OneLove vs Radiant Health vs Clearlight vs SaunaSpace vs Sunlighten vs LifePro Full Comparison

In this video I’m answering a group member question that turned into a massive sauna comparison across every category. I go through OneLove sauna domes, Radiant Health, Clearlight, SaunaSpace, Sunlighten, LifePro, Relax Sauna, DIY heat lamp setups and portable tents, and talk about what actually matters when you’re trying to pick the right sauna for your situation.

Instead of worrying about screenshots of air temperature or marketing language, I break down heater layout, cubic footage, bench heaters, core temperature, heat coverage and why the 3 percent emissivity arguments never make a real difference for most people. Some of these models heat fast, some take forever, some are great for apartments, some work for travel, some make sense for health-challenged folks, and some are just plain overpriced for what they do. At the end of the day the whole point is simple. Just be sweating. I wasted years overthinking all this and renting sessions, and the truth is you get most of the benefits as long as your core temp goes up and you’re using the thing a few times a week.

Use this breakdown to match the category to your needs and not someone else’s. Everyone has different space, power limits, budgets and goals. Some sauna is better than no sauna, whether it comes from a wooden cabin, a dome, a tent or a DIY heat lamp setup.

Below are the links I always include so you can compare options and decide what fits your setup best.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

I have a hard time doing this comparison because we’re, you know, again, we went from heat lamp saunas to premium saunas to slide down sauna domes. He may as well toss in something like a portable sauna tent, like a relaxed sauna tent. I don’t know how to compare all these together for you because we’re not talking about the same things. We’re not talking about the same ease of use. You know, I’m a larger person, so I don’t really want to like sit down cramped into stuff. If I have the option, if that’s all I can do, it’s worth doing it because my body still performs better. I still feel better. Just getting sauna sessions in at the end of the day. My message to you guys is forget about all this crap that you see online and just be sweating because you will live a better life if you just sweating a few times a week, period.

I don’t know if I’m ready for this comparison actually, but I’m supposed to be out there putting, where is it? Rake trim on that roof there, but it’s still in the twenties and I don’t really want to get out there right now. So let’s do a group member comparison or question. Let me read it. It says, can you do it? And this guys, this is hard to do because we’re talking about different categories, but she says, can you do a comparison with one love sauna domes, radiant health saunas, clear light saunas, sauna space, saunas, sunlight and saunas, sunlight and calls, and are trying extremely hard. Three times in one day. Yeah, they’re kind of known to do that. Okay, so man, let’s start with the one love sauna dome. A lot of times people have questions about the domes. It’s perfect. If you’re limited to a 15 amp circuit or you travel or they’re easy to move, like they stack inside of each other. It’s not the easiest thing for one person to, uh, how do you say like carry and put in the trunk of a car necessarily, but it’s easy to collapse them down and put it into a closet or something. Now, pros and cons to that. The pro is they work extremely well. Small cubic footage, excellent heater coverage. Uh, typically you don’t have much heater coverage on your back, uh, but you do on your entire torso head to toe. Basically heat up time is almost instant because there’s no air to really like combat that. Um, you know, they typically work very, very well. If you look up, um, whole body hyperthermia studies by Dr. Ashley Mason, you’ll see the benefit and raising core temperature. People are worried about air temperature and a lot of this stuff. It really is irrelevant at that point. Their core temp is approaching fever state. I mean, it’s totally different experience, you know, to do some targeted therapy like that, but the equipment like you’re asking about does work well.

