The 2 Best Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaners of 2025
Top pick
This extraction cleaner gets stains out about as well as any model we tested, and it costs less than most. But it comes with only one cleaning attachment, and its tank is awkwardly designed.
Though no portable carpet cleaner can magically erase every type of stain, the Bissell Little Green Portable Carpet Cleaner 1400B did a respectable job, and it’s among the most reliable and affordable spot cleaners available. If you’re occasionally faced with food stains or gross messes, this machine will help you clean up.
It has good cleaning power. Though it is far from perfect, this model received the highest overall scores over two rounds of testing. It removed Nutella, peanut butter, caramel syrup, yard dirt, red Gatorade, and Fanta soda better than its competitors. But, like all of the machines we tested, it struggled with blue Gatorade, red wine, and coffee. (It still significantly lightened those stains, however.) If you have darker-colored or patterned carpet or upholstery, you might be satisfied with the results. One Wirecutter staffer marveled at the number of dried-on messes the Little Green 1400B was able to pick up, including cat-puke remnants, muddy footprints, and “years’ worth of on-the-go meal remnants ground into my car seats.” Another tester noted that this model performs best on fresher stains.
It’s easy to clean. Bissell recommends cleaning the hose and the machine after each use to keep grime from building up and causing odors. This model comes with Bissell’s HydroRinse Self Cleaning Tool, which makes cleanup less of a hassle: Attach the HydroRinse tool to the hose, fill the clean-water tank, turn on the machine, and press the trigger to flush it.
It’s comparably light. At 9.65 pounds, the Little Green 1400B was the second-lightest spot cleaner in our latest round of testing, so it should be a bit easier to schlep this model out of storage when you need it.
It’s more reliable than most. The Little Green 1400B seems to be the most reliable (or the least-faulty) model in the category. Several Wirecutter staffers have owned it for years and love it. (They particularly laud its ability to clean up cat puke.) On Amazon, the spot cleaner has an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of five across more than 75,000 reviews.
Bissell has excellent customer service. Should you encounter a problem, Bissell offers the option to text, email, or chat. We contacted its customer service via chat when we couldn’t find the self-cleaning hose tool that was supposed to come with the model. A representative responded within a minute, offering to send us the tool free of charge.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Its tanks have an awkward design. The tanks lack carrying handles, and they have rounded bottoms, so it’s impossible to set them down in the sink. The line for measuring formula is at the bottom of the clean-water tank, so you have to add the formula first and the water second, which we found counterintuitive. The tank lacks measuring lines for the doses of cleaning solution needed for smaller cleanups.
It’s a bit clunky, and its hose is rigid. Despite being relatively lightweight, the Little Green 1400B is notably larger and clunkier than other models we tested, and its hose is less flexible, so it’s trickier to maneuver.
It comes with one no-frills brush tool. The Little Green 1400B comes with one 3-inch cleaning brush. It is sufficient for most situations, but it requires more manual scrubbing action than the larger brush on our best-for pick, the Bissell Little Green Pet Pro Portable Carpet Cleaner 2891. Multiple Wirecutter staffers who have used the Little Green 1400B bemoan how many passes it takes to clean larger stains and found that it could handle only smaller jobs.
