist.com/
BabyList really rules the roost for search engine rankings, with impressive #1 ranks for several high competition keywords, like "convertible car seats." With that high rank comes responsibility to provide trustworthy and timely ratings of the best baby products of the year. And they do just that; their recommendations are always fair, and we've had great success with many of their top-rated products. Their baby registry is also fantastic, by the way, but that's not what this list is about. The website is great - easy to navigate, high quality, fast load-times, and a good user interface. Their reviews are very brief and basically a compilation of some pros and cons they likely gathered from their registry guests and their own use. But they do not claim to do any hands-on reviews of products, which makes us hesitant to rank them any higher than this spot. They also support sponsored list placements, which we didn't like - in other words, a baby product can pay to have a "Sponsored" position in a list. It's worth pointing out, however, that they are pretty transparent about that, and don't try to hide when a product is sponsored versus spontaneously in that position. Babylist is a really large empire, and we respect their clout in this niche; but we do think they could do a better job with more detailed and comprehensive reviews, rather than simply providing a snippet opinion or anecdote about each listed product. Like Parenting.com (below), Babylist has an online store where you can buy many of their top-rated baby products, which is an awesome way to keep customers on the site and make it a one-stop-shop; add that to good customer service and fair prices, and you've got yourself a great option!

https://bestcarseathub.com
If you're looking for a car seat, whether it's an infant car seat, convertible car seat, combination car seat, or booster car seat, this is definitely the best site to visit. As you could probably tell from their name, the site specializes in hands-on reviews of the best car seats on the market, and they do a really fantastic job of it. It's unclear whether they have sister-sites that review a broader range of baby products, though this site is a great start. We appreciate how they aggregate reviews into a few key metrics: a rating from 1 to 10, a price category (low, average, high), and whether the seat is one of their choices ("Our Choice"). What's interesting about the site, however, is that they do not appear to do their own hands-on testing of all products. They seem to summarize reviews that are already available on the large retailer websites rather than test them out. But we didn't see anywhere on the site that they claimed to do hands-on reviews, so we guess that's OK. Because they only sell car seats, we couldn't test whether they would agree to us paying them for a top placement on one of their lists - we didn't think they'd believe us if we said we had a new car seat model unless we were a major manufacturer. Overall, we think this is a great website, though it does have some usability challenges - there is clutter (icons, links, logos, etc) everywhere on the desktop version which is a little overwhelming from a UX perspective.

https://web.consumerreports.org
This is a site we always want to love! Consumer Reports is really the greatest review platform in the world, with clear expertise, authority, and consumer trust. They review everything from cars to diaper bags, and really do a fantastic and thorough job with their reviews. Unlike the majority of the websites on this list that use the affiliate model (i.e., make you click through to Amazon or Target or another retailer and then get a percentage commission), Consumer Reports relies on a subscription model. The good thing about this model is that it makes them much less biased by whether online retailers carry the product, what the commission level is for the product, and how much a manufacturer or PR firm is willing to pay them for product placement. Instead, Consumer Reports offers a subscription to all of their reviews (online and print) for about $55/year, and you can use them to find just about anything you want to learn more about. In our experience as a CR member, they provide very comprehensive and fair reviews, and we trust their opinions about all products, never mind just baby products. Their website is easy to use and fast, they provide easy aggregate ratings and recommendations, and they are all-around highly recommended. But that subscription model is a huge barrier for most people, who are more willing to let another site get their 50 cents of affiliate income than they are paying about 5 bucks a month for a CR membership.

https://thewirecutter.com/
The Wirecutter is another one-stop-shop that is competing with the other huge product review sites, like The Spruce and Consumer Reports. Because they provide extremely broad coverage of consumer products, they are sort of a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. They do solicit experts in each category to conduct hands-on reviews of products; for instance, they recruit CPST's to review car seats and advise on rankings. And they do a pretty good job with it all. Their reviews are fair, thorough, highly detailed in some places, and they rank order their results in an easy-to-digest format. They are an affiliate site, meaning that when you click one of their links to an online retailer and ultimately purchase something, they get a portion of the commission. That's just like most of the other sites on this list, with just Consumer Reports as an exception. The site itself is pretty easy to navigate, the reviews are easy to read, and the site usability is pretty good. They do have ads, but nothing too excessive. And they do provide their affiliate disclaimer right up front on the site, and we like that level of transparency. Many other sites have that disclosure hidden somewhere relatively difficult to find. So why isn't it higher on the list? Well, Wirecutter is very new to the baby gear review niche. We're not skeptical about their prowess in this domain, but they have such a short track record that we're not confident enough to rank them any higher. And some of their recommendations, such as suggesting the Netgear Arlo Baby Monitor, make it seem like they haven't even used the product - that particular wifi baby monitor doesn't belong near the top of any list (in our experience)!

http://nymag.com/strategist/
"Hey, we want a piece of that sweet affiliate pie!" - What an editor at New York Media probably said when they saw how successful the Wirecutter was doing with product reviews! With printed media in a sharp decline for over a decade, and online news sites suffering low click-through rates on their ads (and thus low ad revenue), they have begun doing a couple things. One is moving to a subscription model, requiring you to pay a monthly fee to read more news articles. The other is starting new arms of your media empire, one of which is affiliate review sites. That has been a boon for media companies looking to stay relevant in the 21st century, adding substantial revenue streams to an otherwise declining industry. The Strategist is a really great example of that. They took the Wirecutter model and replicated, and did a pretty good job of it. Much of their reviews are based on anecdotal experience, such as "Ashlee recommends this play mat" - so no hands-on experiences to be found here. Instead, they seem to be pulling their research from other popular websites, such as The Bump. So we feel like this site is a copycat of some other consumer product review websites, and they aren't doing it as well as their competitors. The site itself works well, there are minimal ads (but the "opt-in" popups are killing me), and it has good loading speed. Information is easily digestable, and the navigation site structure is pretty good - again, it's just like Wirecutter.

https://www.parenting.com
There's a lot to like about Parenting magazine's website, including it's breadth and depth of parenting resources, its annual reviews, and its "editor's choice" selections. If you're looking for advice on parenting styles, sleep training, potty training, or pregnancy milestones, they're the site you should check out. But how about for product reviews? Well, we weren't very impressed by their round-ups. Let's use their 10 Best Car Seats page as an example. The page shows one car seat as a time, and as you go from #1 to #10 it switches all over the place from infant car seats, convertible car seats, combination seats, and booster seats. It's like there's no rhyme or reason for it, which can be frustrating as a parent who might already be confused about which seat type they should be considering at different stages of development. And as you do it, there are ads all over the place. Not to mention that most of the reviews are literally two sentences, remarking on a seemingly random assortment of seat attributes. As you're clicking through to find another article, it's hard to tell what's an actual link versus an ad (because they format some ads exactly like their navigation links); we accidentally clicked on ads a bunch of times, which was really annoying. That makes us lose some trust in the site. Like Babylist, Parenting.com has an online storefront where you can purchase products for your child. But Parenting's "store" is actually not a store at all, it's just a list of affiliate links that take you to big-box retailers like Wal-mart, Target, and Amazon. We found that pretty misleading. So overall, we weren't very impressed at all with this site and its reviews.