Cons. I don’t like the position. I don’t really like to lay in my own sweat. I also don’t like, it’s kind of like the sauna blankets. Like I feel like I’m mummified, you know, once I’m in there because my shoulders are wide. So once I get it, except for the one love, uh, XL, the XL is wide enough for me to like pull my arm out and like grab something. The other ones, it’s just like the blankets, you know, once I’m in there and zipped up or whatever you want to call it, uh, I kind of, I’m like, you know, I feel like you’ve duct tape me or something and you’re about to leave me the trunk of the car. Not my favorite thing. Um, but some people absolutely love it and whether you like it or not, if you’re in a situation where your space calls for that type of equipment, it, they do work well. They’re under $2,000 for like the big low EMF ones. You don’t have to go with some name brand like the clear light or the sunlight. And those are nice too. Some of them have like a wooden stand to get you up off the floor, which is kind of cool. Uh, but as far as like, you know, health benefits, you really just need most of the most of foreign friend you can get and that’ll give it to you. So moving on to the next one is ready and health saunas. Now there’s no models specified here, so I’m just going to kind of do like a general overview, assuming that you don’t know anything about these. There’s a thousand videos on the YouTube channel, so if there’s something else that’s more in depth or model specific, just search for my name or the channel and then whatever model you’re interested in and it’ll come up. So radiant house saunas, I mean, it’s pretty much like the gold standard that we’ve used over the last six years now since 2019 basically I have a bunch of them or not a bunch, but I have my favorite one, the flagship one right there behind me. I’ve got my desk spun around today just to do something different as a clear day out, even though the camera doesn’t focus on the mountains in the background. But this is what I’m looking at when I’m filming up here with you guys. And so if Aaron’s ever asking me questions or something and I’m kind of like dozing off to the side, now you know what I’m looking at. Um, but radiant health. Awesome. They don’t break. Everyone’s concerned about this and that temperature, warranty, heat, you know, full spectrum, blah, blah, blah. The gold standard. If you want a great sauna, you want something that’s reliable. You want something that looks amazing, works well, safety standards, low emf, low VOC, so low you don’t have to worry about it. Most of the other companies are only showing you half. Radiant has done an amazing job for years and years on nailing that. And one of the only saunas in the entire world with a bench heater. So if you want to lay flat or you want to lay down and put your legs up, you’re still getting infrared coverage from underneath where or you’re getting like at least heat from underneath. In most saunas, when you look at them on a FLIR gun, if you have no heat in the bench, as soon as you turn sideways and lay flat, you know, that entire portion of your body no longer has far infrared coverage and the radiant health. It does have heat coverage. It also contributes to sweating quicker at a lower temperature. So that’s why you’ll see people say, Oh, I’ve got my radiant health at 125 degrees and I’m sweating buckets. And in other saunas you’d be like, Oh, the sauna is maxed out at 150 and I’m not sweating at all. The temperature on the screen is largely irrelevant when you’re comparing different models, different heater layouts, different wattages per cubic foot, all this stuff. There’s a lot of variables that come into play, but you see a post on social media and it’s like, Oh, well, you know, this one has this much power or this many heaters and it does this. And people say that it doesn’t perform well. Well, there’s reasons why for that. So radiant, probably my number one recommendation. If you’re looking for a standup