Best Clothes and Garment Steamer Reviews this Year: Top Products, Ranked

The clothes steamers reviewed on this page do not only remove wrinkles. Some garment steamers provide protection against germs and other harmful bacteria. Others can also take away unwanted smells. And others still have a wide range of functions and options- from steaming delicate fabrics to thick drapes. 

What does this page contain? Listed below are the top-rated products from different brands. Also contained in the article are tips on how to look for the perfect steamer for you based on size, type, cost, power, and other usable features.

Best Clothes Steamers on the Market

Best Clothes or Garment Steamer Reviews [Updated]

Powerful and convenient.

This is a very nice upright fabric steamer. While it doesn’t get as hot as the Salav below, it focuses more on a wide diffusion of gentle steam. This makes it VERY good for doing a lot of clothes fast, as it disperses the steam over more of the garment at a time, reducing the need for overlapping passes.

It’s no slouch in the power department despite being weaker than some. It still draws 1700 watts of power, heating its 44 oz tank quickly and providing 35 min of continuous steam.

With its convenient removable 44 oz water tank, it’s easy to move around and take care of wide, long fabrics like curtains, sheets, or bedspreads with ease.

This is one of the top rated Rowenta models out there and it’s easy to see why: it’s simply one of the top choices out there for ANY kind of job.

This is just a good all around handheld.

While there are others that outperform it in some small aspect or another, this product nails the important bits better than any other competition without letting some glaring downside (like a small tank size) get in the way.

It has a 7.3 ounce (nearly a cup) tank, with 1110 watts of power. It heats up fast (about 75 seconds) and will keep pumping out a good volume of steam for a solid 15 minutes. The stainless steel nozzle lets you press on fabrics like an iron for extra neatness.

Basically, it’s everything you look for in small portable clothes steamer, at a relatively cheap price.

More for small, infrequent jobs.

There’s a lot to love about the Beautural Clothes Steamer. It has a very nice tank size (an 8.79 ounce tank, close to 1 cup), and can go for roughly 15 minutes. It draws a moderate amount of power (1300 watts) which makes it produce a lot of very gentle steam.

While this makes it less than ideal for quick jobs where you want hotter voluminous super-heated steam, it makes it the perfect home fabric steamer. It can operate for a about 15 minutes, letting you do a small load of laundry or the curtains without the bulk of an upright unit.

While the tank is a little smaller (8.96 oz) it makes for a light weight steamer that is easy to hold even when using it with multiple refills without a rest. This model can also double as a travel companion as well and it is as light as a 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

Super hot, super good.

This baby outputs super hot steam on demand, or can dial it down a notch for your more fragile fabrics. It draws 1500 watts of power to heat a whopping 1.8 liters of water (around half a gallon) to potentially upwards of 300 degrees in 45 seconds.

I’m a big fan of “dry steam” units, and this is one of the best around of that type.

It doubles down by giving you very convenient foot pedals to dial down the temperature or turn the unit off (which made it edge out a similarly powerful Conair for this slot).

Everything else is just extras, but nice extras. A double level garment bar, a double insulated hose (to prevent leaks and stay relatively cool to the touch) and a host of accessories (including an ironing paddle).

Great for the price, or for any price.

Top Brands & Manufacturers

Still great, still pricy.

Like I said above, this is one of the best rated clothes steamers for a reason. It’s powerful, has enough capacity to do large jobs with ease, convenient to use, and able to do any job you need it to.

The only gripe is the price tag, but it’s a great machine even considering that price.

The best professional model is also the flaghship one Salav makes. While they make some other great models, this one is a stellar upright model. Their handheld models all have some vital flaw that holds them back (for most it’s the same: an absolutely minuscule tank size), but this has no such glaring drawback.

It’s hot, it has a bunch of great features, and it’s relatively cheap. What’s not to love?

I waffled a bit on whether to put this or the full sized upright version of the Extreme Steam in this spot for a bit. Eventually, I decided the Turbo Extreme Steam handheld was the better of the two.

For reference, the upright Extreme Steam is very similar in specs to Salav’s Professional model, with similar temperatures, power draw, tank size, heating time, and so on. The only real thing it lacks is the foot pedals and better hanger system.

While that sounds really good (and it is, it’s still a solid second place for commercial fabric models), the main issue I ran into is that it is very consistently rated as being a fragile piece of equipment.

I could write off my own experiences with it as a fluke, but nearly every bad rating on Amazon also backs up the idea that while the Extreme Steam is a very high performance machine, it also has a tendency to completely break down in multiple different ways.

