Brooklyn Bedding Plank Mattress Review: We Tested The World's "Firmest" Mattress

Everyone's mattress needs and preferences are different, but one thing is for sure: Quality sleep is absolutely essential for optimizing your heart health, blood sugar1, mood2, and muscle recovery3.

And, while a number of factors will impact how restorative your snooze is, the mattress you choose is make or break. For our firm surface lovers, we tested one of the market's firmest mattresses, the Plank by Brooklyn Bedding.

While it isn't the most sustainable choice, the Plank mattress does have a quality design and a few features that make it a solid option for back and stomach sleepers. Just note, side sleepers should look for something a bit softer.

Brooklyn Bedding is a mattress company that produces six mattress models, along with pillows, sheets, blankets, mattress protection accessories, foundations, and adjustable bases. While the brand does not provide much information about its sustainability efforts, all products are manufactured in and shipped from the United States. Brooklyn Bedding also works directly with local organizations to provide bedding and sleep accessories to children and families who need them. 

As for the delivery process, the Plank and all other Brooklyn Bedding mattresses ship for free and arrive compressed and rolled in a box. While you'll have to let the mattress expand for about five hours before sleeping on it, our team found the box fairly easy to move around, so setup was a breeze. Before unboxing, we recommend moving the box into the room you'll be using the mattress in. You'll likely want an extra set of hands.

This all-foam mattress takes the support factor up a notch, landing a spot on our picks for the best extra-firm mattresses. The brand calls this model its firmest mattress yet and recommends the design for back or stomach sleepers who need a little extra support. If you've struggled to find a mattress that's firm enough, you can likely end your search with the Plank mattress. It's absolutely one of the firmest designs that we've felt in our testing studios. 

What makes the Plank stand out further is the flippable design. While the mattress is made entirely of memory foam, each side has a slightly different breakdown. On one side of the mattress, you'll find what the brand calls an "Extra-Firm" surface, which is made from a super-dense memory foam. You won't get that squishy feeling you may have associated with memory foam in the past, and you'll feel like you're lying on the mattress, rather than in it.

If you flip the mattress over, you'll find the "Firm" surface. This side has 3.5 inches of padding broken down into 2 inches of a softer memory foam and a 1.5-inch pillow top. The softer memory foam provides a bit of that body-cradling feeling and adds pressure relief, while the quilted pillow top gives extra cushioning. That said, this surface is still very firm and is not recommended for side sleepers.

If all this sounds too firm for you, consider checking out the brand's softer hybrid mattress, the Plank Luxe Firm. While slightly more, the slightly pricier hybrid design replaces most of the dense foam with a 6-inch core layer of individually wrapped coils. This gives the mattress more responsiveness but doesn't have so much bounce that you'll feel every movement.

In case the name didn't tip you off, this mattress is as firm as it gets. The brand rates the Extra-Firm side at a 9.5 on its firmness scale, and the Firm side at an 8. The previously mentioned Luxe design is rated at an 8.5 and 7.5, respectively. In fact, the brand says finding a firmer surface would require you to sleep "directly on the floor."

Twin: 38" x 75"

Twin XL: 38" x 80"

Full: 53" x 75"

Queen: 60" x 80"

Short Queen: 60" x 74"

Olympic Queen: 66" x 80"

King: 76" x 80"

Short King: 72" x 75"

RV King: 70" x 74"

RV King: 70" x 80"

Side sleepers will find this mattress too firm. The flat, dense surface does not offer that same cradling sensation you may have felt on other memory foam designs, and while the "Firm" side specifically does provide pressure relief, the surface is not designed to support proper alignment for your hips and shoulders in a side-sleeping position. Side sleepers could try the Luxe model, but it may still be too firm for many.

Our motion transfer test measures how well this mattress isolates movement by observing what happens to a jar filled with matcha, while our tester walks toward it. Particularly for those who share a bed with a partner or a pet, motion transfer plays a significant role in the quality of your sleep. Good motion isolation prevents your sleep from being interrupted by every movement. 

Our team's Bounce-Back test evaluates how responsive a mattress is and how well it will hold up over time. To test this, we dropped a ~10-pound kettlebell onto the surface and watched how much it bounces. With the Plank mattress, the surface bounced more than you'd expect for a memory foam material. This is due to the foam's dense construction, which gives the Plank its firm feel. Most memory foam mattresses won't bounce, which is why most people associate the material with a sinking feeling.

We test pressure relief in two ways: examining how well a mattress cradles a weight once dropped onto the bed, as well as having our testers lie in different positions on the mattress.

The first part is done during our Bounce-Back test, which also shows how quickly the material bounces back once the weight is removed. As you'll see in the video, the mattress cradles the weight slightly; however, there's definitely less conforming than you'd expect with an all-foam construction.

When our testers lay in all three sleeping positions, they evaluated how the mattress felt around their hips, shoulders, and other pressure points. They found the firm design does not offer a ton of pressure relief on the extra-firm side, especially for side sleepers. While it may feel OK, the extra strain would start to cause issues after a few hours. Side sleepers who need extra pressure relief around their hips and shoulders should switch to the firm side or search for something a bit softer.

When searching for the right mattress, edge support is an important factor to keep in mind. Good edge support not only stops the body from slipping off the edges of the bed, but it also helps prevent sagging.