Nothing beats a Bluetooth headset for hands-free calling on the go. Sure, Bluetooth earbuds are more common now, but our testing confirms that the more advanced microphones on Bluetooth headsets will make you sound clearer even in busy environments, whether you’re in a bustling coffee shop or walking down a noisy street. After more than 30 hours testing 11 models, we’ve determined that the BlueParrott M300-XT is the mono Bluetooth headset most people should buy. It has the best balance of excellent voice quality and background noise reduction, plus the longest battery life of the headsets we tested. It’s comfortable to wear for a whole day, too.
Everything we recommend
Our pick
The M300-XT captures voices clearly and naturally while suppressing background noise. With a 14-hour battery life, it can last for nearly two full workdays of nonstop talking.
Buying Options
Also great
The Voyager 5200 is the best headset we tested when it comes to reducing background noise. But compared with our top pick, it captures voices less warmly, has half the battery life, and costs a bit more.
Buying Options
Budget pick
The Talk 35 can get the job done, with good sound quality, noise cancellation, and battery life for the price. Its more conventional in-ear design coupled with a thin, removable ear hook may feel more secure than our other picks for a wider range of people with different ear shapes.
Buying Options
Our pick
The M300-XT captures voices clearly and naturally while suppressing background noise. With a 14-hour battery life, it can last for nearly two full workdays of nonstop talking.
Buying Options
The BlueParrott M300-XT excels at everything we look for in a great Bluetooth headset. Our audio listening panelists rated the headset best overall for both speaker voice quality and noise cancellation. Incoming audio is also great, so the people you’re talking to will sound clear and static-free. The M300-XT’s Bluetooth 5.1 technology lets you talk all day without worrying about having to recharge it, unlike some of the competition, which uses older, less energy-efficient versions of Bluetooth. It’s also comfortable and adjustable enough to wear for hours at a time, although the one-piece design makes it heavier than other headsets that have a thinner, removable ear hook. [If you want a lighter headset with a tighter in-ear fit, consider our budget pick, the Jabra Talk 35; it’s half the weight and has contoured ear gels, but you’d have to live with a shorter battery life, older Bluetooth technology, and mics that don’t sound quite as good.]
Also great
The Voyager 5200 is the best headset we tested when it comes to reducing background noise. But compared with our top pick, it captures voices less warmly, has half the battery life, and costs a bit more.
Buying Options
We recommend the Poly Voyager 5200 primarily if powerful noise cancellation is a must in your everyday use—for example, to disguise the fact that you’re in a car or on a call while kids are playing in the same room. In our tests with almost deafening coffee shop chatter in the background, the M300-XT did an admirable job of reducing that background noise to whispers, but the Voyager 5200 made us sound like we were calling from a sound booth. In exchange for this incredible voice isolation, however, the Voyager 5200 sacrifices natural vocal warmth and smoothness. We sounded more robotic with this headset compared with most of the other headsets we tested, and there was more stuttering or choppiness in both the outgoing and incoming audio. Still, the Voyager 5200 has a decent 7-hour battery life, and we found it as comfortable to wear as the M300-XT.
Budget pick
The Talk 35 can get the job done, with good sound quality, noise cancellation, and battery life for the price. Its more conventional in-ear design coupled with a thin, removable ear hook may feel more secure than our other picks for a wider range of people with different ear shapes.
Buying Options
The Jabra Talk 35 doesn’t have the excellent mic quality and noise cancellation of our other picks, but it costs about a third of what they do and performs much better than other budget Bluetooth headsets—and even some Bluetooth earbuds that cost more than $100. Thanks to its contoured ear gel, we found that the Talk 35 fits more snugly in the ear than the M300-XT and Voyager 5200, and our tester who regularly wears earbuds found this headset more comfortable than our other picks that have a larger, one-piece, over-ear design. The Talk 35’s design may be easier to use for those who wear glasses or have long hair, as well. On the downside, this headset’s ancient Bluetooth 3.0 technology limits its connectivity range to 33 feet [a third of the M300-XT and the Voyager 5200], and its talk time to 6 hours. But those limitations might be acceptable if you want an inexpensive Bluetooth headset for hands-free calling.
