The Best Standing Desks

No matter how great your office chair is, sitting in it all day isn’t doing your body any favors. But being on your feet constantly isn’t good for your comfort or health, either. An electric, height-adjustable standing desk gives you the best of both worlds. Want a productivity and energy boost? Push a button to raise the desk so you can move a little while working. Feel like leaning back in your chair for some deep focus time? Push another button to lower the desk. After reevaluating our top picks and testing three new models, we’ve reconfirmed that the Uplift V2 is the best standing desk for most people. It accommodates a wide range of heights, it’s stable at even its tallest setting, and it features a greater variety of attractive customization options than you’ll find on any competitor.

The Uplift V2 Standing Desk offers the best mix of performance and features of the desks we tested. It responds quickly to control-pad input (from your choice of four keypad designs) and produces minimal wobble even at tall heights. It should accommodate people of the average female and average male seated and standing heights, but if you’re shorter than 5-foot-4—something that applies to a wide swath of the population—the desk likely wouldn’t work for you without a footrest. In that case, we recommend the Fully Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk or the Fully Jarvis Laminate Standing Desk with a three-stage low-range frame. We found the walnut laminate on the Uplift we tested to be attractive and realistic, and in previous tests, panelists loved the look of the 1-inch-thick curved bamboo desktop. But if you’d prefer a different style, Uplift offers nearly 30 desktop options, including several unusual but expensive wood tops such as acacia and pheasantwood. The company also has four frame colors, three grommet colors, and three keypad colors to choose from, as well as multiple add-on accessories, so you can truly make this desk your own.

The Fully Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk and the Fully Jarvis Laminate Standing Desk have the same frame, just different top options to suit your preference. They offer everything we look for in a good adjustable-height standing desk: a wide range of heights to accommodate most people, a long warranty, reliable customer support, and stability in line with that of most other desks we tested. The Jarvis was our top pick for more than four years, and it’s still a great desk—one that Fully has made even better in the past year with improvements to the frame that reduce wobbling at all heights. It doesn’t have as many customization options as the Uplift V2, but when equipped with its three-stage low-range frame, it works for people as short as 4-foot-9. The laminate tops we tested look great but are prone to smudging, so if you can spend a bit more, we recommend the bamboo top or the techwood (wood veneer) top (we didn’t test any of the other desktop styles).