Best Toilet Bowl Cleaners
These products, from brands like Great Value, Lysol, and Nature Clean, can make cleaning easier
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We all want our bathrooms to sparkle, right? But, as anyone who’s wielded a toilet brush can tell you, keeping them clean can be a real chore.
Consumer Reports recently tested nearly a dozen toilet bowl cleaners from popular brands such as Clorox, Lysol, and Seventh Generation. We examined a range of options, including traditional liquids and gels, as well as sheet and tab products that dissolve once dropped in the water.
Best Toilets From CR's Tests
We flushed plastic balls, sponges, and water-filled condoms to find models that don’t clog.
Best Toilet Bowl Cleaners
The cleaners that top our ratings most effectively removed a proprietary mixture of sticky, organic ingredients dried onto porcelain plates—meant to mimic solid waste on the surface of your porcelain toilet bowl.
To standardize testing, we applied an equal amount of cleaner (mixed into a water-based solution) onto a dirty plate and then set up a rig to drag a brush across it for 3 minutes. The top performers, featured below, removed the most waste when assessed both visually and by weight.
Because they come in bottles with pointed nozzles, liquid and gel cleaners allow you to get all around the bowl and under the lip, while dissolvable cleaners that you drop into the bowl can reduce mess by avoiding drips or leaks during handling and may take up less space in your cabinet. Either style can work; it’s largely a matter of personal preference.
How CR Tests Toilet Bowl Cleaners
The products that perform best in our ratings removed the largest amount of solid waste from a porcelain plate during testing.
To start, our experts concocted a proprietary sticky mixture and dried it onto porcelain plates. We then got to cleaning: For each test, we applied the cleaner (as part of a water-based solution) to a soiled plate and, using a rig, uniformly dragged a toilet cleaning brush across for 3 minutes, mimicking scrubbing. For the solid sheet and tablet cleaners, we first dissolved the solid cleaner into water.
We measure the results by analyzing the amount of white porcelain visible before and after cleaning. This was calculated by counting pixels in photographs taken during testing and is represented by the “bowl cleaning” score. We also weighed the plate before and after cleaning to quantify how much solid waste was removed, represented by the “solid waste removal” score.
Our testing doesn’t assess a cleaner’s ability to remove stains or limescale buildup. It also doesn’t assess the validity of specific manufacturer claims, such as a cleaner being all-natural, nontoxic, antibacterial, or antiviral. We do include those claims in our ratings chart to help you shop, though. The rating of a cleaner’s scent tends to come down to preference, so that also isn’t incorporated into our scoring.
