Best Bissell Carpet Cleaner Comparison and Buyer’s Guide

We’ve bought nearly every Bissell carpet cleaner on the market and put them through a bunch of tests to compare their performance, as well as their specs and features.

In this buyer’s guide, we’ll go over all the similarities and differences and make our personal recommendations as to what we think the best Bissell carpet cleaner models are in three different categories.

The Bissell Carpet Cleaners we Tested

In total we’ll be comparing six Bissell carpet cleaners: the Bissell Big Green Professional, Proheat 2x Revolution Pet, Proheat 2x Revolution Pet Pro Plus, Revolution HydroSteam Pet, TurboClean DualPro Pet, and TurboClean PowerBrush Pet.

When all was said and done, the Bissell Revolution HydroSteam Pet (Amazon, Review) was the best overall. Jump to all of our recommendations.

Models

We reviewed, tested and compared the following Bissell models.

How they Work

All the carpet cleaners here are of the upright variety, and they operate in the same basic way: you fill their clean water tank with warm water and the included solution. 

You hold down a trigger to dispense the water-solution mix, and you more or less vacuum back and forth. The brushes agitate the stained carpet, and the machine sucks up the dirty water into the dirty water tank.

Important Considerations

From most expensive to least expensive, the Big Green Professional and Revolution Hydrosteam are the most expensive, the Proheat 2x models are mid-range priced and the TurboClean models are the cheaper options with the TurboClean PowerBrush Pet being the most inexpensive.

	Price	Water Tank	Weight
Big Green Professional	$$$$$$$$	1.75 gal	42 lbs.
Revolution HydroSteam Pet	$$$$$$$$	1.0 gal	22 lbs.
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet Pro Plus	$$$$$$	1.0 gal	18 lbs.
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet	$$$$$	1.0 gal	17.5 lbs.
TurboClean DualPro Pet	$$$	1.25 gal	17 lbs.
TurboClean PowerBrush Pet	$$	0.62	12 lbs.

One of the big differences is water tank capacity. You can see that the Bissell Big Green is the clear winner at 1.75 gallons. That’s almost triple the size of the TurboClean PowerBrush Pet model which has a 0.62 gallon tank.

The Revolution models all have a one gallon tank, and the TurboClean DualPro Pet has a slightly larger 1.25 gallon tank.

Weight is also important. Here, you can see the cheapest one, the Bissell TurboClean PowerBrush Pet, with the smallest water tank is unsurprisingly the lightest.

The big story from our stain clean-up tests was that there wasn’t much difference from the cheapest to the most expensive that we could see. We think we could say the Bissell Hydrosteam was better than the others, but other than that, it was pretty close.

One of the more important differences, in our opinion, is if they have the ability to be used with a hose and attachments, where you spray the solution on the stains and scrub manually with handheld attachments. 

This is great for stairs, upholstery, or tough spots on carpets. All except the cheapest one have this ability, though there are differences in the length of their hoses as well as the number and types of attachments they come with.

	Hose Length	Attachments	Brushes	Brush Width
Big Green Professional	9 ft.	1	1	10.5”
Revolution HydroSteam Pet	8’ ft.	2	2	11”
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet Pro Plus	8’ ft.	2	2	11”
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet	8’ ft.	2	2	11”
TurboClean DualPro Pet	7’ ft.	1	1	11”
TurboClean PowerBrush Pet	n/a	0	1	7.5”

Some have two brushes on the floorhead, like the HydroSteam and 2X Revolutions, while some have only one brush. However, the brush on the Big Green, for example, is much bigger and more powerful than the other single brush styles.

They also have different brush widths, or cleaning path widths. In this case every carpet cleaner had a 10.5 or 11 inch brush width with the exception of the TurboClean Powerbrush Pet which had a much smaller 7.5 inch brush. 

The benefit? You can cover more area per pass with the wider ones, which really helps with overall efficiency.

Features

Steam

Probably the biggest feature difference is with the Bissell HydroSteam, which is the first and only Bissell carpet cleaner to use steam. When it’s in steam mode and you hold down the trigger, it will produce steam at the floorhead, which theoretically makes it better at stain removal and sanitizing.

CleanShot

Another unique feature is the so-called “CleanShot,” which is only available on the Bissell 2X Revolution Pet Pro Plus. It has a sprayer on the side of the head, which can be activated by a foot pedal. 