The research
Why you should trust us
At Wirecutter, we’ve been testing and writing about Bluetooth headsets since 2013. In that time, we’ve spent more than 100 hours researching and testing several dozens of Bluetooth headsets.
For the past two years I’ve tested and reviewed gear such as wired and wireless headsets, USB microphones, and webcams as a Wirecutter senior staff writer. Prior to joining Wirecutter, I wrote about technology and home-office topics for sites such as Lifehacker, PCWorld, and Laptop Magazine.
Who should get this
A mono Bluetooth headset might seem like a relic of older days, back when Blackberry and Nokia were the dominant cell phone makers and talking with your phone in your pocket was newfangled magic. While Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have become more popular, Bluetooth headsets can still meet specific needs. One of these headsets might be for you if:
- You spend a lot of time on calls on your phone and want hands-free convenience in a lightweight, portable device.
- You consider microphone quality and noise cancellation of utmost importance.
- You want call-management functions—such as answering or ignoring calls with your voice or with dedicated buttons—that many traditional earbuds or headphones don’t offer.
- You want to keep an ear free to stay aware of what’s going on around you on your commute or at the office [including home offices].
As with wireless and wired headsets [the over- and on-ear kind], a Bluetooth headset is a compromise. It won’t make you sound nearly as good as the best USB microphone can, it won’t make incoming audio sound better than a good set of headphones, and it’s not as discreet and as lightweight as the best earbuds. What a Bluetooth headset does better than these other options, however, is pick up your voice clearly while suppressing background noise, wherever you may be.
If background noise cancellation isn’t that important to you and if you don’t do much talking on your phone, you’re probably fine using the earbuds that came with it. And if you listen to a lot of music or podcasts on that phone, with only the occasional call, you’re better off getting a good set of stereo Bluetooth earbuds or headphones with a mic.
But if you have an older headset that doesn’t perform as well as you’d like, or if you’re dissatisfied with its features, upgrading to one of our picks will get you better sound quality, improved noise cancelling, and potentially longer range. If other people complain that they can’t hear you during phone calls, or if you’re unable to trigger Siri or Google Assistant from your older headset, it may be time to upgrade.
How we picked
Photo: Sarah Kobos
For our guide to wireless and wired headsets, we consulted professionals from different industries who use headsets all day. Those interviews, plus information we got from reading recommendations on sites such as PCMag and SoundGuys and verified owner reviews on Amazon, helped us establish a list of criteria for the best Bluetooth headsets:
- Microphone quality and noise cancellation: A great Bluetooth headset should transmit audio that’s crisp and easy to understand regardless of the environment where you take your call. This requires the microphone to have some noise-cancelling capabilities to reduce the ambient sound. Without that, you might sound muddy or even incoherent to the person you’re talking to.
- Speaker quality: Almost as important as microphone quality, a good speaker ensures that you’ll be able to immediately understand what someone says to you during a call. We don’t expect mono Bluetooth headsets to compete with the audio quality of a great pair of stereo headphones, but we do want to hear the person on the other end of the line clearly.
- Comfort and fit: If your hands-free Bluetooth headset pinches your ears or causes discomfort, you’re unlikely to use it, regardless of how good it sounds. If you’ll be wearing this thing for long phone calls, or for extended stretches in the car or at the office in case you need to take a call, it should be comfortable enough for you to not be distracted by the headset. And because everyone has different ears, we look for headsets that come with multiple sizes of tips and loops for getting the right fit.
- Battery life: A headset should last at least most of a regular workday. We consider five hours of actual talk time to be the minimum for a good headset; unless you’re talking on the phone nonstop, five hours of talk time should get you through an eight-hour day. Some headsets come with—or have available as a separate purchase—a battery-equipped storage case that charges the headset when you put it inside, which can extend the battery life significantly. But you can’t take calls while the set is charging, so the headset itself should still be able to last a good while on its own.
