Loftie Alarm Clock Review: The Best Phone-Free Sleep Tool?

I’ve used the Loftie clock + lamp combo for a little while and tested their brightness, blue light, sunrise effects, flicker, and more!

Let’s jump into it and see what these devices have to offer!

The Overview

Loftie’s two-phase alarm didn’t work for me, but if you like having an audible alarm, Loftie is worth trying. The white noise and sleep sounds are great, and I appreciated the portability and battery power. The personalized AI stories are neat but I’m not sure if they’re worth subscribing to Loftie+ for.

If you like the Loftie Clock, the Lamp is a great companion with its red light mode and dimming. But if you’re mainly interested in a sunrise effect, there are better options out there.

Loftie Clock

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See the lab results

Loftie clock filtered spectrum

Spectrum

10

661 nm

400450500550600650700750

Wavelength (nm)

Spectrum chart. Loftie Clock, melanopic DER 0.34.

Flicker, 50%, Brightness

01

20406080100

Time (ms)

Chart by time. Loftie Clock.

Loftie Lamp

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The Loftie Clock + Lamp

Loftie sells both a “two-phase” alarm clock and a sunrise lamp. If you don’t want both, they can work independently of each other.

Let’s jump into each one and their features below, or you can jump to testing here.

Getting to Know the Clock

The Loftie clock is both an alarm and an evening wind-down sound machine.

It comes equipped with a nightlight (shown below), and things like meditations, sounds, and stories to listen to before bed.

The Lofite stands out from the Hatch Restore 2 because it doesn’t require a phone for full functionality, making it ideal for those who want to keep their phones out of the bedroom at night.

It comes equipped with 3 buttons for this.

The large button turns the nightlight off and on, turns off the clock face when held, and functions as a back button in the menu. The small button on the right is for selecting something, and the arrows are used for navigating and adjusting volume. I found it super easy to use!

The clock is also battery-powered so it will function during a power outage! Charging is done via USB-C on the back.

The clock face can also be changed between white and amber in the app.

I preferred using the amber clock face:

Pressing and holding the snooze button will completely turn off the clock face if you prefer a darker bedroom.

Loftie’s “Two-Phase” Alarms

You can set or edit alarms in the alarms menu and change the volume or wake-up or get-up tones.

Now the difference between a wake-up and get-up tone is Loftie’s special sauce.

The Loftie alarm clock plays a wake-up tone for several seconds nine minutes before your scheduled alarm. The idea is to gently rouse you from deeper sleep stages into a lighter sleep stage. If you have the Loftie Lamp, this is also when it begins its sunrise.

9 minutes later, the wake-up alarm is the one that’s supposed to fully wake you up.

I’m audibly a light sleeper, so I found the first get-up tone woke me up every time no matter how I set it… so I prefer using a sunrise alarm only.

But if you prefer an audible alarm, the two-phase alarm is cool and worth trying out.

Wake Up Tones

We’ve recorded the wake-up tones here for you to preview if you’d like 🙂

Get Up Tones

And here are the get-up tones!

Sleep Sounds

Now, the Loftie clock also doubles as a white noise and sound machine. I found the selection good, and the audio quality was on par with a decent Bluetooth speaker.

Just select sounds:

Choose one of the many options:

There are a lot! Below are recordings of all the options at the time of this article.

What’s nice about the Loftie is that you can bring it anywhere at night. You could easily listen to the campfire in your reading nook before going to bed, for example.

Playlists & AI Stories

Like the Hatch Restore, the Loftie boasts a collection of meditations, stories, breathworks, affirmations, and more.

These can be started within the Loftie itself and don’t require the app or the subscription.

There are quite a decent amount of choices within each category.

Now, if you pay $5 a month for Loftie+, you can create your own AI story in the app and upload it to the clock.

It gives several prompts and then sends a story your way! They’re full-voiced and sound pretty good, If I didn’t know any better I’d have assumed it was a real voice-over.

And they’re very relaxing and chill, perfect for evening use. However, I’d have preferred to see some kind of general “get to know me and my preferences section” so that I wouldn’t have to fill out a long questionnaire each time I wanted to make a story.