wooden sauna, very difficult, like very, very, very difficult for me to do a comparison like this when we’re in so many different categories. Like we went from a lie down sauna dome directly to a flagship premium priced, you know, standup wooden sauna with a glass door, speakers, lights, and one of the best heater layouts in the industry. So it’s like we’re, we’re, we’re way past comparing apples to oranges here, but I’m going to do it just because a lot of times people, this is their first exposure to, you know, saunas. Other group members probably have similar questions and you guys can, you know, we can help each other in the comments. Next on the list that she asked about is clear light. She didn’t specify whether it’s clear light sanctuary or clear light premier. There’s a huge difference between those. The sanctuary is the one with all glass front typically has the heaters on the back of the glass. They call them full spectrum heaters, but they’re really just a quartz halogen emitter, kind of like a patio heater. They do work well though, to kind of combat the heat loss from the glass. If you’re going to buy a sanctuary, I’d recommend asking for the weather stripping kit. My sanctuary one, you know, doesn’t like to really perform its best because of the heat loss from the glass. Compare that to a clear light premier. Obviously if you’re claustrophobic, you would go with a sanctuary. They’re more beautiful. One of the most elegant and aesthetic saunas on the market out of all the brands. There’s nothing that looks like them. They’re awesome. From a, from a visual standpoint, you walk into the room, the lighting that they have, it’s just amazing. Erin loves filming in them because the camera works so well. So the clear light premier doesn’t have, it’s got a wooden front wall. So more insulative, usually cheaper, similar, very similar to the radiant health saunas aside from not having the heater in the bench. But basically like big sister, little brother to each other in that regard. And there’s different strokes for different folks, right? Some people say, Oh, one brand’s best for this. One brand’s best for that. I don’t find that to be the case. I find it to be matching it up to your individual needs or your install limitations or your specific, you know, criteria. If you’re health challenged, you know, that kind of changes things. But great saunas, good build. We use Jen for those. They have a black Friday deal too. I should have mentioned that in the very beginning. All these saunas are on black Friday to my knowledge, except for the last two. And there’s probably even some other ones in here that still have a black Friday deal that might be a good fit for you. And I’ll just throw the links in the description. You can check those out. Next on the list is sauna space. Now sauna space is a completely different, very unique product offering. It’s basically the Dr. Wilson heat lamp sauna, you know, on steroids. I’ve had one, but it’s been many years now. We also build, you know, a DIY sauna tent using the same style bulbs for like three or 400 bucks. I’ve always had an issue with the sauna space pricing. If you go back and look at my other videos, I give them kudos to the build quality, like the sanding, wood selection, everything they’re handmade. It’s awesome. Like there’s nothing as smooth as those that I’ve ever come across in any cabinetry or anything else. That said, I mean, spending four or $5,000 for a four bulb or five bulb, whatever they use now, a heat lamp sauna that is basically dowel rods connected together with a canvas tent cloth is like a little bit insane. You know, the saunas do work. I’m not convinced that you’re getting the same red light therapy, despite what people say from a sauna space unit. Because if you look, if you look at a heat lamp bulb charted on a graph, it’s going to have good output in the 1500 nanometer wavelength, but it dives off after you get underneath a thousand nanometers. So if you look at PubMed studies

