Gearnalysis compares outdoor gear on what the numbers actually say. Every product is one sourced record. Every ranking is math you can see, and change. There is no "trust us, this is the one," because the best pad for a winter mountaineer and the best pad for a summer car camper are almost never the same pad.
Most gear roundups are one person's opinion dressed up as a verdict. You get a shortlist, a favorite, and very little you can check. Worse, plenty of them quietly rank by affiliate payout rather than by how good the gear is. So two sites confidently name two different "best" pads, and neither shows its work.
We built the opposite. Publish the specs, score them with a formula you can inspect, and let you re-weight it for the trip you are actually taking. The ranking is an output of the data, not a headline written first and justified later. Change what you care about and the "best" product changes with you, which is exactly how a real recommendation should behave.
We take no sponsorships and run no paid placements. No brand pays to rank here, and no brand can. A product's position comes from its published specifications and the priorities you set, and nothing else touches it. If a page ever carries an affiliate link, it earns a commission at no cost to you, and it still has zero effect on where a product lands in the table. The ranking and the money are kept in separate rooms on purpose.
When a maker doesn't publish a number, we mark it "n/s" and score around it. We never invent a value to flatter a product, and a missing spec never quietly inflates a score. If that makes a well-marketed product look worse than the hype, so be it. That gap is the honest part.
Every figure on the site is a published specification, pulled from the manufacturer's own listing or an authorized retailer, and shown right in the comparison table so you can trace it. Today that covers 133 sleeping pads and 173 sleeping bags, quilts, and bivies, and it grows as we add categories. We hold warmth to a single standard rather than mixing lab figures with marketing ones: ASTM F3340 for pad R-values, and EN 13537 / ISO 23537 for bag temperature ratings. The full set of rules, including how the durability proxy works and why we only store standardized warmth numbers, lives on our methodology page.
Gearnalysis is built and maintained by a small team of outdoor-gear obsessives who got tired of roundups that couldn't show their math. We keep our names off the rankings deliberately. The whole promise of the site is that you don't have to take anyone's word for anything, so the work should stand on the data and the method, not on whose byline is attached. Judge the numbers, not the personalities. That is the entire idea.
Specs change, makers update their listings, and prices move. If a number here looks off, tell us and we will check it against the source and fix it quickly. Accuracy is the whole product, so a good correction is one of the most useful things you can send us. Reach us at hello@gearnalysis.com.