Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Cot review

Journalist and new mum Grace Holliday put the Snoo to the test with her four-week-old baby. Read our Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Baby Cot review to find out why she thinks it's worth every penny.

Firstly, let’s establish that the Snoo Smart Sleeper Baby Cot isn’t technically a Moses basket. However, it’s such a game-changer when it comes to newborn sleep that we had to include it in our best Moses basket buying guide.

This is a premium product that retails at £1,145 so it’s in a different price category than the average Moses basket. But, based on our tester’s feedback and in-depth review, you’d be mad not to consider investing in a Snoo if you’re in the market for a Moses basket.

The Snoo is a high-tech cot with gentle rocking and soothing functionality built-in. It also has a white noise feature that actually responds to your baby, even when you're asleep. It can also be controlled via an app on your smartphone. The Snoo Smart Sleeper Baby Cot famously promises safer, longer, and happier sleep for both baby and parents.

Happiest Baby, in tandem with Dr. Harvey Karp (author of Happiest Baby on the Block), has made bold claims about their flagship product, promising it can revolutionise sleep for both babies and parents. The brand even suggests it can help reduce the impact of sleep issues such as sleep regression and eliminate the need for sleep training. Thousands of positive online reviews speak passionately about how much it lives up to expectations. So does it? In a word: absolutely. 

Design

Weighs: 17.4 kg | Suitable from: 0-6 months

Any product that makes big claims about making parents’ lives easier needs to be straightforward to set up. After all, anyone spending upwards of a thousand pounds on a product to help their baby sleep is likely to be suffering the effects of broken nights. It’s a bad start if you need an A-level in engineering to put the thing together.

It's very easy to assemble, according to Grace's Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Cot review. It’s a heavy piece of kit, which is a good thing because that’s partly what makes it so sturdy and robust. But Grace was recovering from a C-section when the Snoo arrived for her to test. So she needed to recruit her husband to help with assembly. 

Nevertheless, the couple had it unboxed and fully constructed in 15 minutes, including the time it took them to find, download, and set up the free app that you need to operate the Snoo Smart Sleeper. 

Delivered in a big sturdy box, Grace found the Snoo Smart Sleeper was ‘beautifully and logically’ packaged. (Do note, however, that our tester’s top tip for assembly is to finish setting up the app before you put the cot’s legs on - Grace’s husband had to crawl beneath the cot to scan a barcode on the base required to complete the setup.‘The cot itself is wrapped in material, and there isn’t an ounce of plastic in sight,’ she says. ‘Such a large package could seem intimidating, as though hours of manual labour must surely lie ahead, but that’s not the case. Once the material cocooning the cot is removed, all that needs attaching are the legs and the electrical wires. A bedsheet and small Snoo sack (for sleeping in) were already in situ.’

All parents know the frustration of unboxing a new bit of baby gear only to find that you need a spare drawer to store all the fiddly extras and bits of paper it comes with. The Snoo, according to Grace, doesn’t have that problem.

‘Parents with a house stacked to the rafters with baby paraphernalia will appreciate the fact that any extra items aren’t superfluous; there is a compact pack of instruction manuals in various languages, an EU-compatible plug, and two more sleep sacks - one medium-sized and the other large - and that’s it.’

How does the Snoo Sack work?

The Snoo Sack is an integral part of the Snoo’s success. It’s basically a swaddling sack that you zip your baby into, which attaches to the bassinet and keeps your baby on their back - the safest sleep position for babies. Swaddling a baby might be new to some parents, but Grace found the Snoo Sack easy and intuitive to use.

‘It’s easy to wrap the wings over, left to right, and then up at the bottom, though we adjusted a crooked arm a couple of times to ensure any cries down the line weren’t due to discomfort,’ she says. ‘The Snoo Sack is purported to take five seconds to fasten, but I’d suggest it takes more like 15 if your baby is doing anything more than lying completely still.’

Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Cot: comfort and features

Aesthetically, the Snoo is a beautiful baby cot. Grace describes it as reminiscent of a stand-alone bathtub in a fancy hotel, albeit with a wooden base and minimalistic, white metal legs.

‘It’s also much more petite than the bedside cot we replaced it with, with no clunky legs sticking out at awkward angles or zips, panels, and seams,’ she says. ‘I appreciate that there is just one button on the cot itself - on/off; everything else you can tailor via the app.’

