Review: Elvie Stride

Wearable breast pumps—where you place a complete pumping unit directly into your bra—are all the rage these days. They're portable, convenient, and discreet. But if you want to save some money, there are also portable breast pumps that just attach to a wearable cup. They tend to be a little cheaper, while still providing the privacy of a wearable.

The Elvie Stride is one of these styles of pumps. It has wearable cups that connect to an external pump, making it a portable pump rather than a true wearable. Elvie is famed for its original wearable pump, but I think the Elvie Stride is actually the best pump the company makes.

The Elvie Stride is the easiest to wear out of all the portable pumps I tried.

Both the Elvie Stride and Pumpables Genie Advanced (9/10, WIRED Recommends) encourage you to wear the motor base while you pump to make it feel portable. Pumpables has a built-in clip and comes with an additional lanyard, while the Stride comes with a hub cover and clip that you can put onto the pump. It's not easy to get on—it's a snug fit that took some push and pull. You also have to put it on before you start pumping, since the tubing has to be unplugged.

But once it's on, it's lighter than the Pumpables and the similar Medela Freestyle (7/10, WIRED Review), and I found it the most comfortable to wear out of the three. It stayed clipped on soft workout shorts and dresses, and didn't yank at my clothes while I walked and pumped.

The tubing is shown in Elvie's photos as worn under the shirt, but I let the tubes hang out the front so that I wasn't snaking my tubes through my bra and back out again after a pump session. What I love is that the tubing clicks into a rounded centerpiece in the wearable cup, which you can turn whichever way you want for a comfortable wear. So if you did snake the tubing through the bottom of your shirt, you could rotate the tubes to face downward, or I was able to angle them to stick up out of my bra.

There's two tubes, one for each cup, but they meet onto one large tube to create a Y-shape when everything is hooked up. The motor is at the base of the Y, with a cup on either end. There's a little connector at the end of the single tube to attach each cup tube, but the connector also has a cover if you only want to use one cup. You'll need to place the cover over whichever side of the connector doesn't have a wearable cup attached to it in order to not lose suction power. It was easy enough to figure out, and it's nice that you can either single or double pump.

Photograph: Elvie

This pump works well for its price point. The Elvie app works for both this model and the regular Elvie, but this one was easier to connect with the app since you only have to connect the single hub of the Elvie Stride, rather than both halves of the regular Elvie.

Neither of Elvie's pumps will prompt you at checkout to choose your size, though you will see it mentioned on the main product page. The Elvie Stride is supposed to come with three sizes—21 mm, 24 mm, and 28 mm—but my set only came with 24 mm and 28 mm. The app will guide you through finding your size, and will direct you to buy a shield if you discover the included sizes don't fit you. But I'd prefer to be prompted to get the right size at checkout, rather than finding out an hour before I planned to pump that I don't have the right size to pump with.

The cups were lightweight and easy to keep in a bra, and the controls were easy to use on the motor. The pump itself made a little more noise than others—my husband commented that it “sounded a little like Darth Vader” as it pumped.

You'll need to have somewhere to store the milk when you're done pumping, whether it's a bottle or milk storage bag. I liked that there was a cover over the top where I would pour milk when done with my pump session, so I didn't have to worry about spilling as much as I did with open-top pumps (though I still don't recommend bending over with this one).

Overall, the Elvie Stride is a solid pump for its price, and it's a good choice if you're looking for wearable cups but don't want to pay wearable prices. Plus, that means you only charge one device instead of two, which is a win.