Best Upholstery Cleaner Sprays

What finally drove me to try to get rid of the stain was Frank, my adorable, but very nervous rescue cat. During his first night home with me, he peed on my couch—right over the orange queso stain. A frantic visit to my local pet store sent me home with a box of baking soda, a spray cleaner that smelled worse than my cat’s pee, and a hopeless warning from the shop salesperson that my couch would never be the same again. Comforting.

How it performed: Though none of the upholstery cleaners I tried restored our pillow covers to their original clean look, it was obvious that the pillow cover cleaned with Folex Instant Carpet Spot Remover looked the best post-evaluation. It completely removed the green juice and sweet potato baby food from both materials, didn’t leave any unsightly rings around the lightened stains, and didn’t cause any damage to the feel of the velvet pillow cover. 

The remaining seasoning sauce, curry paste, and chile pepper adobo sauce stains were most noticeable on the polyester-linen blend pillow cover, though a second application of the spray did lighten the stains further. The results on the velvet material were even more impressive, lightening the most difficult-to-remove stains significantly more than the other products.

Ease of use: The spray nozzle has two positions in addition to “off”—spray and stream—which is helpful in controlling how much of the upholstery you are wetting with the product. The product dispenses easily from the bottle with a quick press of the nozzle. 

The design of the bottle isn’t very inviting and if I’m honest, before conducting this evaluation, if I had seen a bottle of Folex next to a bottle of Resolve at the store, I probably would have gone with the Resolve. Though it isn’t a flashy label, it is an efficient one, with instructions, guarantee information, and safety warnings printed clearly in both English and Spanish. After struggling to read the tiny letters on the label of the Resolve Upholstery and Multi-Fabric Spot & Stain Remover, I appreciated the much larger text around the Folex bottle. 

As its name suggests, this product can also be used to remove stains from carpets, according to Folex. 

Ingredients: Because the company site lists the product ingredients very vaguely and does not provide a Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry Number for all of the ingredients, it was difficult to search for the ingredients in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List. The one ingredient that was found on the list was water.

How it performed: Resolve Upholstery and Multi-Fabric Spot & Stain Remover completely removed the baby food and green juice stains I applied to a velvet pillow cover, but left behind a noticeable shadow on the spots where these same two stains were applied to the polyester-linen blend fabric. Like the Folex spray, it struggled most with the dark brown seasoning sauce, curry paste, and chile in adobo sauce stains. It edged out the Folex Instant Carpet Spot Remover by a hair in removing seasoning sauce from velvet. 

On the polyester-linen blend pillow, it lightened the curry paste stain very little (about as much as the below DIY method I tried) and made the seasoning sauce stain bigger.

Ease of use: While you don’t get to decide whether the product is dispensed as a spray or stream with this upholstery cleaner, it isn’t a messy process. The nozzle presses down easily, didn’t get stuck at any point of the evaluation, and I found the bottle’s shape a bit easier to hold than the bulkier Folex bottle. 

It has plenty of directions and safety warnings throughout the label, but the text is so small, that even with my glasses on, I had to place the bottle very close to my face in order to read it. 

Ingredients: This was the only of the three products I tried that had the ingredients printed on the label. A search of the ingredients on the EPA’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List showed that just three of the nine ingredients listed were included on the list.

There are a lot of DIY recipes for upholstery cleaners online, so I went with one that had the ingredients you’d most likely already have at home. To an empty spray bottle, I added 100 milliliters of distilled white vinegar, 400 milliliters of warm water, and a tablespoon of Dawn Ultra dishwashing liquid. I mixed the solution well then sprayed it on the five stains on both pillow covers and rubbed the mixture into the material with a clean, white microfiber cloth. 

Performance: There was some improvement in the appearance of most of the stains across both the velvet and polyester-linen blend fabrics, but it only performed better than the stain-worsening Woolite Carpet & Upholstery Foam Cleaner. It removed all of the green juice and baby food stains from both pillow covers and didn’t cause any damage to the velvet material. 

Ease of use: Making the cleaning solution was very simple. After an hour of drying time, the pillow covers cleaned with the DIY solution were still saturated with the solution, while the covers cleaned with the other three products were totally dry or just slightly damp. I worry that if I tried this method just before some guests arrived for dinner, they’d be sitting on a cold, wet couch. 

Ingredients: Dawn Ultra dishwashing liquid is not an EPA Safer Choice-Certified product, but water and vinegar are both on the EPA Safer Chemical Ingredients List. 

How it performed: Instead of removing some of the stains I applied to pillow covers in our lab, this foaming cleaner made them worse. Though the label specifically states it is not recommended for cleaning velvet, silk, or leather, I cleaned the velvet pillow cover with this product anyway to see what the damage would be like. The results were not great. While all of the stains were lightened or removed from the material, it gave the fabric a stiff, brushed appearance that ruined the pillow cover. 

The polyester-linen blend fabric did not fare any better. Large rings appeared in the material long after the surface had dried and the seasoning sauce stain that was originally pretty small nearly doubled in size. Even the areas of the pillow cover where there were no longer any green juice and baby food stains now had a wet-looking stain in their place. All in all, a hard pass for me.

Ease of use: Dispensing product from the Woolite Carpet & Upholstery Foam Cleaner can was not an easy task. I couldn’t get any of the product to come out of the nozzle when I pressed the button with just one finger. Using two fingers helped but I still found I had to use a significant amount of force to get any foam out. 

Because you have to hold the brush head right against the upholstered material, it is impossible to tell how much foam you’ve dispensed without lifting the can. When using the brush to work the foam into the fabric, I found it difficult to stay just within the confines of the stain, so large areas of the fabric that did not need to be cleaned were covered in foam. 

Rinsing the dirty foam from the brush in between uses was very easy though, and of the three products, this had the most pleasant scent. 

Ingredients: There is no ingredient list on the label of the product, but it is the only product that I tried that is on the EPA’s Safer Choice-Certified List.