Neo Chair Office Chair Review: I tested Amazon's bestselling $39 chair

When you think of the best office chairs, chances are you brace yourself for a hefty price tag. Many of our top picks cost well above $400, and their quality warrants such a cost. That said, what if you not only cut that price in half, but divided it by 10? That's even cheaper than many of the best budget office chairs, but there are models out there with a price that low.

With some hesitancy, I decided to try out one of the cheapest chairs I could find on the internet to see how it compares to all of these top-shelf options. There are plenty of options available on sites like Amazon, most of which I can safely assume will perform poorly. That's why I went for the top-rated option under $50, the Neo Chair office chair.

After about three weeks of testing this uber-cheap chair, I can collect much of my findings in three clauses: I would not buy this chair again, but it performed better than I expected, and it raised my bar significantly for the chairs I test in the future.

Now, that sentence tells most of the story, but not all of it. For a deeper dive into what I thought was notable about this humble piece of bottom-of-the-barrel furniture, read on.

Neo Chair Office Chair: Cheat Sheet

• What is it? An ultra-inexpensive mesh and foam office chair that justifies its low cost with reduced size and adjustability
• Who is it for? First-time home office designers looking to outfit their workspace for as low a price as possible
• What does it cost? The Neo Chair costs $39 on Amazon
• What do we like? It has a breathable mesh backrest, it's super light, and it was relatively easy to assemble
• What don't we like? This chair was far too small for me, and the lack of adjustability made it a difficult chair to use for more than an hour or two

Neo Chair Office Chair: Specs

Neo Chair Office Chair: The Ups

It's pretty easy to dig into how a chair this cheap isn't as good as something from Herman Miller, but there are still a good few nuggets of quality worth mentioning with this budget build.

Super light

To add some context to the picture shown above, my arm was recently injured in a mountain bike accident, and I've been struggling for ages to lift anything with it. This 16-pound chair, however, was no problem at all.

The Neo Chair was absurdly easy to carry up to my third-story apartment in its box. The low weight can likely be credited to the considerable amount of plastic that makes up this chair's structure, but I'm not too concerned about this chair's durability considering how easy it would be to just get a new one.

Since this chair was so light, it was easy to move between rooms for photos without moving any of the rest of my furniture, and it also stayed in place on my slightly slanted office floor instead of rolling into the hallway.

Easy assembly

Approximately three days before I got this chair in the mail, I got another chair with a similar price in a similarly sized box with similar assembly instructions. I truly disliked my experience with that chair, and my unpleasant testing started with the assembly. Half of the threads stripped out when I was screwing bolts in, the bolt holes didn't even line up, and the whole thing felt precarious once it was all together. But that wasn't the case with the Neo Chair.

I did have to take my time putting this chair together, as no two parts were joined out of the box, but it was a far less maddening process. The whole ordeal probably took me 15 minutes, though I wasn't exactly looking at the clock.

Once everything came together, it felt rock-solid, so much so that I actually disliked how rigid it was in the end (more on that later). I was just glad it wasn't flimsy.

Lumbar support

If there was one thing I wasn't expecting to like on this chair before it arrived, it was the lumbar support bar that's molded onto the backrest. It looked like it hardly did anything. However, now that I've spent some time in this chair, I can say that it's not as vestigial or superficial as I worried it would be.

I will say that this support felt rather flimsy, but I still noticed its presence, which is more than I can say about some other chairs I've tried that didn't have any at all.

Neo Chair Office Chair: The Downs

There are things I didn't like about this chair that costs me less than half my weekly grocery bill? How shocking!

Sarcasm aside, I was surprised to see that the issues I had with this chair weren't what I thought they would be. Keep reading to see what I mean.

Size issues

It's not easy to represent with a photo, but this chair is teeny-tiny, at least for someone of my 5' 11" stature. It's good to have some of your thigh hanging off the edge of your seat when you're on a swivel chair, as this gives you a lot more mobility, but I felt like I had to scoot back every few minutes just to stay on this thing.

If you're taller than roughly 5' 8" or have long legs for your height, I imagine you will struggle to feel like you can settle into this chair. You can recline the upper half of the chair, which helps keep you in the seat a little more securely, but it's still not supremely comfortable.

Almost no adjustability

To get to such a low price, the Neo Chair makes considerable sacrifices in the "moving parts" department. All you can really do with this thing is change the seat height and lock the recline spring in place. That's all. Simplistic, for sure, but not exactly comfortable.

The entire upper half of this chair is fixed together. The armrests, seat, and backrest are all effectively one piece, which makes it quite hard to find the right way to sit in it. Like I said, it's pretty small, and the lack of lumbar support mobility is downright infuriating.

Neo Chair Office Chair: Verdict

If you're looking for a sub-$50 chair that ticks all the boxes of a more expensive model, that makes two of us. The Neo Chair is a great option if you fit in it perfectly from the get-go, but I would definitely recommend looking for a pricier, more adjustable model if you have the budget for it.

That said, there are plenty of folks out there who don't have the budget for a chair that costs hundreds of dollars. I've been in that position before. As such, I have enough experience living from that perspective to know that this is probably as good as you're going to get at this price point. This chair doesn't try to sell you anything flashy to hide the fact that it's dirt cheap; rather, it focuses on what elements of its design it can actually make work with one of the most limiting price caps imaginable.