The Best Sleeping Pads of 2022

If you’re looking for luxury and comfort when you're out camping, the Outwell Dreamboat Single is an excellent choice. With a nice size and a generous 12 cm of thickness, the Dreamboat gives you plenty of room, as well as a comfortable surface to sleep on.

Of course, all of that space and comfort does mean it’s on the heavy side. At 2.9 kg, this isn’t the kind of sleeping pad you’ll want to just roll up and take with you when you go hiking. It is, however, ideally suited to family camping where you don’t mind this figurative boat taking up its fair share of space in the car.

Setting sails on the Dreamboat

It’s very easy to get the Dreamboat set up. It has double valves that you can adjust to three different settings, which makes inflating it a very pleasant and trouble-free experience. For extra flexibility, you can also inflate it manually ... if you so desire.

The Dreamboat is a double-sided mattress with one side adapted for the summer months and the other side for winter – depending on whether you want to keep yourself cool or warm. There’s an indication on each side so you know you’re using the right side for the time of year, and we found this to be a great addition. While it was not entirely relevant during our tests, we see it as an additional possibility for the hardcore outdoors enthusiast.

Comfort, comfort, and more comfort

The Outwell Dreamboat is incredibly comfortable. It really feels like a proper mattress. You can sleep on your side without getting aches, pains, or sore shoulders. The choice of material makes it feel soft against your skin, and turning over feels comfortable. Overall, you feel that you’re sleeping in a proper bed, which is a great sensation when you’re out camping.

The Outwell Dreamboat is ideal for anyone who puts comfort and luxury ahead of minimal packing. If you don’t need to save space or worry about weight, this is a really good choice. It’s a really comfortable mattress, though if you need a lightweight, convenient mattress, you should look elsewhere.

When it comes to sleeping pads, the German company Robens is one of the largest manufacturers, and their ZigZag is an easy and affordable alternative for those who don’t need too much comfort when camping. It’s suited to anyone who puts low carrying weight ahead of maximum sleeping comfort.

The Robens ZigZag is a fairly minimalist sleeping pad. With a low weight of only 320 grams, it’s both easy to carry and relatively easy to stow away. However, it doesn’t have the typical shape that sleeping pads normally do when packed. You don’t roll the ZigZag, you fold it. When you’re finished, the shape is more of a rectangle, which means it takes up a little more space than you might expect. However, you get two packing straps which help a lot.

Since this sleeping pad is quite thin, it won’t be the most comfortable night’s sleep you’ve ever had, especially if you’re camping on a slightly uneven surface. On the other hand, if you camp on soft, even ground you should still sleep quite well. Especially if you like a slightly firmer bed. The textured surface of this pad definitely helps to make it more comfortable. In terms of insulation, the ZigZag also does a pretty good job. The sleeping pad helps prevent both cold and moisture from seeping up from the ground.

All in all, the ZigZag is a good value sleeping pad. With its low price and relatively light weight, this is a great pad for anyone who likes to travel – and sleep – light. It isn’t the smallest pad once packed, but if you don’t mind that, the ZigZag could be right for you.

The Robens Fjellguard 60 is a sleeping pad that can be easily and quickly packed or unpacked. The valve on the Fjellguard 60 is designed in a way that makes it very quick and efficient to inflate this sleeping pad. Likewise, it is also quick to deflate. In those respects this pad is one of the better ones we’ve tested.

However, it’s not one of the lightest or smallest when it’s packed. So if you want to travel a long way, with a light pack, this isn’t the choice for you. Of course you can hang it on the outside of your backpack, but there are better options. However, this pad does work great for anyone who has a little more luggage space.

It’s also really comfortable, especially if you prefer to sleep on your back. You can easily adjust the air so the surface is as firm, or as soft, as you like.

However, it’s important to bear in mind that this pad is quite thin. So for heavier people and those who like to sleep on their side it might not be quite comfortable enough. Or for anyone with a low pillow. Of course, you also need to check that the length of the sleeping pad is suitable for you. This particular model is 180 centimetres long.

The Robens Fjellguard 60 is fine if you have plenty of space for packing and so long as you’re not very tall. It’s a really easy sleeping pad to inflate and deflate.

Outwell's Dreamcatcher is a self-inflating sleeping pad made of foam plastic. The foam in the Dreamcatcher is corrugated, which makes for a very comfortable experience.

The corrugated form also makes the pad easy to pack as all the pieces compress and fit into each other - pretty much like a jigsaw puzzle. This makes the pad unexpectedly compact, but unfortunately still too large to take with you on a backpacking trip. Instead, it’s something for a camping holiday with the whole family where you need a really comfortable night's rest.

