Secretlab Professional Footrest with Cloudswap Technology Review

Photo: Cody Campbell / HGG

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Cody has been a gamer ever since his family got a Sega Genesis when he was five-years-old. In addition to his love of narrative-focused RPGs and ho... Read more

Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

Comfort is a thing that is often neglected when it comes to gaming stations, but joint pain and sore backs are something that everyone starts to consider sooner or later. Secretlab is one of the most well-known gaming chair companies out there, and they’re about to release a footrest (professional edition) which was designed to accompany them. These launched on February 21^st, 2023 and will be widely available in June.

Secretlab sent us one of these footrests early so that we could give you our thoughts on it. Here’s what we found.

Design

The Secretlab professional footrest is a sturdily built piece of furniture. The chassis is made of metal and is quite heavy. The weight, coupled with the rubber feet on the bottom, make it very stable. I never had any issues with it sliding or moving around on the hardwood floors in all the time that I used it.

It’s also quite big. It has a surface area of 21.8” x 13.5”, meaning that there’s plenty of space for users to rest their feet comfortably, but that it also takes up a lot of space on their floor. It’s 4.3” tall, but it also includes a pair of optional rubber base covers that slip over the feet, raising the height by ~1”.

The footrest is able to tilt 15-degrees forward or back, allowing the user to adjust its relative angle to whatever is most comfortable for them. There is a switch on the back that allows you to switch between two adjustability modes: Stationary and Dynamic.

Stationary mode locks the footrest in place, allowing the user to adjust it using a lever at the top. Dynamic allows the footrest to tilt freely whenever pressure is applied.

Comfort

The PU-coated surface that comes with the footrest is one of its best features. It’s exactly the right balance of cushioning to reduces fatigue while also being firm enough that it doesn’t feel like a pillow. I could feel the tension melting out of my feet when I rested them on it.

The padding is also swapable, and Secretlab will be offering two alternative toppers that will fit the footrest: a heated one and a flat memory foam one. These must be purchased separately, however, and range from $69-$99 in price.

My only real complaint is that is that the footrest cannot be adjusted vertically (other than the 1” added by the base covers.) Many gamers like to recline while they play and it would be nice if the footrest could adjust to something resembling ottoman height like a few of the ones available Amazon do. Most footrests don’t have this capability, but most of them don’t cost this much and a feature like that might make the price feel more worthwhile.

Is the Secretlab Professional Footrest Worth the Money?

The Secretlab Professional Footrest MSRPs at $199.00, which is quite expensive for something that’s just there for you to put your feet on. A quick search online reveals that most footrests are available for less than a quarter of that price. So why buy it?

Well, to be fair, Secretlab is offering a degree of build quality and adjustability that seems to blow pretty much everything else on the market out of the water, so it makes sense that their product would come at a premium.

Still, at the end of the day, trying to get the average gamer to spend that kind of money on a footrest is a hard sell — even more so when it comes to the extra $70-$100 attachments.