Pillow test: How do $90 pillows compare to $200 ones?

What makes a good pillow? The holidays can be a lot of fun, but they can be pretty exhausting too. Here's a look at which pillows provide the best night's sleep.

Rest up, the holidays can be exhausting. We often think about the mattress when considering a good night’s sleep but perhaps just as important is the pillow.

Consumer Reports just finished testing pillows from popular brands like Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, and MyPillow to see which ones might give you a fighting chance of getting a restful night’s sleep.

In the tests, pillows are assessed based on how well they support the head and neck of both back- and side-sleepers of a range of sizes.

And in a resilience test, a 225-pound, evenly distributed weight is placed on each pillow for a total of 96 hours. It’s to evaluate how well a pillow holds its shape, firmness, and thickness.

The pillows ranged from about $9 for one from Mainstays at Walmart to more than $200 for a Tempur-Pedic. The tested pillows consisted mostly of memory foam, polyester fibers, or a combination of both.

If you want good support and a long-lasting pillow, you’ll have to spend some money, but maybe not $200.

Some of the cheaper pillows offer good support out of the box, but when it comes to keeping their shape, many fell flat.

Testers found that pillows that were lower-priced tended not to hold up as well as pillows that cost a little bit more.

And even some pricier pillows like the $50 MyPillow Classic and the $85 Casper earned a score of only Fair for resilience.

Consumer Reports recommends the $87 Coop Home Goods Premium Adjustable Loft Pillow. It’s excellent for both side- and back-sleepers of any size. And it comes with an extra foam kit so you can adjust the pillow to your liking.

One caveat, says Consumer Reports, is that all of the recommended pillows except the top-rated Coop pillow didn’t do as well in the breathability test. For example, while Tempur-Pedic’s fairly pricey Cloud Breeze Dual Cooling Pillow earns a CR recommendation it scores only fair for breathability.