- Controls: At the bare minimum, you should be able to accept or reject a call and adjust volume with buttons on the headset itself. The ability to do some of this with the sound of your voice is a nice bonus but not a requirement.
- Appearance: Let’s face it: Bluetooth headsets look kind of silly. So we went for the least conspicuous models as possible.
For this latest update, we considered 16 models ranging in price from $20 to $130 and decided to test 11 based on owner reviews and specs for the features above.
How we tested
In the first stage of testing, starting from the least expensive to the most expensive, I spent about two hours with each headset. I began by reading the manual to get acquainted with the controls, then connected it to my MacBook and Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Android phone. I evaluated the headset’s comfort and swapped the ear gel to a smaller size when needed, listened to music and podcasts, wandered away from the phone to test connectivity range, and recorded myself reading a list from Harvard Sentences while coffee shop sounds played loudly a few feet away in the Coffitivity app.
After eliminating three contenders because they lacked volume controls or had terrible mic quality, I sent my recorded samples from eight headsets to our sound experts, Wirecutter senior writer Lauren Dragan and audio engineer/producer Charles A. Martinez. They didn’t know which headset model each sample was from or how much the headset cost. For a baseline comparison, I also sent them samples containing the same sentences, recorded with my MacBook and our Bluetooth earbuds pick, the Jabra Elite 75t.
While they listened to those samples over the course of the next week, I continued to test the headsets’ audio quality, comfort, and controls while noting their average battery life. I tested call answering and rejection, as well as Google Assistant interaction. I also left voicemail messages for myself on my Google Voice number and examined Google’s text transcription, which helped me understand how clearly my voice was captured by the mic. And since comfort is relative, I had my husband and teenage daughter try on the headsets, too. They have larger and smaller ears than me, respectively, and different over- or in-ear preferences.
Once we’d collected all that data, we had clear Bluetooth headset picks.
Our pick: BlueParrott M300-XT
Photo: Sarah Kobos
Our pick
The M300-XT captures voices clearly and naturally while suppressing background noise. With a 14-hour battery life, it can last for nearly two full workdays of nonstop talking.
Buying Options
The BlueParrott M300-XT is the complete package, more so than any other Bluetooth headset we’ve ever tested. It can make you sound loud and clear by cancelling out most background noise, and it can do so without sacrificing your natural, warm vocal tone. Its 14-hour talk time is at least twice that of the other headsets we tested, which means you don’t have to worry about charging it every day. And while we wouldn’t want to wear or talk on a headset for 14 hours straight, it’s comfortable and adjustable enough for those “I’ve got calls all day” days.
When it comes to calls, “being heard clearly” can sometimes be at odds with sounding “natural.” Consider the difference between listening to an automated voice system versus a human speaking on the other end of the line. The voice system might be clearer with better pronunciation, but the human would sound more, well, human. The M300-XT is the best Bluetooth headset because it finds a happy medium in that spectrum. Our panelists found that it has excellent background noise reduction yet still retains natural voice definition. BlueParrott states the headset cancels 80% of background noise, which we found to be accurate. Competing headsets tend to lean heavily toward either noise cancellation or the natural vocals: The Poly Voyager 5200 achieves better noise cancellation but doesn’t capture voice as naturally, while the Jabra Talk 55 has the best vocal quality but poorer noise cancellation. We also thought the M300-XT’s vocal quality and noise cancellation were better than that of the more expensive Jabra Elite 75t, our pick for the best wireless Bluetooth earbuds.
For its purpose, the M300-XT’s speaker quality is excellent as well. We didn’t expect high-fidelity incoming audio like you’d get from a great pair of headphones, but during multiple online meetings and phone calls, people we spoke to came through clearer than with our other picks, or with cheaper headsets like the FimiTech Bluetooth Headset.
