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Whether you’re spending all day in an office or all evening in a garage, good seating is important. And if making a comfortable ergonomic chair is difficult (and expensive) when you’re barely moving your fingers over a keyboard, imagine how hard it must be to encourage good posture in someone doing car detailing or hunching over a workbench. It’s no wonder that truly great shop stools and chairs, like the ones from Vyper, are so expensive. But is there really no other option, ideally one that doesn’t cost more than an entire tool collection?

Yes, there is, but it’s a little harder to find than you may think. Many major power tool brands make a shop stool or a creeper that turns into a chair — that’s true for DeWalt, Milwaukee, Wen, and more — but most of them are very affordable and quite basic. To beat the premium shop seats and stools made by Vyper, we need to look further, to lesser-known specialized brands and one-off products from toolmakers you probably never heard of. Once we started looking there, it was quite easy to find shop tools and chairs that had more features, better seating, or greater storage options than the Vyper models, all while being cheaper.

Powerbuilt makes a lot of accessories for automotive work, including toolboxes, creepers, lifts and jacks, and yes, a shop seat. The Powerbuilt Shop Seat With Expandable Side Trays is not cheap by normal shop stool standards, at $332, but that’s still less than half of the price of any Vyper chair, and it’s cheaper than most of its stools, as well.

This chair comes with lots of storage space, as well as a large seat and a backrest. The height of the seat (19.5 inches) is not adjustable, but this chair does more than enough to balance this drawback. It ups the weight capacity to 500 lbs, significantly more than the 400 lbs tolerated by the Vyper seats, and it means the padding for the back rest and the seat is a solid 3.5 inches.

The trays are easily the star of the show. There is a collapsible tray on either side of the chair — each made out of three containers — and a sliding compartment at the bottom with three dividers and four sections in total. If you were to buy the storage space on this chair as a separate product, you’d have to pay the price of three large, versatile toolboxes. That alone places the value of the Powerbuilt above any Vyper chair, given that these only have a small space at the bottom of the seat. At most, some special models have an armrest of sorts that can be used to carry a small tool.

BlackTeck isn’t a popular brand, and its product selection seems a little lackluster, with workbenches and extension ladders sitting next to Wi-Fi dash cams. That said, the BlackTeck Heavy-Duty Adjustable Shop Stool seems to be one of the brand’s highlights. 

For about $250, nearly half the price of Vyper’s cheapest stools and about a third of a Vyper seat, this shop stool comes with adjustable height (31.7 to 36.4 inches), lumbar support, a 360-degree swivel seat, locking wheels (a feature that Vyper sells as an extra), and a lot of space for tools and materials.

The BlackTeck shop stool has three spaces that can be used to hold tools and materials: A plastic one at the very bottom, a metal mesh just above it, and a detachable tray closer to the seat. The seat and the two larger tool trays measure about 21×18 inches, significantly more than the 14 inches circle that makes up the Vyper chair. 

Sure, you could get the Fully Loaded chair by Vyper and get significantly more space to sit on, but that would mean removing what little extra storage space the Complete Package chair gives you. Either in seating space or in storage, the BlackTeck seems like the clear winner, especially if you consider the staggering price difference of $500.

A truly budget option in the world of premium stools, the FreekyFit Rolling Shop Stool beats the Vyper both in price and in storage. This stool also has a 360-degree swiveling seat, adjustable seat height, and brakes on two of its four wheels, but the space dedicated to tools and materials really sells it. 

On the bottom, close to the wheels, is a plastic tray as wide as the stool itself, that contains a smaller tray for screws and small bits. Right above it, there’s a metal mesh that covers about as much space as the tray below. Finally, the space on both sides of the wire mesh is dedicated to a detachable bottle tray, to hold screwdrivers and similar tools, and a magnetic toolholder, for keeping a handful of metal tools always within reach.

At $150, its competitor should be the simplest Vyper stool (which is three times as expensive as the FreekyFit), but this shop seat can go head-to-head with a Vyper chair. Of course, it doesn’t have a backrest or a very wide seat, since it’s only a stool, but the seat height adjustment (20.8 to 26.3 inches) and weight capacity (330 lbs) are very close to the Vyper’s.

It’s unlikely to have the very best padding, and comes with stricter weight limitations than the Vyper — and yes, the fact that FreekyFit products are distributed primarily through Amazon isn’t a great sign, but there are plenty of tools worth buying on Amazon, and with 626 reviews averaging at 4.5 stars, this may very well be one of them. All in all, the FreekyFit Rolling Shop Stool is a much better low-budget solution than any Vyper stool, which it easily surpasses in both price and features.

Compared to any other chair on this list and on Vyper’s website, the Ergochair ERGO-RS is a different beast, being nearly unrecognizable as a shop seat. For one, it has a wide range of adjustment, with six seat heights and 75 degrees of rotation for the backrest. It can be placed completely parallel to the ground and used as a creeper, or become a normal chair with a long backrest. You may only be interested in a comfortable chair, but if you’re willing to spend hundreds of dollars on it, you should look for something more.

Speaking of comfort, it’s not clear just how thick the seat and backrest are, but the chair promises to be engineered for ergonomics. Being able to actually rest your back and get rid of the backrest when it’s in the way is just as important as a thick seat. Backrest and seat not only adjust vertically, but also move forward and backward, something you’ll find in most premium ergonomic office chairs but is vanishingly rare in shop seats and stools.

As you’d expect, this creeper seat comes with four wheels and four storage solutions, many of which are removable and can be stored directly inside the chair. The Ergochair ERGO-RS comes in at $700, slightly less expensive than most Vyper chairs but way cheaper than the brand’s Fully Loaded Robust Steel Max, priced at $930 when not on sale.

To select the shop stools and chairs highlighted in this article, we started by analyzing the products offered by Vyper, focusing in particular on the Vyper chairs. Then, we looked for stools and chairs from other brands that outperformed Vyper in one or more categories, like storage space for tools and ergonomics. Keeping the price lower than that of the Vyper chairs wasn’t difficult, and most of the products on this list are much cheaper than even the brand’s tools.

The market for premium shop stools and chairs is a niche one, and it’s completely dominated by Vyper. For this reason, most of the products highlighted on this list have received a low number of user reviews. While they’re generally positive, they are so few that you should still do your own research before buying one of these products.