CleanShot applies the water-solution mix directly to the stain, kind of like a pretreatment. This feature is only available on that version of the 2X Revolution (the purple one) and not on the others, which look very similar other than the color.

Heater

Some of these carpet cleaners have an internal heater, but this doesn’t mean they make cold water hot. It really just means they keep warm water warm. We think this feature is more of a marketing strategy than actually useful, but maybe we’re wrong.

The models with the internal heater are the Revolution Hydrosteam Pet, Proheat 2x Revolution Pet Pro Plus and Proheat 2x Revolution Pet.

Cleaning Modes

Some of them have different cleaning modes, usually accessed by flipping a switch or pushing a button. They have different names like Max, Deep Clean and Express Clean.

But, what the different modes really boil down to is that you have the option of having less water dispensed when you hold the trigger down, meaning it will take less time to dry.

One feature we liked when comparing and reviewing Tineco Carpet Cleaners was heated drying. None of these Bissell models have it, but we expect we might see it in a future model.

The Revolution models have three modes, the TurboClean DualPro Pet has two and the Big Green Professional and TurboClean PowerBrush Pet just have a single mode.

Performance

The first thing we did is measure each carpet cleaner’s suction, both at the base and at the head, in what we call the usable suction test.

We mostly found that they had similar sealed suction numbers, though the cheaper ones did have less than the more expensive ones. 

But in the usable suction test, there was something interesting: namely, the cheaper ones really punched above their weight. In fact, the TurboClean PowerBrush Pet had the second-highest suction in this particular test.

Bissell Carpet Cleaner	Sealed Suction	Usable Suction
Big Green Professional	67”	12.09 kpa
Revolution Hydrosteam Pet	67”	4.24 kpa
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet Pro Plus	67”	5.2 kpa
Proheat 2x Revolution Pet	67”	4.5 kpa
TurboClean DualPro Pet	57”	8.4 kpa
TurboClean PowerBrush Pet	46”	11.04 kpa

Stain Tests

We did some initial tests with dried-on dirt stains and found that with light stains like these, they all nearly perfectly cleaned the carpet in two passes or less. 

However, we feel the more expensive Bissell carpet cleaners did this more efficiently than the cheaper ones, but we didn’t score this test. It was mostly for show.

For the stain torture tests, we wanted to develop a new system that we could use in the future. So, we prepared the dried-on stains, where we used 5 oz of a dirt and water mixture, as well as 1.5 oz of coyote urine, which we allowed to dry for 24 hours. 

For the wet stains, we used 1.5 oz of red wine and 1.5 oz of a glow-in-the-dark material, which is virtually impossible to remove from carpet but looks cool.

We used the same solution mixture for each product and did 4 back-and-forth passes for each stain. We did not pretreat the stains, and we only used room temperature water, not heated water. 

As a result, the remaining stains were more significant than if we had used pretreatment or warm water, but this made it easier for us to observe relative differences.

Results

After drying, we took pictures with the same camera and lighting settings for each stain and visually compared them with one another.

However, we’d like to have an AI imaging program or something similar compare these images and provide accurate grades. If anyone knows of a service or program we can use for that, please let us know.

The big story from our stain clean-up tests was that there wasn’t much difference from the cheapest to the most expensive that we could see. We think we could say the Bissell HydroSteam was better than the others, but other than that, it was pretty close.

Recommendations

Best Bissell Carpet Cleaner: Bissell Revolution HydroSteam Pet

For the best overall in the points algorithm, the winner for best Bissell carpet cleaner overall was the new Bissell Revolution HydroSteam (Amazon). It has the most features, cleans the best, and is much less heavy than the Big Green.

Best Value: Bissell 2x Revolution

For the best value, though, the clear winner was the Bissell 2X Revolution series (Amazon). Ever since the HydroSteam came out, the prices on these dropped. 

Bissell has three versions of the 2X Revolution these days, with the main difference being that the Pet Pro Plus has the “CleanShot” feature. While the clean shot is nice, it’s not necessary, especially if you can get the orange or blue one at a significant discount.

These 2X Revolutions have consistently ranked as our favorite carpet cleaner in this price range.

Best Budget Carpet Cleaner: Bissell TurboClean DualPro Pet

The budget pick was tough. While we love the price and the suction power of the Turboclean PowerBrush Pet, for just a few more dollars, you could get the Turboclean DualPro Pet (Amazon), which offers a much larger water tank and a hose for above-floor cleaning.