5. Oral-B Vitality – Best Price
If you’re on a tight budget but want to upgrade from a manual brush, this is probably the best cheap brush you can buy. However, you will have to make some compromises.
On the plus side, it has quadrant alerts and a two-minute brushing timer, as well as three brushing settings: Sensitive Plus, Sensitive and Daily. It also provides a good cleaning of the teeth, although it is not as effective as the iO models, which both vibrate and oscillate for better plaque removal.
As for the brush itself, it has a thick, grippy handle and you can buy generic replacement heads very cheaply. But a pressure sensor is missing. It’s fairly quiet to use, although the motor noise is rattly, with a high-pitched buzz on the highest setting.
On the negative side, it doesn’t come with any kind of battery lights. This means that it will stop working without any warning if the battery is empty. Then when it’s on the charger, there’s no indicator to show it’s charging properly or fully charged.
But it’s battery life that’s the real compromise. The Vitality Pro has a maximum battery life of 8 days – and that’s if you brush for two minutes twice a day and stop exactly at that point. If you run over it a few times, you can use it for about a week. If two people share, you only have 4 days before you need to recharge. It also takes 22 hours to charge from empty to full.
If you like to leave it on the stand so it can be continuously charged, then that’s no problem and we recommend it as a budget-friendly successor to a manual brush.