For photobiomodulation or the benefits, cellular benefits of red light therapy, you’re going to see the primary most research wavelengths are the 600 nanometer wavelength and the 800. So it’s 660, 830, 840, 850, anywhere in those ranges. Right? So my issue with people saying that, Oh, you can get sauna and red light therapy. It’s not, I, I wouldn’t trust it for myself. So I have a hard time telling you we’re going along with that because when I look at that graph and the output drops off a cliff under 900 nanometers, yeah, you might get some bleed through. You may get some output right in the 800 nanometer wavelength, but not very much. And it’s not targeted like a red light therapy device. So this idea that you’re going to get red light therapy and sauna from the same thing and that the heat lamp bulbs themselves, I mean, they’re primarily, they’re going to top out at a, you might get some bleed through again on the upper range, but if you’re into 2000, 3000, you know, upper couple thousand nanometers, again, going to fall off a cliff. So the heat output charted on a graph is nowhere close to the same thing as like a far infrared sauna that has a ceramic or carbon heater in it. It’s very different.

Now why am I saying all this and going into detail because it’s important for you to understand they do work, right? You’re in a tiny little canvas cabin and you have, I don’t know, two 50 times five, you’ve got, you know, under 1500 Watts of heat power right in front of you, close to you. But the problem that I don’t like is that you have to spin around on the chair like a rotisserie in order for you to get even, you know, sweat coverage on the body. So like your front half can be on fire when you’re facing the bulbs, but you literally have to spin, you know, like this in order to get the rest and to get a, you know, the same spot on your back. Now we haven’t checked it with temperature probes, so I don’t know what that’s doing to your core temperature. If it’s still eliciting, you know, a similar response to blah, blah, blah. I just know that for $5,000 we can get a cheap standup, wooden infrared sauna, like three of them, or we can get one, you know, premium standup, wooden sauna, um, that has even heat coverage. I don’t have to spin around on a rotisserie. I also don’t have to like crouch way down in order to get in and out of the thing. That wasn’t really my favorite thing. And then just seeing what I’m getting compared to like, I could replicate the experience of that almost in a DIY sauna. Like in the course that we sell, it teaches you how to build it for under 500 bucks. So I’m like, what am I spending an extra $4,500 for? Yeah. If you like that, and that’s your thing, I get how it could be worth it because the build quality is far superior than to some little grow tent thing, right. Or some stool that you buy at Walmart and stick it in there. So, you know, I understand all sides. I just, I have a hard time doing this comparison because we’re, you know, again, we went from heat lamp saunas to premium saunas to lie down sauna domes. You may as well toss in something like a portable sauna tent, like a relaxed sauna tent. Also great offering. If that’s what you’re limited to, if you have no space, you move around a lot, you’re living out of hotels, maybe you’re traveling, you know, nurse or salesman or something like that. It can fold up and throw it in your back seat and you can have sauna anywhere. If you only live there for a couple months, you don’t have to set something up. So I totally understand everyone’s need for different stuff. It’s just hard for me to compartmentalize. Like I don’t know how to compare all these together for you because we’re not talking about the same things. We’re not talking about the same like ease of use. You know, I’m a, I’m a larger person so I don’t really want to like sit down cramped into stuff. If I have the option, if that’s all I can do, it’s worth doing it because my body still performs better. I still feel better. Just getting sauna sessions in. At the end of the day, my message to you guys is forget about all this crap that you see online and just be sweating because you will live a better life if you just sweating a few times a week, period. And so, you know, the portable sauna tents also have their place. But I mean, if you could have a standup wooden sauna, like you could get the life pro that’s right behind me. I’ve posted about it a lot in the black Friday deal cause it beats the Costco saunas, right? And it’s less money. It’s on sale for like 1650 or something like that with discount code. I forget what it is. I’ll put them in the description. I think it’s sauna 20 but I don’t even know. Um, but you get a, it’s not perfect. Is it the same as a 6,000 $10,000 premium sauna? No. But does it work? Will you sweat? Absolutely. And it works better than the $2,000 stuff that you see. Amazon Wayfair, Costco, it doesn’t matter. Um, and you get a standup wooden sauna that you can fit in. It’s easy to put together. So, you know, I get all these things. There’s something for everybody. I don’t think there’s one brand that’s like, you’re not going to buy one thing and it’s going to be like 90% better than another. Everyone