Searching for a great cleaner that’s effective and versatile yet gentle on surfaces and sensitive skin can seem like a lot to ask. And sometimes it is. But we’re not ones to shy away from a challenge.
Over the past year, our writers, editors, and other experts have evaluated popular cleaners in search of the best. We spilled chili sauce on delicate fabrics, smeared red lipstick on mirrors, and poured wet coffee grounds on linoleum floors. Then we relished the satisfaction of watching each stain vanish.
And the supplies necessary for wiping away messes can be just as essential as the cleansers themselves. So naturally, we also took it upon ourselves to uncover the best tools (sponges and paper towels, for example) for getting the job done.
Here are the top picks from our recent evaluations. Happy cleaning!
CR’s Guide to Spring Cleaning: Find the top-rated cleansers, tools, and appliances to make your home sparkle.
Best Household Cleaners
If the mark of a great concentrated cleaner is one you don’t want to stop using, Zep Pro-Tabs All-Purpose Cleaner exceeded expectations. It comes in tablet form, with four tablets in total. You’ll need a separate reusable bottle to dilute the cleaner. Fill it with 32 ounces of warm water, add a tablet, attach the trigger, wait 5 minutes, then shake the bottle. It would be helpful to have a label on hand to attach to the bottle so that your cleaner is easily identifiable.
According to the company that makes Zep, it can clean countertops, tile, porcelain, fiberglass, and painted surfaces. But don’t use it on natural stone surfaces, carpets, or automotive paint. This is an all-around great cleaner for kitchen and bathroom surfaces, the stovetop, a microwave exterior, and more.
Mrs. Meyers Clean Day Multi-Surface Concentrate is the spring cleaning dynamo that can create enough cleaning fluid for nearly every surface. That said, this is not the multipurpose concentrated cleaner you’re going to rely on for quick, everyday tasks like cleaning kitchen counters—its dilution process requires too much water for that to be realistic. You’ll need a bucket that’s large enough to hold a gallon of warm water to add a quarter-cup of the concentrated cleaner. For tough stains, use the cleaner straight (but never on unsealed hardwood floors and unsealed natural stone) and allow it to sit for a few minutes, then wipe it up.
This was an effortless floor cleaner, and our evaluator loved how her kitchen smelled after using it. It got her kitchen counters and bathroom sink gleaming and was one of the best for mirrors, removing lipstick stains with three wipes and not leaving a single streak behind. This cleaner has a mild, fresh, and clean scent, a blend of oils including lemon peel. (The manufacturer notes that the product does include allergens.)
We chose Mr. Clean as our favorite multipurpose cleaner because it effortlessly cleaned most surfaces we purposely made dirty, meets the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Choice Standard, and features a “power nozzle” that gives you a unique amount of control over how much spray is released. The other cleaners we evaluated emitted the same amount of dispersed spray each time their trigger was pulled, but this one has a wider, more comfortable trigger that can be pulled at different strengths to spray short, medium, or continuous bursts.
This cleaner proved best at wiping up greasy vegetable oil from a stovetop. It took just a few strokes with a paper towel and it didn’t leave the surface greasy. It also excelled at wiping away maple syrup from a kitchen table (again, no stickiness left behind), blue sticky toothpaste from a bathroom sink, and marinara sauce caked on a kitchen counter. Although it didn’t take many strokes for Mr. Clean to remove fingerprints from a stainless steel dishwasher, we found it caused streaks that had to be removed by buffing the area with a microfiber cloth.
For more: Best Multipurpose Cleaners
While all the glass cleaners we tested performed well on mirrors and windows, we selected Sprayway’s foaming glass cleaner as our favorite because of its additional functionality as a chrome, tile, and porcelain cleaner. The ammonia-free formula easily cut through all our messes, leaving surfaces instantly dry after a single wipe with a microfiber cloth. Of the eight products we tested, it was the quickest to dry on mirrors and windows. This foaming formula also clung to the surfaces it was sprayed on, so there was no need to rush to wipe.
For more: Best Glass Cleaners
The Goo Gone Grout & Tile Cleaner stood out for being pretty effective, easy to use, and not overly smelly. After rinsing it off, an evaluator said that her grout was significantly lighter in color than when she used some of the other products we tested. It’s easy to apply with a spray and has a foamy texture. Rinsing or wiping it off requires a little more work because of its foamy, sudsy nature, but not so much that it turns people off from using it.
One of its biggest draws is its scent. One evaluator described it as fresh, clean, and reminiscent of cucumbers. All the evaluators found the smell to be on the lighter side, especially compared with the other products we tried.
According to the manufacturer, the product can be safely used on grout, ceramic, porcelain, and granite, but it shouldn’t be used on limestone and unsealed stone. The product has a Safer Choice label from the Environmental Protection Agency.
For more: Best Grout Cleaners
Similar to other powders, Bon Ami’s effectiveness was very noticeable across all the surfaces we used it on, though most notably on a stainless steel kitchen sink. To get the best results with Bon Ami, our evaluator found that a second sprinkle, scrub, and rinse was necessary for really stuck-on messes, and the repeated work meant that it didn’t perform the best in our evaluations. Removing knife marks from ceramic plates was also not that successful with just one scrub, but after a few scrub sessions, there was a big improvement.
In addition to the usual surfaces like kitchen sinks, cookware, and bathroom surfaces, a few other notable surfaces this powder cleanser can be used on include outdoor furniture, porous surfaces like marble, and glass-top stoves.
