Standing Desk Brands

Standing desk brands vary widely in price and quality, so it’s vital to know who you’re dealing with before you make a decision about which office fitness gear to purchase. Some brands go to great lengths using marketing dollars and curated reviews to make their brand appear high quality when the reality is something completely different. This is particularly true of Chinese sit-stand desk makers that run what appear to be US brands by remote control from China, and especially those who sell on Amazon with fake reviews and other consumer traps (you can often tell they run by remote control because they don’t have a US phone number on their website and you can only reach them via email).

Since the vast majority (like 95+%) of stand-up desks sold to American consumers via ecommerce are made in China, it’s important to first understand that there are two tiers of these companies. There are those that are in a race to the bottom on price and quality, which occupy almost the entirety of Amazon search results with desks under $300, and have no US operations. And then there are true US-based companies, or Chinese-owned factories that established prominent US brands but still make their products in China (e.g. Fully, Uplift Desk, Vari, Flexispot and Autonomous). In both of these groups there’s a wide variation in design sophistication, component quality, customer service expectations, warranty, etc.

There are of course a handful of premium vendors that make their sit-stand desks in the USA (e.g. iMovR, ZipDesk, Herman Miller, Humanscale) that are a cut above all the brands that produce commodity-grade sit-to-stand furniture in China. If you can even find any of these on Amazon they’re buried deep below all the commodity-grade products because search results on Amazon are sorted by sales volume. But you will find those brands covered here, and you’ll want to do business with them through their own websites or authorized dealers.

Once we’ve lab tested and reviewed a handful of products from a major brand we organize a round-up of their reviews which you can link to from this page. By that time we’ve gotten a general sense of where the fit in the ergonomic office products ecosystem and include that at the head of the round-up, to give our readers a better sense of the company, not just one specific product.

We used to tell readers to look at the warranty terms as an indicator of what the manufacturer thinks of the durability, reliability and overall quality of their own product. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. We have seen it all in reviewing products in over twenty categories besides standing desks, (e.g. treadmill desks, standing desk converters, monitor arms, keyboard trays). There are always some sellers, especially the high-volume operators selling Chinese-made, commodity-quality products, that put a lot of marketing spin on their warranty terms. Their aim is to make it sound like a super high-quality product but in truth, the warranty coverage is significantly diminished by all the things they carve out in the fine print. Even if it’s a long warranty, check the details to make sure you’re actually covered. We cover this topic more thoroughly in our primer on How To Compare Warranties On Standing Desks.

Since you can’t always trust warranties anymore, it is always wise to check independent reviews (assume that most vendors curate reviews left by customers on their own websites to suppress bad ones from appearing) when deciding between standing desk brands.

Below you can find our roundups of the different brands, laying out the positives and negatives for each brand, plus the products where they tend to excel or struggle.

Frequently Bought With Standing Desks