thinks that there’s like this elusive heat therapy experience where if they just pick this, you know, if they just find this one little thing or it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a 90% difference, right? If I blindfolded you, like that’s what this emissivity testing and stuff. Oh, the heaters are 99% emissivity or the other ones are 96 by their own test emission. This is the same company doing the testing, right? So if I blindfolded you and there’s a 3% difference between two saunas and you get out and you’re not like, you know, a sauna pro that does this every single day for years and years and years, do you really think you’re going to feel a 3% difference? Probably not. Probably not. So you can go through all this stuff about, you know, blah, blah, blah, this feature, that spectrum, this wavelength. And at the end of the day, we’re talking about a minuscule difference that most people are never, ever, ever going to feel. That’s why I always say, focus on far infrared. It’s the real workhorse in any infrared sauna. I focus on heater layout. I focus on decent power to weight, power to weight ratio, decent power to cubic footage ratio, meaning, you know, guys that posted in the Facebook group where there’s this three person sauna and there’s like four heaters on the back wall and that’s it. I don’t even have to see it, use it, look at it, nothing. I can just tell by the type of heaters and the way that it’s laid out, it’s not going to work well. Your back’s going to feel like it’s on fire. Your front’s never going to get the sweat that you deserve. So by design, they just, you know, they’re not that great. So, um, let’s go on down the list. Let’s see what else did she have? She got Sunlighten. Um, you know, Sunlighten was the very first infrared saunas that I ever used. I was renting sessions at a float, a float plank float tank place. Jeez, that was a mouthful. Uh, in Baldwin Park Florida because I lived in a small apartment at the time and I didn’t have space to put a sauna in and I was thinking about moving to a larger space, um, to accommodate, just to do my wellness routine and have like a home gym or sauna room or this, that, and the other. And I was like, well, before I do all of that and before I spent all this money, I don’t really believe that this shit works. Right. So I would go and rent sessions to figure out if it, if it did work. I was seeing a functional medicine doctor and she was saying, Oh Matt, based on your labs, you’ve got to be in a sauna like yesterday. We’re not gonna be able to get this level down and do this, this, and this unless you detox and blah. I was like, yeah, whatever. I called the Sunlighten people because it’s what I rented a session in. It was like 6,500 bucks. This was way back in 2000 and I don’t know, something. And I was like, it’s too much. I don’t think it’s really doing anything. So I would continue to rent sessions and I would go there. Amazing build quality cabinet quality of a Sunlighten is the best of the industry. As far as infrared sauna cabins go, usually they have a three quarter inch planking, like an impulse or something like that. Half inch glass, uh, far above the standard. Um, the sauna, the saunas are, are definitely well built. The cabinetry is well built. I like them a lot. The thing that I don’t like about them is some of the heater layout. Some of them just don’t have adequate heat in the floor. Some of them take like an hour to reach temperature and they never actually get as hot as they’re supposed to. I also don’t like their idea of full spectrum. It’s a small led array behind the grill, um, in the, in the actual like heater layout in the wall. So wherever they have red light therapy, you’re missing far infrared. I just, this, you know, I’m not down with that. I would rather have a hundred percent heater coverage, not interrupted by, you know, red light. And then I want real red light. I don’t want subpar red light, which is what I think you get, you know, in the impulse. And it’s questionable. It’s behind a mesh grill. Yeah, it shines through, but you’re covered in a thick layer of sweat. You don’t have independent control because they cycle on their modes, the control panels. But if you’re a techie person and you want a sauna with a tablet in it and you want fancy and this, that, and the other, a lot of people love these things. But in my experience, they take a really long time to heat up. And when I was renting sessions, you know, when I use them a lot, sunlight and impulse, if the staff at the place forgot to preheat my sauna like, and they only did it like a half an hour before I got there for my scheduled time, I wasn’t sweating. It was the end of my session. I’m like, guys, what, what’s going on here? It’s not hot. It’s not, you know, so the heat up time is just drastically long in those and they never really get, I mean, none of the infrared saunas get to the air temperature that you see on the screen. Like if you were to take an independent third party probe, stick it in an infrared sauna, it’s not going to match the temperature that you see on the control panel. There’s a discrepancy there. Number one, it’s placement of the heat probe. Number two.

