Flooring Comparisons

Each one answers a single either/or that people genuinely get stuck on, and each is written to reach a recommendation rather than to list attributes and leave you to decide. They are most useful once you have narrowed to two candidates — if you are still choosing between categories, the guides under /guides/choosing cover that decision first, and coming here too early tends to produce a confident answer to the wrong question.

We give a recommendation and state the conditions it depends on, which is different from declaring a winner. Almost every one of these pairings has a real answer that flips depending on the substrate, the grade level, the household, and how the house is conditioned. A comparison that names a universal winner is usually hiding the conditions rather than resolving them.

Because a comparison is only worth publishing where the decision is genuinely live and the answer is not obvious. Pairings that nobody actually weighs against each other, or where one option is simply unsuitable for the application, produce pages that exist for search rather than for readers. We would rather carry fewer comparisons that resolve something.