Best alarm clock for 2020

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Travelwey’s alarm clock excels at simplicity. It’s $14, which is a little more than other competent models I tested, but still easily affordable for a bedside alarm clock you’ll use every day. It only has a handful of buttons, all of which are easy to understand and use. The big red numbers dominate the LED display, and the snooze button is easy to find and smack when you want to shut up the alarm in the morning.

You can adjust the brightness of the numbers with a slider on the back. At all levels, the numbers are large enough that they’re easy to read from across a dark room and they don’t cast a glow that could disrupt your sleep. The Travelwey Home LED Alarm Clock also has a separate nightlight feature if you don’t want your room to be pitch black while you sleep.

Other than the nightlight, Travelwey’s alarm doesn’t have much to feature. You can’t adjust the snooze time — it’s 9 minutes. You can’t set a second alarm. You can switch between a two-volume alarm setting if you prefer a soft or loud alarm clock, but you can’t change the tone or have it play music or the radio.

It’s a simple alarm clock, but Travelwey made sure all of the basics were implemented well. A simple indicator shows the alarm is armed. It has a backup battery, if you have a power outage. You can check the time with a button and press a separate one to turn off the alarm but leave it set for the same time the next day. There’s not much to the Travelwey Home LED Alarm Clock, but what’s there works well.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The Show 5 has a lot of the trappings I look for in a good alarm clock. You can set different alarms and have them repeat on various days of the week. The alarm can wake you up with a customizable tone or your own music. You can have the alarm ramp up the volume loud to ease you out of your sleep. Along the same line, the screen can gradually get brighter starting 15 minutes before the alarm to wake you from sleep.

When you’re not sleeping, you can issue voice commands to the Show 5 thanks to the built-in Alexa voice assistant. You can also use the touchscreen to make video calls, check the weather, control your smart home and other things. The Show 5 is a smart display similar to the original Echo Show, but trimmed for your nightstand.

Even with adaptive brightness enabled, the screen still casts a little glow, and you can’t customize the snooze time, but it otherwise offers all of the customization and any feature you’d want if you’re willing to pay more for a smart alarm. Its list price is $90, but it’s currently on sale on Amazon for $60.

Read our Echo Show 5 review.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The Sony ICFC-1 costs $18, a little more than the Travelwey Home LED. It has an alarm clock radio built in so you can wake up to your favorite station or a more traditional alarm clock buzzing. You can set a sleep timer so you can fall asleep to the radio as it plays. It adjusts the time automatically for daylight saving time. Even the buzzing alarm gently ramps up to ease you out of your sleep, and the snooze function button is easy to find if you need more time.

You’ll want to keep the manual handy when first setting up the Sony ICFC-1. Even setting and checking your alarm time is counterintuitive at first. There’s no button for it — you hit the plus or minus on top to see the time then keep hitting one or the other to set the alarm time. Once you know what to press, using the ICFC-1 is simple enough, it’s just not quite as brainless as the Travelwey alarm.

The cube design is also a little hard to get used to, and the orange numbers aren’t as easily visible from across the room as those on the Travelwey alarm. That said, you can cycle through three levels of brightness by tapping snooze, none of which creates an unwanted glow. The ICFC-1 also has a button to turn off the alarm that keeps it set for the same time. It has a battery backup and a clear indicator when the alarm is armed.

I liked Travelwey’s alarm slightly more as it’s easier to set up, and its clock is easier to see from across a darkened room, but Sony’s alarm makes a strong case for itself by doing more for the same price and it could easily be the better choice for you if you value those extras.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

If you’re willing to spend more than $40 for an alarm, you can look for all kinds of different features. Of all of the potential alarm upgrades, the sunrise alarm on the $45 Philips HF3500 is the only one that actually makes it easier to wake up in the morning. Shaped a bit like a UFO with a kickstand, the HF3500 has a simple circular orange clock face surrounded by a couple of buttons and a wide light ring. Thirty minutes before the scheduled alarm time, the light gradually starts increasing in brightness until it reaches a customizable max at the scheduled time and starts beeping with increasing intensity to finish the task of waking sleepers up.

The light is supposed to gently ease sleepers awake. On both mornings of my testing, I had a good night’s sleep and a relatively easy time getting out of bed. Aside from the light, the Philips HF3500 is easy to operate with minimal buttons. You can use the light as a lamp and it has 10 levels of brightness. You can cycle through three levels for the clock face, but the orange numbers do a good job of not casting much of a glow even at their brightest, so sleep won’t be disturbed.

Snoozing the alarm is counterintuitive, as you need to whack the upper half of the light — there’s no button. I’d worry that I’d accidentally break my fancy alarm on a particularly grouchy morning. For its price, the HF3500 surprisingly lacks any extras other than the wake-up light, and I doubt that will be much help for heavy sleepers, or those with rooms that already get bright when day breaks.

