Casper Essential Mattress Review (2019 Update)

Comfort & Feel

There are three aspects that make up our assessment of comfort and feel. We call these "preference-based characteristics" because no rating here is better or worse – rather, the attributes that are most desirable to you will be determined solely by your personal preferences. We apply the same classification standards to each mattress so you can more easily compare apples to apples.

Softness ( what’s this )

Keep in mind that what mattress companies call “firm” or “soft” is a purely a preference. All mattresses should be supportive and promote healthy spinal alignment. Whether a mattress is fluffy and squishy (what mattress companies call soft or plush), or less so (what companies call firm), is purely down to your personal needs and preferences.

We classify the Casper Essential mattress as a Medium in terms of softness overall, maybe just a hair to the side of softer. But overall, we this this mattress is right in the middle in terms of softness.

Not sure what softness is best for you? Take our Mattress Match Quiz and find out.

Cushioning Depth ( what’s this )

This refers to how deeply you sink into the mattress or feel cradled or hugged, versus a feeling of floating on top of the bed. We found the Casper Essential again to be a middle-of-the-road mattress between the two poles, right between that hugged/deep sinking feeling versus a firmer floating on top feeling.

Responsiveness ( what’s this )

Responsiveness refers to how quickly a mattress recovers its shape after being compressed. When you press your hand into the mattress, for instance, then remove it, does it take several seconds for the mattress to return to flat, or does it recover immediately?

While the Casper Essential mattress does have a small 1.5” layer of memory foam (the middle layer of the mattress), it really does not have any of that recognizable memory-foam feel, where after compressed, your handprint takes several seconds to disappear (some describe this as a slow, melting into the mattress feeling). Rather, the Casper

Essential mattress is fairly quick responding, meaning it recovers its shape quickly; not as quickly as an innerspring mattress might do, but definitely a lot faster than what you’d associate with memory foam.

This also translates to bounce, which we test in two ways. When we dropped our 16-lb. bowling ball in the mattress, it bounced only once, and when our tester dropped his weight onto the bed, he did not bounce at all. This mattress has practically no bounce at all, which comes into play when we discuss motion isolation further below.

Back Support & Pressure Relief

The two things that you should always be sure to get from your mattress are spinal alignment (commonly thought of as "back support") and pressure relief. Unfortunately, no mattress will deliver these two things equally well for all sleepers. In particular, spinal alignment and pressure relief capabilities will vary across sleepers with different weights, body shapes, and sleep positions. To help you determine how this mattress will perform for you, we break down our spinal alignment and pressure relief assessments by sleeper type.

In our evaluations, the Casper Essential mattresses afforded very good support for back sleepers, and would be suitable for a broad range and sizes of people.

The Essential was also good in our view for stomach sleepers with the possible exception of those heavier than about 200 pounds, where we questioned whether hips might sink into the mattress’s soft top layers too deeply, bottoming out on the firmer support layer.

We thought it might be find for certain, but not all, side sleepers. Our 200 lb. tester felt that his shoulders didn’t sink quite deeply enough into the mattress as he would have liked, and he felt the mattress’s support layer sort of pushing back up. He didn’t experience any pain, but he found he didn’t enjoy being in that position and was happy to roll back to his back. In the end, we thought the Essential could be fine for those who occasionally sleep on their sides.

Spinal Alignment

The key to good back support is maintaining proper spinal alignment while you sleep. This means that the mattress should hold your spine in roughly the same position it's in when you're standing. The ability of a given mattress to do this will generally depend on your weight, sleep position, and body shape.

Here is how we break down the spinal alignment of the Casper Essential mattress:

Back Sleepers:

While our tester was on his back, he noted that his hips sank just deeply enough to create a perfectly neutral spine, while he felt the mattress did a nice job reaching up to support his lumbar curve. We feel that sleepers of a wide weight range would have a similar experience in this position on the Casper Essential.

Side Sleepers:

Side sleeping was not ideal for our tester. While he didn’t experience any pain or pressure, his shoulders did not sink as deeply as he would have liked, and he was happy to roll back onto his back. While the Essential may be just fine for those who only sleep occasionally on their sides, we especially question how supported heavier and also lighter might be; heavier people might sink through to the firm support layer of the mattress while lighter people might not compress the foam layers much at all.