The M300-XT is adjustable for comfort and fit: It comes with three ear gel sizes, the earpiece can be angled 180 degrees [and can be used on the right or left ear], and the earhook also flexes to accommodate different sized ears. Weighing about as much as a AA battery, the headset is definitely noticeable sitting on your ear, but not distractingly so once you get used to it. The one-piece over-ear design balances the weight of the headset across the top and back of the ear, rather than anchoring most of the weight in the ear canal, as earbuds do. This might be more comfortable for people who don’t like pressure on the inner ear area. If you have relatively small ears, however [like my teenage daughter, or me, a petite woman who uses the smallest ear gels when testing headsets], the M300-XT might feel looser and less secure than the Voyager 5200, which has a slightly tighter around-the-ear shape. It’s still secure enough to stay put even if you’re doing a yoga downward-dog pose, though. [We tested that too.]
The BlueParrott M300-XT has soft-touch power and volume controls on the back of the earpiece. Photo: Sarah Kobos
The M300-XT offers 14 hours of talk time [at least twice that of our other picks] and a slightly wider wireless range than our other picks thanks to its Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity [the others use Bluetooth 4.1 or earlier]. With the M300-XT, I was able to walk away from my phone while still on a conference call one floor down and two rooms away before being disconnected, while our other picks cut out just a room or two away.
The soft-touch power and volume buttons on the back of the headset are easy to find and press, and the power button is used to also answer or end calls, as well as access Siri or Google Assistant. A larger BlueParrott Button at the base of the mic boom is even easier to access and can be programmed for mute, speed dial, or other functions through the mobile app. We found that convenient, particularly for quickly muting ourselves during Zoom meetings.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Unlike headsets with a primarily in-ear design, putting the M300-XT on is a bit trickier: It requires two hands to adjust for the best fit. If you wear glasses or have long hair, putting the headset on and taking it off can be even more awkward, although we were able to wear it with eyeglasses comfortably.
We found its audio announcements for things like “Power on” or “Connected” to be very low compared with other headsets, and this model also doesn’t announce the battery life level.
One nitpicky complaint: The M300-XT has no controls for pausing or resuming music, but this isn’t an issue limited to this particular headset—few aside from the Voyager 5200 do. Stereo headphones or headsets would be better for listening to music anyway.
Also great: Poly Voyager 5200
Photo: Sarah Kobos
Also great
The Voyager 5200 is the best headset we tested when it comes to reducing background noise. But compared with our top pick, it captures voices less warmly, has half the battery life, and costs a bit more.
Buying Options
The Poly Voyager 5200 is the best headset available if background noise reduction is your primary concern. Even if you’re in a busy airport or at a playground while children are squealing with joy, the Voyager 5200 can make you sound like you’re in a quiet room. The tradeoff is lower overall sound quality: This headset’s digital processing makes your voice sound less natural than it would with our other picks, and incoming audio also can sound choppier. Because the Voyager 5200 does everything else well, with a nearly all-day talk time and comfort to match—we think it’s worth the tradeoff if being heard above the ruckus of the rest of the world is most important to you.
During testing, our panelists unanimously noted the Voyager 5200’s “unbelievable” noise cancellation in loud environments compared with other headsets we tested. While the M300-XT had excellent noise reduction, with loud coffee shop chatter only slightly audible in between spoken words, the Voyager 5200 eliminated almost all sounds aside from the speaker’s voice. This is likely because the Voyager 5200 uses active on its four mics, plus other technologies designed to optimize incoming sound for the speaker’s voice. Our other picks have two microphones, and while they use their own noise cancellation technology as well, they don’t block as much background noise.
But the digital processing that makes the Voyager 5200 so effective at noise cancellation also delivers a more robotic-sounding voice than competing headsets. Lauren Dragan noted “slight digital clipping and stuttering” in our audio recording, but this didn’t interfere with her being able to understand what we were saying. In general, we found incoming audio to be clear, but a bit tinny and choppy at times.
Like the M300-XT, the Voyager 5200 has a one-piece earhook design that’s comfortable to wear for hours, once you select between the three ear gel sizes and angle the earpiece for the best fit. Its rated talk time of 7 hours is half that of the M300-XT, but it should be enough for most people for a full workday before needing to be charged.