Nevertheless, the HF3500 keeps things simple and elegant while still innovating on the basic concept of waking up from sleep in the morning. Splurging on the HF3500 could be a worthwhile experiment if you’re looking for a more peaceful way to wake up.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The RCD30 has a lot in common with my favorite of the bunch, the Travelwey. The RCD30 is simple, with only a couple of buttons. It has a red large display with two levels of brightness — neither glows and you can easily see either from across a dark room. The snooze button is easy to find, but double-checking your alarm time and resetting it for the next day aren’t as easy on the RCD30 as on the Travelwey. Also, unlike the Travelwey, the RCD30 doesn’t have a nightlight, which some prefer for sleep. Given that it’s only about $13, it’s a good alternative if you want something cheap and simple.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

I hated the Sonic Bomb bed shaker alarm — but that’s a good thing if you’re a semicomatose sleeper and it’s difficult for you to wake up. To be clear, I didn’t hate the $32 clock because of poor design or poor performance, I hated it because I woke up to my pillow shaking and I thought the world was ending. The bed shaker alarm has an incredibly loud buzzer and a vibrating alarm clock attachment you can place on your bed in case the buzzer itself isn’t enough. The clock offers two alarms and plenty of customization. The controls are easy enough to figure out. It’s worth your consideration for heavy sleepers, and it deserves to be mentioned alongside the Philips HF3500 as a good implementation of a novelty alarm concept. But unless you truly know very deep sleepers, the Philips makes for a much more pleasing morning routine.

The Lenovo Smart Clock uses Google Assistant to respond to your voice commands, so you can use it as a smart speaker like the Google Home Mini. It has a 4-inch touchscreen and you can swipe between pages showing the weather, your commute and your calendar — handy info when you’re heading to bed or first waking up. It’s similar to a smart display, but not as robust, in that you can’t watch videos or access a smart home control panel. The touchscreen is meant specifically for your bedside.

Fortunately, it’s an effective alarm. You can set different alarms at once and customize each to a wide degree. You can set your preferred snooze length, choose an alarm tone and set any alarm to repeat on a daily schedule. The Lenovo Smart Clock also doubles as a sunrise alarm, with the screen getting brighter 30 minutes before your scheduled wake up time. 

Plus, it can trigger a Good Morning routine when you shut it off. By default, that routine will tell you about your day and then play news podcasts, but you can customize it to your liking and have it control smart home gadgets as well. After a recent update, it can also scroll through your personal pictures as a screensaver. 

The Lenovo Smart Clock isn’t perfect. You can choose from a variety of clock faces, but none strikes the perfect balance of nighttime visibility without a glow. You can’t wake up to the radio or your own music. If you want something more than a basic alarm, the smarts are well implemented, but the Amazon Echo Show 5 does more.

CNET review: Lenovo Smart Clock.

The LED display on this smart speaker shows the time and weather. It’s a minor upgrade over an ordinary Echo Dot, but the visible clock makes it easier to recommend as an alarm. The brightness of the display adapts to the light in the room and the numbers do a good job of not casting a glow when dim. I was surprised the Dot with Clock did well on this test, since the numbers are white and you can’t change the color to orange or red — which are typically better at being visible in the dark without casting a glow. 

The Dot with a Clock responds to your voice commands through Alexa, and shows an indicator when an alarm is set. Plus, you can smack the top to snooze for a set nine minutes. While still a smart speaker first and foremost, the Dot with Clock now warrants consideration as an effective alarm clock. 

CNET Review: Amazon Echo Dot with Clock.

I was torn about the American Lifetime Day Clock, because the large-print design struck my fancy and could come in handy if you have impaired vision. The clock even spells out the day and date, and you can program alarms with a reminder message such as “Take your medicine” to help relatives with memory trouble. That said, I’m primarily judging alarm clocks here, and it isn’t a good alarm clock. You can’t snooze, the display casts a glow even at its dimmest, and setting alarms is a pain. You have to scroll through a menu that could easily be confusing for an elderly relative — so you’d be stuck with all the setup and even maintenance when a setting needs to be changed. The $41 American Lifetime Day Clock might be worth considering if you need a time display capable of reminders, but you can find better options if you just want an alarm with big numbers.

If you want features, the $50-ish iHome iBT29BC likely has you covered. This smart alarm clock has a built-in radio and two alarms, doubles as a Bluetooth speaker and even comes with an auxiliary cable. It has a battery backup, and it can double as a speakerphone and communicate with your phone’s digital assistant. It has a light that changes colors and lots of customization for what to play when you wake up. The light won’t fade up like the Philips HF3500, but it can turn on when your alarm sounds. Plus, the sound quality is surprisingly good. The snooze button is a little too small and you’ll want to keep the instruction manual handy when you first start using it. The clock face shines too brightly when turned up and it’s hard to see from across the room when dim. The iHome iBT29BC does a little bit of everything, but it’s not great at any one thing, and for the price, if you want a built-in speaker to wake you up, you might as well get a smart speaker.

Read more.

Given that the Home Sunrise Alarm Clock performs ostensibly the same trick as the Philips HF3500 for a fraction of the price — $29 for the Home Clock as opposed to $37 for the HF3500 — I was excited to try it out. This light alarm clock even has a few more features: The light changes colors, and you can customize which color turns on and how long it fades up before your chosen alarm time. It has a radio and you can pick from a variety of wake-up sounds, including classical music and nature sounds such as waves crashing. On paper, the clock offers everything you could want in a light alarm clock at a great price. It also proves that you get what you pay for. The touch buttons on the front aren’t very responsive — setting the time, setting an alarm and turning off the alarm from your bedside table are all more difficult than they need to be. Using the radio is surprisingly tedious. The sunrise simulation brightness ramps up too quickly in the morning and the white numbers showing the time cast too much light at night. If you can get around the tedium, the clock does offer many a feature for the price.