Stomach Sleepers:

Achieving good spinal alignment for stomach sleepers can often be trickier as the hips can tend to sink down too far with some mattresses, but our tester felt well supported in this position as well despite the softness of the mattress’s rather soft comfort layers. We did question whether those over 200 lbs. would experience the same support, and suspect that hips might sink far enough to create less than ideal spinal alignment. But for most who sleep on their stomachs, we felt the Casper Essential would be a good match.

Pressure Relief

Other Features

Beyond the preference-based characteristics of comfort and feel, and the body matching for spinal alignment and pressure relief, a mattress will have a number of other attributes that can make it a better or worse choice for you. We call these "priority-based characteristics" because they are areas in which a mattress can be better or worse, but that will have differing amounts of importance to each sleeper. So, determining how much importance to give to these features will be entirely a matter of your own personal priorities. As always, we apply the same ratings standards to each mattress so you can more easily compare apples to apples.

Motion Isolation (what’s this)

With a bowling pin standing upright on the Casper Essential bed, we tested motion isolation by dropping a 16-lb. bowling ball on it, as well as the whole weight of our 200-lb. tester.

In both tests, the pin barely moved at all. For that reason, we felt that the Casper Essential bed would be an excellent choice for couples who don’t want to feel their partner getting in and out of bed.

Temperature ( what’s this )

For most people, we do not think the Casper Essential mattress will feel hot. Memory foam has a reputation for heat retention, but in the case of the Casper Essential bed, the memory foam layer is not on top. The top two layers are softer and less dense foams, which should have better airflow than denser materials.  

If overheating in bed is an issue for you, and you’ve experienced it with other mattresses, other models have features that are specifically intended to address this, but for most we don’t expect heat to be a problem with the Casper Essential bed.

Edge Support ( what’s this )

Foam mattresses aren’t typically very supportive along the very edge of the mattress—important if you like to sit on the edge of the bed, or if you tend to sleep along the edge. And that’s the case with the Casper Essential. When sitting on the side, our tester sank through virtually the whole mattress.

When laying on the very edge of the mattress, our tester felt his body starting to lean and slip off the edge pretty much right away. He felt less stable in this position than he did with the original Casper bed. Overall, if you spend a lot of your sleep time right on the edge of the bed, we feel other mattresses will be a better fit.

Ease of Repositioning ( what’s this )

If you tend to move and change positions a lot over the course of a night, ease of repositioning will be a priority for you. Our tester did experience any big problems, though it was not quite as easy to move around as on the original Casper bed, which is firmer. But overall, we don’t expect most people will have big problems here.

Green Features ( what’s this )

For mattress shoppers concerned with the use of natural materials, sustainable manufacturing practices or the like, we offer our subjective evaluation of any efforts taken by the company to make the mattress more green, healthy, or safe. 

In the case of the Casper Essential mattress, the company makes no claims about the use of natural materials, however all of the foams used are certified to the CertiPUR-US standard, which verifies that a material has low VOC off-gassing as well as a lack of chemicals and other substances regulated by the CPSC. The fire sock and cover are certified to the OEKO-TEX standard, which asserts similar minimal off-gassing.

We also gave the Essential mattress a ‘sniff test’ and while it certainly had what we would term a ‘new mattress smell’ we barely noticed a smell. Read more about the company's safety certifications.

Adjustable Base Compatibility ( what’s this )

We did not specifically test the Casper Essential on an adjustable bed frame. However, the Casper company sells its own adjustable base that can be used with the Casper Essential bed, and using an adjustable base (either Casper’s or another brand’s) will not void the warranty. For that reason, we assume that adjustable base compatibility should be adequate. Find the Casper adjustable frame here.

Price, Value & Longevity

What Does the Casper Essential Cost?

Prices shown are list prices. Remember that GoodBed keeps our site current with the best available discounts on all online mattresses, many of which are exclusive discounts for our readers. This is an exclusive discount for our readers, and also provides GoodBed with a small referral fee from Casper that supports our work at no cost to you.