You know, air temp does not necessarily equal radiant temps or what the body is subjected to an infrared because you’re dealing with, you know, it’s not a convection only sauna. Yeah, it does heat the air some, but it’s not reliant on that a hundred percent. This is why you could still sweat with a door open. This is why you could still sweat at a lower temperature or, you know, we can come up with a hundred examples here, but so those, those largely haven’t been my favorite, but I’ve tested a lot of stuff over the years.

Some have been great. Some have not been great. Put a ton of YouTube videos out, different reviews on different products. And in this day and age, there’s so much available. Like we can barely get through it all and there’s something for everybody. So regardless of how I feel about, you know, using these products that you’re asking about or what my opinion is of comparing them, you know, there are situations where one company just makes something that’s the right fit for a person’s needs and whether I like it or not, that’s still the best choice for them.

So, you know, for me, it’s, it’s very important to take an individual person’s needs into account because everyone’s not me. You know what I mean? Some people don’t care about the stuff that I care about, but I’m able to remove myself from that situation and realize that, you know, this product is not for me, it’s for them. Right? So I always ask what’s, you know, what’s important to you. What’s your, you know, highest criteria. What are your limitations? Everyone has limitations.

Like I told you in the beginning of the video, I lived in a small apartment. I couldn’t really fit us on a, you know, I built the DIY heat lamps on it in my shower because I wasn’t convinced that I was going to get the value out of spending the money. I also wasn’t convinced that I could fit or power or that it was worth it to get a wooden one. But we didn’t have the options that I’m talking to you about back then, right? They weren’t that great. You used to be able to get a dynamic sauna from Costco for $9.99 a thousand dollars, right? It was okay, but it didn’t work like the life pro does today for like 15, 1600 bucks.

We didn’t have, I mean, maybe the relaxed sauna existed back then, but I didn’t even know about it. It’s not like you could just pull up a thing and be like, Oh, there’s all these choices. There was no, there’s not like a store where you can just go and try all these. So over the years I would also work with different health practitioners like alternative healthcare, you know, functional medicine doctors basically. And we would do different sets of labs and try and improve my health and do detox protocols and this and that.

And a lot of the times, you know, whether I wanted to do something or not, they really believed in a type of product or a type of sauna or a type of protocol. And I would just do it because I wanted to get the best for me. Well, over the years I kind of found that, you know, it’s the 80 20 rule. It’s, that’s why I say just be sweating. You know, everyone wants to be perfectionism syndrome in this thing. Get everything right.

Or you think if you don’t hit a certain temperature, you’re not going to get all the benefits from making shark proteins. It’s not true. Watch my other videos. Look at the PubMed studies. If you can make heat shock proteins in a hot bath, I guarantee you can make heat shock proteins in other equipment. If as long as it increases your core temperature. So this idea that some piece of equipment has to hit a temperature threshold of the air temperature monitored inside the cabin, it’s the wrong thing to be focused on in the first place.

What you want to do is look at the body response. Anything that will give the body response increased spike toward a fever temp, right? That’s what we’re going for. So a lot of people like kind of get pulled off track because they fall into these marketing narratives and it’s like, Oh, I’ve got to have this wavelength and it’s got to be full spectrum and it’s got to, that doesn’t really work for the 80 20 rule. Cause I wasted months and years researching, not buying stuff, driving to rent these stupid sessions until I got pissed off one day.

Cause I was sitting in traffic and there was like, I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t get home and they didn’t have a shower available at the float tank place. So after my sauna session, I was covered in sweat. I changed my clothes. I’m still sweating. I’m sitting on, I’m sitting at a stoplight that’s not moving in my car, still sweating on towels in my Toyota four. And I’m like, this sucks. It was, it was this weird thing that, and that’s what motivated me to be like, all right, the hell with this.

I’m going to buy this. I’m going to move. I’m going to set up what I’m going to do. Whatever I need to do to not continue experiencing this nonsense at traffic lights anymore, because this is stupid. Now it was one of the best things that I ever did and I recommend it to everybody. If you do anything, if you have a spa place near you, just type in your city plus infrared sauna into Google or something. Go rent a session, pay the 40 bucks, try it and make sure that it’s for you.

It’s an entirely different experience. Some people have great experiences renting sessions and some people don’t. A lot of it comes down to the staff at the individual place and the sauna that they have. Like I told you, if they didn’t preheat the sauna correctly, by the time I got there, you know, I only got it for an hour. So if it was a bad sauna or it didn’t preheat very well, by the end of that hour, I was either having a great experience or I was having a terrible experience based on what they do.

But still, I recommend everyone try before you buy. That’s what my grandmother said about getting married. I was like, not sure what you mean by that. Later I found out and I’ve found that, you know, really always doing something is better than nothing. Some sauna is better than no sauna live. I live by the rule of just be sweating. I don’t care what it is in 2025 about to be 2026 now. I mean, there’s something for everybody. You have options and you have information that I didn’t have back then.

You have so many different choices of saunas that weren’t available to us, you know, way back then. So I’m sure, I’m certain that even if there’s not something on this list, there’s something for you that will work really, really well. Good questions. We’ll see you in the next one.