The Voyager 5200’s power, volume, and call control buttons are small but well placed. Photo: Sarah Kobos
The small control buttons are well placed on different sides of the headset, although the multipurpose button on the end of the mic boom [used for answering calls, interacting with Microsoft Teams, or interacting with Siri or Google Assistant] is smaller and harder to reach than the M300-XT’s, which is located on the earpiece. The Voyager 5200 offers a few more controls and conveniences than our other picks, such as a button to pause or play music [it can also be used to interact with Amazon Alexa]. And you can also answer a call by simply saying “Answer” if the headset is already on. If you’re not currently wearing it, you can alternatively pick up the call by putting the earpiece in your ear, since the Voyager 5200 has sensors to determine when you’re wearing it.
Budget pick: Jabra Talk 35
Photo: Sarah Kobos
Budget pick
The Talk 35 can get the job done, with good sound quality, noise cancellation, and battery life for the price. Its more conventional in-ear design coupled with a thin, removable ear hook may feel more secure than our other picks for a wider range of people with different ear shapes.
Buying Options
If you don’t want to spend more than $50 on a Bluetooth headset or want a headset with a tighter in-ear fit than our other picks, we recommend the Jabra Talk 35. Although it doesn’t cancel out background noise as well as our other picks, we found it still captures voices clearly and naturally. Its older Bluetooth 3.0 technology means you can’t stray far from your phone, and it offers a relatively short 6 hours of talk time, but for the price you won’t find a better alternative for hands-free calling.
Our panelists ranked the Talk 35 around the middle of the pack for vocal quality and noise reduction—but that’s not a bad thing. We found it on a par with the mic quality of our Bluetooth earbuds pick, the Jabra Elite 75t, which costs twice as much [although the Elite 75t is much better for listening to music, and more lightweight]. In our leave-a-voicemail-on-Google Voice test, we were clear enough for Google’s AI to translate almost all of our words accurately, whereas even more expensive headsets fumbled some words.
Google Voice heard us pretty clearly when we called using the Jabra Talk 35.
Incoming sound was good as well, although this headset produced a bit more static than our other picks.
The Talk 35 weighs half as much as our other picks; it’s equivalent to an AAA battery rather than a AA. This may make it more comfortable for longer periods of time for people sensitive to this sort of weight. There are multiple ways to attach this headset to your ear, too: The Talk 35 comes with two sizes of thin, removable plastic ear hooks, as well as two sizes of ear gels with hooks [the kind with a loop that fits inside your ear], in addition to a standard ear gel. The ear gels are contoured for a better fit when you twist the headset into place in your ear. We found this form factor easier to use with eyeglasses, quicker to put on and remove, and less problematic with long hair than the larger, one-piece over-ear designs of the M300-XT and Poly Voyager 5200.
In addition to a contoured ear gel, the Talk 35 comes with large and small ear hook options and ear gels with hooks so you can get a good fit. Photo: Sarah Kobos
Due to its ancient Bluetooth 3.0 technology, the Talk 35 has both shorter battery life and smaller connectivity range compared with our other picks. We didn’t experience any reception issues when the phone was close at hand, but walking 15 feet away [in a house with thick plaster walls] severed the Bluetooth connection. The 6-hour talk time should be fine for most people who don’t spend every hour of their workday on calls.
This headset has an easy to reach main button that you can use to answer or end calls, as well as volume buttons on the side and a power on/off switch. We found these simple to reach and operate.
A sign of the Talk 35’s age: It comes with a DC car charger. However, the headset is still modern enough to interact with Siri and Google Assistant.
Other good Bluetooth headsets
The Jabra Talk 25 is the least expensive Jabra mono Bluetooth headset we’ve tested, similar in design to the Talk 35 but with a longer 8-hour talk time because it uses the more recent Bluetooth 4.0 protocol. It’s the best of the headsets we tested under $30, but we think it’s worth spending a bit more for the Talk 35’s better noise cancellation.
