7 Best Electric Toothbrushes of 2026, Lab-Tested and Reviewed
The best electric toothbrushes should make brushing your teeth and removing plaque easier. We tested top models from Burst, Oral-B, and Philips.
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When it comes to keeping your teeth clean and healthy, an electric toothbrush isn’t a necessity—but it can definitely help.
Features like 2-minute timers and pressure sensors can help make it easier to brush your teeth thoroughly and safely. But with prices ranging from $8 to $400 in Consumer Reports’ ratings, you want to be sure you’re buying a toothbrush that works for you.
Best Electric Toothbrushes
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of brushing your teeth for your oral health. That’s why CR tests electric toothbrushes: To single out the best for cleaning power, ease of use, and more.
How CR Tests Toothbrushes
CR evaluated the performance of powered toothbrushes using a panel of people in good dental health, ages 18 to 65, all of whom used electric toothbrushes.
Cleaning performance: To assess how well each toothbrush cleaned, a trained technician measured plaque levels in volunteers after they skipped brushing and used other dental products for at least 12 hours. Each then brushed using one of the electric toothbrushes for 2 minutes. The cleaning performance score was calculated based on the before-and-after differences in plaque levels. If a toothbrush came with multiple brushing modes or brush heads, we tested the modes most likely to be used in daily life and scored it based on the mode and head combination that performed best. This is the most important factor in a toothbrush’s Overall Score.
Ease of use: Testers told us how easy it was to attach the brush head, how messy it was to use (such as whether it caused any mirror splatter or foam running down a tester’s hand), and how comfortable the device felt to hold and use. We also factor in whether brushes have the most useful extra features: a timer and a pressure sensor.
Battery performance: This test measured how long it took for devices to charge (for the rechargeable toothbrushes we tested), how long it took for them to run out of juice, and how easy the charging process was for users.
Noise: Testers were asked to evaluate the noise level for each device. Most devices are comparable on this front, so it’s a small factor in the Overall Score.