Bon Ami was also the powder cleanser preferred by Amy Ziff, founder of Made Safe, a partner organization that screens for harmful substances and certifies products that are safer for human health and the larger ecosystem. It has no fragrance or color additives, and unlike Bar Keepers Friend’s strange chemical smell, it had no scent at all.
For more: Best Powder Cleansers
In search of the most effective upholstery cleaner sprays, we stained pillow covers made of velvet and a polyester-linen blend with various sauces and ingredients. Though none of the upholstery cleaners restored the pillow covers to their original look, the one cleaned with Folex Instant Carpet Spot Remover looked the best post-cleaning. 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 damage the velvet pillow cover’s feel.
The remaining stains of seasoning sauce, curry paste, and chili pepper adobo sauce 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.
For more: Best Upholstery Cleaner Sprays
In our evaluations, Dawn Ultra Dishwashing Liquid dish soap took the longest amount of rinsing to rid a kitchen sponge of any signs of it, an average of 2 minutes and 12 seconds. It also produced lots of thick suds on the sponge and in our sinks. When our evaluator washed eight dishes covered in ketchup and chicken tikka masala in a 3-liter bucket of warm water with half a tablespoon of dish soap, the amount of suds before and after washing remained unchanged.
The scent of Dawn dish soap can best be described as clean. No fruit, flower, or food is similar to it. Our evaluator found that her hands didn’t feel dry after washing dishes with this dish soap. The handle on the side of the 56-ounce bottle was very convenient when dispensing soap. Dawn also offers an unscented and dye-free version.
For more: Best Dish Soaps
According to our evaluator, the Skura Style Skrubby Sponge sponge was oddly nice to hold. The gray polyurethane material was smooth and bouncy-feeling, and the sponge was incredibly lightweight despite how dense the polyurethane foam appeared.
Its scrubby side, for tougher-to-clean jobs, was rough like sandpaper. But because it was thin, the sponge stayed flexible, making it easy to clean the inside of wineglasses (even the bottom corners of the squarish-shaped ones we used). And it excelled at cleaning caked-on scrambled eggs and thick, starchy rice stuck to a pan. One of its unique elements is that the color of the scrubby side fades with time to indicate when you need to replace it.
For more: Best Sponges
The Moxie Extra Strength Eraser Pads don’t have a name as well-known as Mr. Clean’s, and they’re not as thick, but Lowe’s Moxie Extra Strength Eraser Pads were the overall best for all of the tasks in our testing. They also managed to hold up without ripping or warping (which makes it something of a unicorn among melamine sponges). They’re soft but so much denser and sturdier than all of the soft sponges we evaluated. We squeezed and twisted them, and they bounced right back to their original state. The double-sided sponges feature a smooth side and a textured side with hexagon squares that wound up coming in handy when we tackled tougher surfaces.
When we evaluated their ability to remove marks from an orange crayon on a painted wall, they did so the fastest—in just 1.6 seconds. (We used the smooth side for this job.) They didn’t mar the painted surface or leave it discolored. The smooth side of the sponge also removed sticky adhesive left from a sticker we put on a mirror, although as with all of the eraser sponges, we had to then use a glass cleaner and microfiber cloth because the sponge left our mirror wet.
The sponge’s textured side did an outstanding job of removing dirt from a white sneaker, and even after scrubbing with the rough side, it left the sneaker white without warping or ripping the way other sponges did. The textured side was also ideal for scrubbing bathroom grout and lifting dirt out of tight spots between tiles.
Thanks to its ability to retain water well, we didn’t find ourselves needing to wet the sponge again much, and its sturdiness allowed us to use it for multiple surfaces and for a longer time than all of the others we tested except for the Scrub Daddy.
For more: Best Magic Eraser Sponges
The Method All-Purpose Cleaning Wipes are the wipes our evaluator now keeps by her desk. They’re thick and sizable enough to manage wiping down a desk surface, computer stand, and filing cabinet. They’re on the drier side, so they leave fewer streaks than wetter wipes and allow you to go about your business rather than having to wait around for your surfaces to dry. They met all three of our evaluator’s challenges, including wiping up sriracha and olive oil from kitchen counters and chunky jam from a gas stovetop.
For more: Best Cleaning Wipes
Bounty is probably the first name you think of when you think about paper towels, and after our evaluations, we see why they’re so popular. For water absorbency, they earned the highest score, absorbing an average of 49 grams of water per square foot of paper towel. Its scrubbing strength was similarly impressive, surviving 15 cycles in our sandpaper-equipped apparatus before it showed any signs of ripping. After wetting, wringing out, and allowing it to dry, it was also the paper towel that retained its shape the best, and it consistently picked up chunky oatmeal better than any of the other paper towel brands.
Though it was the most expensive of the options we considered (both per roll and per sheet), because of its reusable nature and its stellar scores across most of our evaluations, we think it’s worth the extra 2 cents per sheet compared with some of the competition. A pleasant surprise: Our tester found that when he calculated the amount of paper towels you get in each roll of Bounty based on the square footage, you’re actually getting nearly two more sheets than what’s listed on the label.
For more: Best Paper Towels
Surprisingly, the best alternative to paper towels is the only choice that isn’t meant to replace them at all. There’s something effortless about the cotton Utopia washcloths. They’re endlessly absorbent, even when dry, and at 12 inches square, they’re the perfect size for wiping up spills or drying your hands. They’re definitely as soft as the cloth variety.
The best part? You can toss them in the washing machine. Our evaluator opted for the white set (there are 17 colors available), so they’re also safe to bleach if you really want to sanitize them. That said, they do tend to show stains more than some of the other options. But when they get particularly stained for kitchen use, repurpose them into outdoor cleaning rags.
For more: Best Paper Towel Alternatives