The Jabra Talk 55 is the most compact and lightweight Bluetooth headset we tested, similar in look to AirPods [but black, and mono]. The majority of our panelists rated its vocal quality highly because it captured full, rich voices, even though its noise cancellation isn’t as good as that of either the M300-XT or the Voyager 5200. Our main issue with the headset is its extremely short 3-hour talk time. It comes with an egg-shaped portable charger that has a 7-hour battery life, though, so if you run out of time, you can quickly charge it for the next call. The Talk 55 is button free: Tapping or double-tapping on the earpiece controls the headset, and you can answer calls with your voice. One other important downside to note is that there’s no volume or mute control.
The competition
We considered the FimiTech Bluetooth Headset and New bee BT Earpiece because of their relatively low prices, but they ranked at the bottom in our voice quality evaluations. Both had poor noise cancellation and made our voices sound unpleasant.
We also dismissed the following headsets in previous rounds of testing:
The Poly Voyager Edge was previously our top pick because of its excellent sound quality and comfort. We also appreciated that it came with a charging case that extended the headset’s talk time to up to 10 hours. Unfortunately, the company has discontinued this headset. It’s still available at some retailers, but you can expect it to go out of stock soon.
The Jabra Eclipse has very short battery life: In our tests it lasted for only 3 hours 34 minutes on its own battery [after turning off once, about two hours in, for no apparent reason]. It comes with a carry-along battery case that Jabra claims adds seven more hours of talk time, but we didn’t confirm this claim since we saw nothing else compelling about the headset.
We liked the Jabra Stealth’s incoming audio quality and battery life, but its microphone quality was middling.
Despite its name, the Jabra Style is not particularly stylish. More important, it didn’t fit our testers well. Some reviewers have also noted connectivity issues.
The Nokia Luna is a tiny headset that comes with a charging dock for extra battery life. Unfortunately it lacks A2DP streaming audio, which means you can’t use it to listen to music or podcasts in between calls. We also found its incoming audio quality to be lacking.
The Sennheiser Presence was a runner-up to the Voyager Edge in an earlier version of this guide because of its audio performance in a quiet office environment and its 10-plus hours of battery life. But it’s now more expensive than any of our picks.
Meet your guide
Melanie Pinola covers home office, remote work, and productivity as a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. She has contributed to print and online publications such as The New York Times, Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, and PCWorld, specializing in tech, work, and lifestyle/family topics. She’s thrilled when those topics intersect—and when she gets to write about them in her PJs.
Further reading
The Best Wireless and Wired Headsets
by Kaitlyn Wells and Melanie Pinola Whether you prefer the freedom of Bluetooth or the reliability of a wired headset, we have picks to suit all budgets and fit preferences.The Best USB Microphone
by Melanie Pinola After our tests of 30-plus mics over eight years, the Blue Yeti remains our favorite USB mic for people who want an easy, noticeable upgrade over built-in mics.
Gear and Peripherals for PC Gaming
by Haley Perry
We’ve tested hundreds of gaming laptops, keyboards, mice, and other essentials to make your PC gaming experience even more immersive and enjoyable.
Are Jabra headsets worth it?
Buying Options Of all the wired headsets we've tested, the Jabra Evolve2 30 offers the best mix of great audio quality—both input and output—and lightweight comfort. Compared with less expensive options, it did a better job in our tests of suppressing background noise while still capturing clear, warm vocals.
What is better Jabra or Plantronics?
Verdict. For the Bluetooth category Jabra and Plantronics headsets rank equally in terms of connections. They also both have amazing active noise cancellation technology. And so your choice of one over another would be based on design and budget rather than on performance, as there's no clear winner here.
How do I connect my Jabra mini to my phone?
To enter pairing mode, press and hold [3 seconds] the Answer/end button until the Bluetooth light flashes blue. 4. To pair, go to the Bluetooth menu on your mobile device and select the Jabra Mini from the list of available devices.
Which Jabra has best noise Cancelling?
The Jabra Evolve Series is a professional range of headsets offering best-in-class noise cancellation to aid concentration in open office environments.