What about the app? Is it strange getting to grips with controlling your baby’s bed via your smartphone? ‘The app does look a bit intimidating at first glance, with various pages and unfamiliar buttons, but once I play around with it for a couple of minutes, I realise it’s not,’ reports Grace.

‘Happiest Baby has again cut away anything superfluous. Page one allows you to click one button to start the Snoo, while page two shows you how much sleep and soothing your baby has had. Three other pages provide tips, settings, and help/feedback. Its minimalism is reassuring; I like knowing that I can trust the inbuilt tech of the cot to do its job. The app is less like the control panel of a spaceship and more of a bonus to tweak. Given the single on/off button on the machine, you could forgo the app altogether and still use the machine.’

Grace says she wouldn’t advise that though. Part of the appeal of the Snoo is the fact that it allows you to tailor its functionality to suit your baby during use, and as they grow.

Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Cot Review: Does it work?

The Snoo impressed our tester from the first moment she laid her baby in it. ‘Our daughter has just had a nappy change but is fussing a bit when we first put her in. Once she is on her back, she begins to cry, but we take time to make sure she is in the Snoo sack properly,’ she says. 

‘Once she’s tucked safely in, it’s easy to get the machine going via the cot’s button. She cries for a total of ten seconds and then stops. The Snoo gently rocks her from side to side. White noise plays from a speaker deep inside the machinery, positioned under where her head lies. She is asleep in under a minute.’

To establish whether the Snoo was working its promised magic, Grace was careful to recreate the same environment her baby usually sleeps in. ‘This means music on the radio, keeping the bedroom light on, and avoiding at all costs the temptation to tiptoe around. She kicks her legs about three or four times but stays calm and doesn’t cry out, so the machine doesn’t try to soothe her. She sleeps peacefully for a whole hour before we have to rouse her for a GP appointment.'

'Once we’re home again, she goes back in for a second time, eyes bright as we strap her in. As the machine turns on, a small smile creeps across her face. For six minutes she resists sleep, though happily and silently, and by the seventh minute she’s sleeping. I can’t quite believe how well it is working, and how quickly and calmly she has taken to it.’

Grace began using the Snoo when her daughter was four and a half weeks old. She wondered whether her baby was adjusting so well to the Snoo because she'd been using white noise and occasionally swaddling her since birth. ‘Then again, babies have been swaddled and rocked to sleep for centuries. So I’d see it working for most babies, particularly if it's introduced in their earliest days,’ she says.

What of the Snoo’s white noise feature? Grace is a big fan and found it significantly less intrusive than the portable device she had been using to soothe her baby. ‘The Snoo’s white noise is more like background sound - easy to tune in or out,’ she says. ‘And even when the machine racks up through its various levels, the sound is never unpleasant.’

Snoo Smart Sleeper: Value for money

For this Snoo Smart Sleeper Baby Cot review, Grace and her husband put it to the test for ten nights. ‘We consistently got around seven hours of sleep every night. Aside from one night when our daughter decided to lie happily awake; that night, we only managed six hours,’ she says. ‘In her first cot, we’d be lucky to get more than three hours sleep in total.’

Is the Snoo worth the money?

At the end of her Happiest Baby Smart Sleeper Cot review, what does Grace think? ‘If you can’t afford the cost, no it’s not - nothing is worth getting into financial trouble for,' says Grace. 'But if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it, then yes. Without hesitation, it's worth the money,’  ‘It can be used for around six months, which is approximately 183 days. At its retail price, that works out a cost of around £6.26 a night. If it allows parents to function more efficiently thanks to more sleep, it could be a wise investment. And even pay for itself.’ 

Grace reports that the Snoo improved her life in several ways. After completing the Happiest Baby Snoo Smart Sleeper Baby Cot review, she returned to work. 'After eight weeks, my husband is staying home to look after our baby. The Snoo cemented my decision.'

‘Our daughter is happier and more content during the days. We are less exhausted, and therefore less fraught and snappy with each other. Better nights mean better days. We have begun to enjoy our time with our daughter more. Having the energy to treasure this precious time is my favourite feature of all.’

You might also like our Mack & Milo Alysha Moses basket review – we rated it the best Moses basket you can buy, based on our tester’s feedback. And don’t miss all our other baby product reviews.