Review: Bryte Balance Pro Smart Mattress

As a certified sleep coach and mattress tester of over six years, I get a lot of questions about hotel mattresses—namely, what people can buy to recreate this restful luxury experience at home. It just so happened that on a recent weekend getaway to Miami, I decided to look into which mattresses local resorts were using.

During my research, I came across one brand featured at a handful of luxury resorts across the country: Bryte. While the company has been around since 2019, its primary focus has been on partnerships with resorts rather than the consumer market. One resort that used Bryte mattresses, Carillon Miami, was based near where I was staying, but I doubted they would appreciate me showing up on their doorstep unannounced. The topic quickly fell to the back of my mind as the trip wrapped up.

Months later, Bryte appeared on my radar once again. The same smart mattresses that appeared in my previous retreat research are now available for your home—no RSVP needed. While booking luxury retreats is far out of my budget, bringing that experience home with the Bryte Balance Pro is something I would seriously consider after testing this innovative smart mattress.

Start Your Engines

Smart mattresses are most commonly powered by one or two air chambers connected via hoses to an air pump. This is what allows the bed to adjust its overall firmness: The air chamber inflates to become firmer or deflates to become softer. Each smart bed company will put its own spin on things, like the Personal Comfort Rejuvenate’s individualized air chambers on each side of the bed for couples. Other smart beds, like the Sleep Number p6, have actually mini air chambers spread across the surface to help with auto-adjusting pressure relief. So imagine my surprise to find that the Bryte Balance Pro is a true hybrid mattress with coils, with a tech twist.

This smart mattress isn’t using your average pocket coil, though. It uses around 90 “Bryte Balancer” coils that can automatically react to your movements. They will also respond to areas of high pressure for constant comfort and pressure relief as you sleep. If you sleep like a rock, like my husband, it may not be as much of a standout feature. But for me, someone constantly on the move even at rest, the Bryte Balancers adjusted over 200 times in my sleep, yet I had no complaints about back pain or a lack of softness around my joints. You can also adjust zones of the bed via the Bryte app, making certain areas, like the lumbar zone, firmer.

Photograph: Julia Forbes

With other smart beds I’ve tried in my years of mattress testing, it’s typically evident that you’re sleeping on a pseudo air mattress. Even at its firmest settings across brands and various models, it’s simply just not going to feel as rock-solid as the firmest mattresses our team has come across, like the Plank Firm, or even the floor for comparison’s sake. It’s not as aggressively floppy as a waterbed, or even as jellylike as the GelFlex grid of Purple mattresses. Nonetheless, you will detect the air chambers, despite the memory foam layers on top.

Perhaps that is why the Bryte Balance Pro immediately stood out. Its support was immediately evident, and no preliminary inflation was necessary, unlike with other smart beds. That said, if it were just a regular hybrid mattress, I’d say it was solid yet pretty basic compared to other hybrids on the market. Nothing stood out to me that would make it unique, such as cooling features or the memory foam layers in the Wolf Memory Foam Hybrid, which provide excellent pressure relief. That’s where Bryte’s programming and AI Sleep Concierge sets it apart—not just from hybrids, but other smart beds out there.

Balancing Act

ScreenshotBryte App via Julia Forbes

ScreenshotBryte App via Julia Forbes

ScreenshotBryte App via Julia Forbes

The Bryte Balance Pro is a sleep tracker in itself, with sensors that pinpoint areas needing attention for pressure relief, responsiveness, or firmness adjustment. When the mattress is first delivered, download the Bryte app to set up your sleeper profile. You answer preliminary questions about your sleep preferences and usual routine, and the app will walk you through what to expect with adjusting your firmness level.

There are 100 firmness levels to choose from with the Balance Pro, and it also features the softest memory foam top layer of all its mattress offerings. I ended up leaning toward firmer levels to offset this softness, landing at 60, while my husband opted for 80. It took about a week to fine-tune our preferences and establish a baseline, as the Bryte app outlined during installation.

Another marquee feature of smart mattresses, aside from customizable firmness, is compatibility with adjustable bases. Adjustable bases enable a smart mattress head and foot to move to different positions, whether to help with snoring or to kick your feet up. We tried the Balance Pro on an adjustable base and ultimately decided against it, which was not the case with other smart mattresses I’ve tested.

We found that the Bryte Balancers were so rigid that we didn’t want to risk material breakdown from simply wanting the head and foot of the mattress to move up and down. I reached out to Bryte’s team to cross-confirm whether it was indeed adjustable-base-friendly, and they said it was. But given how pricey the bed is and how the initial attempt went, I'm breaking out in a sweat about trying again. Bryte’s team also let me know that it works great with a traditional flat-bed frame, and I am here to tell you: Please go this route instead. Maybe even grab a Thuma Classic Bed frame to create an all-out hotel aesthetic at home.

As time went on, though, I actually didn’t mind that we were technically missing out on this typical smart bed feature. The Bryte Balance Pro can adjust its firmness across various zones, and I could detect the change seamlessly when I made an adjustment. I’m not sure I’d be able to make that same discernment if I had an adjustable frame propped up into zero-gravity and other angles.

Do the Wave

I’ve never been one for massage settings, which usually come with smart mattresses. Technically, this feature is achieved through tricked-out adjustable bases rather than the mattress itself. To me, they usually feel like I’m trying to reenact a small earthquake as opposed to winding down. Not to mention, the vibration generated by this setting isn’t exactly quiet.

ScreenshotBryte App via Julia Forbes

All Bryte mattresses, including the Balance Pro, offer a library of settings focused on meditation, falling asleep, waking up, and even light massage. It’s not as extensive as the Calm app, but its effectiveness and integration into the bed’s design impressed me. Each zone of the bed’s Bryte Balancers is activated to mimic waves, which Bryte calls “BryteWaves” that gently roll down the body, head to toe, like a gentle ocean wave. Playing around with the settings, you can add audio to guide you through meditative breathwork and nature soundscapes, such as thunderstorms and acoustic music, to accompany this soft rolling. My favorites, ironically, ended up being two massage settings: “Rhythmic Wave” and “Back Release,” in which the Bryte Balancers would gently press under my shoulder blades before working their way down to my lower back. It’s not a full-body massage by any means, but it quickly became my preferred way to fall asleep.

The Bryte Balancers also have a “Silent Wake” setting that gently rolls you awake without the need for an alarm clock. However, this was a hit-or-miss setting for us. Some days I would notice it, but others I was already awake and moving before the time I had programmed it to begin. For deep sleepers, like my husband, they likely won’t notice it at all.

The AI Sleep Concierge can be found in the bottom-left corner of the app, and you can ask it intuitive questions to fine-tune your sleep experience. It’s helpful, for sure, but I’m more hands-on when trying things, probably given the nature of my job as a tester. I’d rely on it for step-by-step instructions, troubleshooting, or breaking down your sleep data, rather than explaining each setting in the settings library.

Check In, Check Out

The Bryte Balance Pro does not include a remote and can only be controlled via its app on your smart device. It’s something to consider, but again, I didn’t mind not having a remote. It kept my bedside less cluttered among sound machines and sleep gadgets, and it maintained all my nightly sleep data and preferences in one place.

While this mattress's programming is complex, given its scope of offerings, it’s still really easy to navigate the programming, app, and features. It’s in hotels, after all. Yes, there are some differences compared with other smart mattresses, such as its seeming unwillingness to work well with an adjustable base and its lack of a remote. However, it’s quickly become a new favorite bed for me, and is an exciting glimpse into what smart beds are evolving into. Plus, it makes the luxury sleep resort experience more obtainable—no booking needed.