Best Showerhead for 2024 - CNET

Nov 01, 2024

Article updated on October 29, 2024 at 4:24 AM PDT

Your shower should make you feel like a million bucks, and with our expert-vetted list of showerheads, you'll be able to feel just that.

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.

There are few things worse than a disappointing shower. Imagine arriving home after a long day, longing for the soothing warmth of hot water on your tired muscles. Instead, you encounter a weak spray that’s more irritating than relaxing. If this sounds like your own personal hell, then it’s time to take action and invest in a new showerhead -- a showerhead that can tackle poor water pressure and scale buildup, ensuring you feel clean and comfortable.

Read more: Best Smart Home Gifts for the Holidays 2024

Regardless of whether you enjoy the pulsating and hard-hitting showerhead to keep your hair soft and healthy or prefer the relaxing ambiance of a rainfall showerhead, changing out your showerhead is a quick and relatively affordable bathroom upgrade that can make a big difference to your showering routine. Though most showerheads may look similar and offer many of the same features, the nuances are worth noting.

Overall, the High Sierra Classic Plus is the showerhead that came up on top as the best to elevate your bathroom. That said, we've also found plenty of other great choices.

Delta's clever showerhead tucks a handheld into the main body.

During testing, the following showerheads rose to the top as the best. Each one features an easy and noninvasive install, especially important if you're in a rented apartment. All are reasonably priced between $50 and $200. All are relatively efficient with water, with ratings between 1.5 and 2.5 gallons per minute. The tested showerheads are also highly regarded in terms of both customer and industry reviews.

If you're looking for an affordable showerhead you can install yourself, check out these picks. This list gets updated periodically, with Kohler's unique Moxie Showerhead being the most recent addition.

The affordable High Sierra Classic Plus showerhead gets all of the basics right. It sprays in a wide pattern with great coverage and plenty of firmness. I tend to like a relaxing stream on my body and a firm spray on my face and hair. The Classic Plus doesn't offer any alternate spray pattern settings, but the main one balances both of those needs well. If you tend to find a good default and stick with it, look no further.

The Classic Plus has a simple and elegant design. It's one of the most affordable showerheads on this list and conserves water as well with a 1.5 gpm rating. If you're looking for something fancy with a wide variety of settings, I have plenty of alternate options below, but this is the Amazon Echo Dot of showerheads. It's simple, affordable and elegant. It's also powerful, even with low water pressure or hard water. If you don't care about extras and just want something to get the job done well, go with the water-saving High Sierra Classic Plus. Available in brushed nickel, bronze, polished brass, matte black or a chrome finish.

The AquaDance 7-inch Premium showerhead is a great choice if you're looking for a dual showerhead with a lot of features. It includes a handheld showerhead with a stainless steel shower hose and spray head that sit in place behind the main showerhead. Both offer a full-coverage spray setting, an intense massage setting, one that mixes those two, and a mist.

The full coverage setting on both the main shower and the handheld showerhead feels great. It balances firmness with wide coverage and still feels relaxing. The intense massage provided a great way to mix it up when I wanted to really feel the pressure and water flow. I ended up leaving the main rain setting on full coverage and kept the hand shower on the massage setting if I wanted that extra intensity.

You can pause the stream of either if you want to save water while you suds up. You can run both showerheads simultaneously on the same or different settings. You'll lose some water pressure with the dual shower setting, so you could just as easily switch back and forth from the main showerhead to the handheld shower. You can switch settings by turning a dial, or you can use the splitter to easily swap between the main showerhead and the handheld showerhead.

Whatever you want your shower to feel like -- regular showerhead, handheld shower or dual shower -- this AquaDance has an option for you. If you're the type that likes options and likes to change settings based on your mood, this is the best showerhead for you.

The Moen S6320 looks like a high-end shower with its 8-inch diameter and polished chrome finish. The main full-coverage setting again strikes the right balance between relaxing coverage and firmness. Plus, the S6320 switches to an intense massage setting that also feels great. Lots of the massage settings that I tested were too narrow to be useful outside of spot-cleaning. Moen's is still wide enough to provide actual coverage while still providing a nice boost of intensity.

You can also switch back and forth easily with a handle on the side of the showerhead. It's simple enough to control that I was able to find it and switch the setting while my eyes were closed after suds-ing my face.

If you want a showerhead that looks higher-end while still maintaining a simple elegance, the Moen S6320 fits the bill. It doesn't have a lot of features, but the two settings are both awesome and switching between them is so easy that you can do it with your eyes closed -- literally.

Showering with the American Standard Spectra eTouch rain showerhead genuinely feels like standing under a gentle stream or being outside during a warm summer rain. This bathroom accessory is super relaxing. The Spectra eTouch is pretty expensive for the brushed nickel or chrome finish, but it's economical with water at a 1.8 gpm rating.

The Spectra includes a remote you can attach to your shower wall to switch between multiple spray settings or you can simply touch the rim of the showerhead to do the same. It feels high-tech without adding any complexity. The different settings include a fine mist and two varieties of an intense massage spray, although I found both to be too narrow to provide any coverage. The rainfall shower setting was also a little too gentle on my face, so the Spectra doesn't have a single setting that hits the perfect balance between a firm feel and full coverage.

The Kohler Moxie combines a Bluetooth speaker with Amazon's assistant Alexa built-in and an otherwise ordinary showerhead. You can't control the water or temperature with your voice or an app, so I hesitate to call it a smart shower, but it's the closest to one on this list and much more attainable than the fully smart Moen shower, which requires a plumbing overhaul to install.