Inflating the Dreamcatcher takes approximately 2.2 seconds. There’s still space to add a little more air, which is actually a good thing as that allows you to choose how much air you want in it. For those who like it a little softer, it’ll be fine as it is, but if you want it as hard as possible, just manually fill it up a bit more. The two built-in valves make the job easy, and we see it as a solid plus that you can adjust the hardness of the pad to your personal preference. Similarly, draining the pad of air is also easy, and it takes about a minute.

The Dreamcatcher really does the job. It’s comfortable, preserves heat well and keeps the cold at bay. In addition to a tent, we also tried sleeping on it in a hammock. Hammocks are notorious for letting the cold seep in from the ground. Say, if you use a sleeping bag in a hammock, the bag is compressed by your weight and the cold penetrates from underneath. So we took the Dreamcatcher and laid it in a hammock to see what would happen. Honestly, it did the job very well. With a width of 63 cm, there was no problem making it fit in the hammock. It stopped the cold and the wind, and kept us incredibly comfortable and warm all night; lovely.

The weight of the Dreamcatcher is around 2200 grams, which puts it slightly on the heavy side. It’s also quite large. Thus, this isn’t a mattress to take with you on a bike or motorcycle, and it is much more suited to be packed in the car where you can afford it takes up the space.

Another small plus was that the straps that come with it were of good quality and made it very easy to roll the pad up.

The major advantage of the Therm-a-Rest NeoAir X-lite is its low weight - 340 g is impressively low for a comfortable sleeping pad. The X-lite is comfortable and warm to lie on and insulates well against ground chill, thanks to Therm-a-Rest's Therma-Capture technology, which utilises body heat and reflects it towards the surface material. However, the sleeping pad rustles loudly at the slightest movement, which can easily awaken light sleepers, but we have nothing negative to say about the durability.

The NeoAir X-lite tolerates being handled roughly and the air stays in all night.

The sleeping pad has transverse air channels that are easy to inflate manually and easy to deflate and fold up, but getting it into the storage bag after use requires a some patience. It's also what's known as mummy-shaped (narrowing at the bottom) and we feel that it's unnecessarily narrow. However, if you value low weight and good insulation more than absolute silence, the NeoAir is a good buy.

The Big Agnes Insulated AXL Air is an insulated 3-season sleeping pad that’s mostly made of nylon. It also has a TPU coating and antimicrobial treatment.

The AXL Air reflects away a large part of the cold that comes from the ground below, and we think this sleeping pad actually does a good job in this respect – but not as good as the manufacturer claims. This sleeping pad works from zero degrees and upwards.

Big Agnes claim that this sleeping pad weighs 510 grams, but when we weighed it, it came out about 20 percent heavier than that. Uninflated, we weighed it as 599 grams. We also measured the length and width when rolled up, and got 23 x12 cms which is also a bit bigger than the manufacturer claims. The pack dimensions the manufacturer gives are probably based on when you pack it perfectly, but to be honest it’s a bit tricky to do that with a sleeping pad. It’s always very difficult to get the last bit of air out, which is noticeable when you roll it up. So this means their pack dimensions are also incorrect.

Included in the price is a pump bag, which is a really good addition for anyone who doesn’t want to inflate the mattress manually. It also comes with a repair kit.

Inflating the AXL Air is very easy when you use the pump bag. But if you want it done quickly, it’s actually faster to inflate it with your mouth. If you want to let some or all of the air out, you can do that easily via the valve. You simply press down on one corner. This is actually a good feature because you can then easily adjust the sleeping pad to get a comfort level that suits you.

And when it comes to comfort, our testers claimed they slept really well on the Big Agnes AXL Air. But it’s ideally suited to people who sleep on their back. You can sleep on your side, but there are other options out there that provide higher levels of comfort for side sleepers.

There’s also some friction noise when you move around.

The Big Agnes Insulated AXL Air is a comfortable sleeping pad with several good functions. It’s a bit bigger and heavier than promised, though still within acceptable limits.

The Therm-a-Rest NeoAir Venture is an appealing budget alternative for those who want to make their hiking trip a little more pleasant with a comfortable inflatable mattress, but don't want to or can't afford to spend a fortune on professional kit.

For a relatively low price you get a perfectly good sleeping pad that doesn't rustle, is stable and substantial, retains the air throughout the night, insulates nicely via transverse air channels, and is easy to inflate and deflate. The disadvantage is that it's very thin, and unnecessarily heavy given that there's no built-in pump. It's also pretty much impossible to get back into the bag after use. Finally, it takes up a lot of room in a backpack, so it's perhaps not suitable for the minimalist or someone counting the grams.

Though when all is said and done, your sleep is guaranteed to be better on the Therm-a-Rest NeoAir Venture than on an old-fashioned foam underlay, even though the price difference isn't enormous. A good buy for a weekend hiker with a limited budget.