So, I disqualified it from this list in favor of the handheld version, which is a very good all around machine for a good price.

If you’re willing to take your chances with the full size version, by all means: people who report it working long term are very happy with it (including some who use it in their professional steaming business), but be aware that yours may be a lemon.

I really like this thing. It’s not the highest rated on the market in most aspects, but sits in an interesting middle ground between travel and home clothes steamer that makes it very good in a specific niche.

It also has one of the more ergonomic designs of any handheld fabric unit, most of which are content to be shaped either like a price gun or a really funky looking flashlight and just feel awkward in the hand.

Because this model is light weight, is very comfortable to hold and use.

While it lacks many of the bells and whistles of some other handheld units (like the Extreme Steam or many of Salav’s handheld models) there’s a certain elegance in this simplicity where all of its desirability comes from the basic design.

Quite a nice little handheld.

I find very little to complain about with this one, and there’s a lot to love. It has a sizable 240 mL  tank, and can heat to 130 seconds. It comes with a 9ft cord and produces steam for about 15 minutes. This means it can be hot enough to produce dry steam, or left to produce cooler, wetter steam as needed.

It comes with a limited amount of accessories (a cup for filling and a brush head included), but it didn’t quite make the cut for handheld use due to lacking some basic features, including auto shutoff and temperature settings (you have to eyeball time to get certain heat settings) and other quality of life features.

I expect an appliance like this to either make things easy on me or far outperform the competition, but the Hilife steamer does neither. It’s still good, and I don’t feel it’s overpriced , but others do it better.  For me this is a great budget pick if you need something for light wrinkles.

I chose the Jiffy J-2000 Garment Steamer to include in this list because it is the top overall product from Jiffy in terms of price, power, and ability to remove wrinkles from fabrics. Although this is a step down from the J-2, the top product from our Jiffy list, this is still a worthy choice for you. 

The Jiffy J-2000 has a slightly lesser water tank compared to the J-2, with a capacity of 96 ounces or around 3/4 gallons. This product is great for clothes, draperies, and other fabrics. You can use this unit for both home and professional setups. 

The J-2000 has a heating time of 90 seconds starting from the time it is turned on. This is a great feature since most of us would not want to wait for a long time before we can start ironing and removing the wrinkles of our clothes. 

Another excellent feature of this product is its wheeled base which allows it to be positioned anywhere you want. A lot of verified buyers can attest that this unit from Jiffy is really durable and reliable compared to other models in the market. 

Type/Size

There are two general types of garment steamers:  upright and handheld .

Upright clothes models are for home use and should generally be thought of as a medium sized appliance like a vacuum cleaner (they take up about that much space). They generally have a tank size of a half gallon or larger, and are meant to operate for an hour or more on a single refill. They can also operate at a wider range of temperatures an often heat up far faster than handheld units.

Handheld garment units are meant more for traveling, though some are for compact around the home use. Their usual tank size is from a half cup to one and a half cups, and they’re made to operate for about 15 minutes, tops. These clothes steamers also tend to operate either at relatively lower temperatures, or are on full blast constantly.

Heat

Normal, or “wet steam” is boiling temperature; 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. “Dry steam” is hotter than that (by how much varies).

I tend to value those that CAN produce dry steam, though dock points for ones that ONLY do dry steam, as it’s not the right feature for many fabric types.

Power

Most garment steamers (handheld or otherwise) pull between 1000 watts and 1600 watts of power. The more power they pull, the faster they heat up and the hotter they can get. More power is, therefore, usually better.

In general you should expect a product to heat up in under a minute, anything more than that is pretty slow. For dry steam a longer heat time can be forgiven (as they could be heating the water up to 100 degrees more) but no more than two minutes at most.

Cost

Most garment steamers exist in the wide price range for handheld fabric units and for upright clothes models. Some fall above or below that range in both categories, but prices are in general remarkably consistent (unlike most other appliances in my experience).

Extra Features

Extras range from the mundane (on/off switches and auto shutoff safety features) to the more luxurious (easy access foot pedals and multiple settings).

In general I expect every upright fabric steamer to come with a garment rack and multiple settings, while every handheld clothes steamer should at least come with a few simple attachments (like a fabric brush or ironing paddle). -BGSR staff

I don’t particularly over value a lot of these extras, but the addition of them for a minimal cost increase is always a welcome plus, as many make your life easier when using them.

Now, our main criteria explained, let’s get to it, starting with the top choices for a specific purpose!