The battery-powered speaker nests in the center of the showerhead with magnets, so you can easily pull it free and use it as a smart speaker in other rooms of your house. Thanks to Alexa, you can listen to music or issue a wide variety of voice commands. The speaker itself surprised me with its sound quality and it genuinely made my morning routines more fun. The showerhead itself is less impressive. The stream was intense but a little narrow, and it didn't have any alternate spray modes. It comes in a variety of finishes, at either 2.5 or 1.75 gpm.

Kohler Forte 22169: Kohler's showerhead provides nice coverage. The main setting strikes the necessary balance between feeling firm and still relaxing. You can easily switch to a concentrated massage mode or a fine mist. Overall, it's a solid, well-balanced fixed showerhead option that you should consider if you like the look or the brand. It even saves water with a 1.75 gpm rating. It simply didn't stand out as much as the ones above and the concentrated massage stream is too narrow to be useful.

Delta In2ition Two-in-One: This Delta showerhead features a clever adjustable showerhead design in which a handheld shower is nested within the main showerhead. The main shower provides the full coverage option, and the handheld shower offers a more intense stream. You can also run both the main and handheld shower at once, though the water pressure expectedly dips a bit, and I'm not a fan of low water pressure. The handheld showerhead easily pulls free, or you can leave the shower arm in place for a stationary massage stream. All of the settings are functional but the main coverage option is a little too weak for my tastes. The main showerhead is also a little hard to pivot, but that's a minor nitpick. This is a competent shower that's worth your consideration, but the little drawbacks took away just enough to prevent it from ranking higher for me.

Speakman S-2252-E175: None of the showers I tested were outright bad, but this model from Speakman doesn't have a strong enough stream for my tastes. The main mode is fine if underwhelming. The alternate nozzle setting effectively just lets the water pour straight out without any added water pressure or water flow at all. Overall, it was a low-water-pressure shower experience.

Culligan WSH-C125: This affordable model from Culligan includes a shower filter and has a bunch of different settings. Changing between the nozzle settings is a pain. The main shower works well enough, but none of the alternate modes are inspiring. Again, this is a competent bathroom shower, but you have plenty of better options.

The price, finish and materials can vary wildly, and you can also look for the best showerheads with a lower gallons-per-minute rating if water conservation is a concern. You can get a fixed showerhead, which is attached to the wall, or one that includes a handheld sprayer. Some showerheads offer a wide variety of spray patterns (you don't have to be limited to rainfall if you want to switch your spray setting). Whether it's a handheld, dual, fixed, low-flow, high-pressure, combination or rainfall, your showerhead must have the essentials for hassle-free bathing: faucet, flow restrictor, filter, flexible hose and swivel ball.

Mount type: Depending on your shower setup, you'll want to choose either a wall or ceiling-mounted showerhead

Settings and features: Some showerheads offer multiple stream types and pressure levels including pulsing massage, rainfall and wide-spray. You can even score a showerhead with a built-in speaker for listening to music and podcasts while you wash up. Feature-heavy showerheads typically cost more so consider what your needs are beforehand.

Finish: You'll likely want your showerhead to match or at least complement the other metal accents in your shower. Showerheads are available in loads of styles and finishes, including chrome, nickel, copper, bronze and black.

Cost: Showerheads start at about $25 and go well into the hundreds of dollars. Settle on a price range before you start narrowing your search.

I've taken a lot of showers over the past couple of weeks. When testing a showerhead system, I look at a lot of factors: The diameter of the face, the gallons-per-minute output, the number of settings, the materials, the design and more. We also run an anecdotal test on the water flow, water pressure and power of the spray pattern with dried egg yolk. More than anything, I showered and noted how each shower experience felt.

Some settings did a better job of removing eggs than others.

I leave each model installed for a couple of days so I can take a variety of showers. During the first shower with a new shower system, I'm paying close attention to each spray pattern and how they feel, but I also want to shower when I'm not thinking about it as much. With each model, I shower when I'm groggy in the morning and do a post-workout shower to cool down.

After every shower, I take notes on the shower experience. Was it firm, relaxing or both? Was the showering experience intense enough to get the soap and shampoo off quickly or did I have to change settings? Is it easy to change settings?

For the egg test, I brushed egg yolk onto a cutting board and let it dry for 24 hours. Then I held the board 20 inches from the showerhead while it ran for 10 seconds and noted how much yolk was removed. I ran this test for each setting on each showerhead. Most only removed a little yolk if any, but a few settings proved weaker or stronger relative to the rest.

Different showers check different boxes, but at the end of the day, what mattered most to me was the actual showering experience. None of the models I tested were terrible, but a few rose above the rest and cleaned up the competition.

A showerhead's gallons per minute is the common way to measure a unit's pressure. Most showerheads range somewhere between 1.25 and 2.5 gmp. The higher the gpm, the more pressure your showerhead will be capable of.

Most showerheads do not require the expertise of a plumber or handyman to install. With simple tools such as a wrench or screwdriver and a stepladder. You may also need thread tape but that is commonly provided alongside the showerhead with purchase.

Most showerheads don't have filters but you can purchase specialty showerheads to filter out impurities in your water such as chlorine and scale.

Most wall-mount and ceiling-mount showerheads share a universal connection. You shouldn't have to worry about matching the showerhead to your specific shower unless you are dealing with an unusual design or looking to change the type of mount from your existing one.