It’s a bit much to “make” my own story assuming I’d like a new one each night. It’s just too much like work for something that’s supposed to be relaxing.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth lets you play audiobooks, podcasts, or music through the clock’s speakers.

It does of course, emit EMF when you do this:

So just don’t use this feature if you prefer to avoid EMF near your bedside.

Getting to Know the Sunrise Lamp

Since I love sunrise lamps, I was originally interested in this from Loftie. So, how is it?

Well, it’s a tall lamp, that’s for sure!

The Loftie lamp has two buttons:

It comes with preset options like red, orange, and reading modes.

Here’s what those can look like:

But of course, it’s also got a sunrise alarm feature, which is what I was curious to try out.

Now oddly, the sunrise will start at the alarm time you set, unlike every other sunrise alarm clock out there which finishes at the alarm time, unless you pair it with the clock, at which point it starts 9 minutes before your alarm time. Weird I know.

There are 13 total sunrises to choose from:

But again it’s worth noting that these only last 9 minutes and you can’t change the total brightness or duration, so it’s a fairly limited sunrise device.

Testing the Loftie Lamp!

We wanted to measure the total brightness for the Loftie lamp sunrises, so we put it into our integration sphere!

Lumens and Sunrise Curves

Checking total lumens, we see that the Fiji sunrise comes out on top.

The sunrise ramps themselves begin gradually which is nice, but they do rise quite dramatically near the end. Not the best.

To give you an idea of what the Fiji sunrise looks like from the Loftie Lamp here is a sped-up version:

There are some sudden increases in brightness at the end that don’t seem to show up in our 30-second test intervals, but they are also much slower than that in real time.

Lux and Proper Distances

To determine how effective the Loftie Lamp is at certain distances, we need to test lux.

We can see that Fiji is still on top, but Budapest makes an appearance here as well!

This probably has something to do with the way the colors are stacked in the Budapest sunrise. Either way, these two are your best bet.

I usually recommend starting a sunrise alarm practice at about 250 lux, and since the Loftie lamp isn’t very bright, that’s somewhere between 6 and 12 inches away.

Flicker

We test flicker as well in case that’s a concern of yours.

While there is some mild high-frequency flicker, it’s the lower-frequency stuff we worry about so this isn’t too bad. Below is a table with the flicker from each sunrise.

Testing the Clock

Of course, the clock also emits light, so I was curious to see what that looked like through the brown opaque plastic at the bottom.

Spectral Analysis

The main light is 2700K but drops down to a warmer 2300K through the plastic.

Here’s the light spectrum unfiltered:

And here it is through the plastic:

The plastic cuts down on the blue and increases the red, so that’s good, as this is meant to be used at night.

But even the small amount of blue light left shouldn’t be a big deal. The nightlight is very dim and the lux output is less than 1 just a few inches away.

Flicker

We tested the flicker on this as well:

I was happy to see that there’s barely any!

Good job Loftie.

My Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m not a big fan of the two-phase alarm; it just didn’t work for me. However, if you prefer the security that an audible alarm gives you, Loftie’s system is worth trying out.

The clock also offers some great white noise and sleep sounds and can be taken to other areas of the house since it’s portable and battery-powered, so I liked that aspect.

It also has the wind-down routine stuff packed inside, and I loved the fact that the whole thing can effectively be used without your phone nearby. Overall it’s a neat little alarm clock with a great user experience.

If you’re sold on the Loftie Clock, the Lamp is a great addition since it works hand in hand with the two-phase alarm. I also liked the red light mode and the dimming. But if you’re not getting the Clock, and are primarily interested in the sunrise effect, there are much better options.

Smart lamp

Loftie Lamp

Distinctive in the category: a proper red light mode for the bedroom, a rising sunrise effect that's genuinely novel, and simple button controls. Trade-offs are price — it's expensive for what's in the box — and a sunrise that runs dim compared to dedicated alarms.

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Loftie Clock

Stands out for working without a phone or subscription for the onboard content, no EMF unless you turn on Bluetooth streaming, a genuinely good sound machine with built-in nightlight, and a clean look with an easy menu. Trade-offs are a two-phase alarm that didn't land for me, and a monthly fee if you want access to the AI stories.

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