FlexiSpot C7 Ergonomic office chair review

Our Verdict

It's a bit pricey and formal, but the C7B-Pro excels in essential areas for a modern ergonomic chair. It offers impressive comfort and durability for remote workers and gamers seeking long-term satisfaction.

Reasons to buy

• Balance between support and comfort is excellent
• Adjustment of the various pieces is easy
• Lumbar support is effective

Reasons to avoid

• Not the easiest to put together
• Not the cheapest in its class
• Corporate looking design

I’ve been a remote worker in the cybersecurity industry since December 2019, working horribly amounts of time on both sides of the Atlantic from a battery of various office chairs. The sound of dry spaghetti snapping? Oh, that’s just me standing up after a day of work.

Fast forward to around three weeks ago when I was asked to review the Flexispot C7 ergonomic office chair. Promising both lumbar relief and comfort at a solid price point, I put it through the proverbial wringer with endless Microsoft Teams calls, PowerPoint marathons, and some late-night creative writing sessions.

Honestly, with a fairly sizable dataset at this point in my career, the FlexiSpot C7 isn’t just another seat. It’s genuinely been a bona fide game-changer in my quest to find a chair that I can throw long work days at, without getting up with a back so tight it hurts to walk around sometimes.

If you’re also in the market for some swivel-based sedentary real estate, lists of the best office chairs and best gaming chairs should be your next port of call. After the lion’s share of a month testing it, I can attest that the FlexiSpot C7 deserves a spot on both.

Specs

The chair I was sent to review was the C7B Pro, one of FlexiSpot’s ergonomic office chairs. The C7B Pro measures in with:

Assembly

The first part of testing this chair (as with many others like it) is building the thing. Depending on what end of Amazon or Staples you buy the chair from, instructions can range from self-explanatory to requiring a trip to the British Museum to reference the Rosetta Stone.

FlexiSpot also makes some of the best standing desks, which also require self-assembly. Across both, it does a good job of providing clear diagrams and instructions, but I found one specific step relating to the heavy lever assembly on the bottom of the chair had a few infuriatingly difficult arrows to work out. I disagree that this is a one-person chair to put together in the time the instructions suggest.

A few of the components of this chair are fairly heavy (like the lever assembly pictured below), requiring the assistance of another person to stabilize other parts of the chair if you want to securely build it in the 20-30 minutes the instructions mention.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with needing two people to put a chair together, but it’s something to note if the person ordering is on the smaller side or lives alone – could be worth bribing a friend with some pizza to help out! Other than that, the chair is pretty easy to put together with the provided instructions and tools. Once done, the C7B-Pro looks a little something like this.

The two features of this chair I want to specifically highlight in this review are the adjustable armrests and the adjustable lumbar support. I’ve been suffering from chronic back pain for a good few years and spent a good chunk of my working day sitting at my desk typing away. This means that maintaining a solid, healthy working posture is vital and the chair I sit in is pivotal to keeping that posture achievable over a long day. If I can do that without having to constantly adjust the settings on the chair, all the better!

I’m not the smallest guy and I always find a component of many office chairs that grows uncomfortable the fastest to be the armrests. The material is either sticky to the skin or is too thin to mask the chair’s construction underneath and after a few hours necessitates adjusting posture or position.

I did not find this to be the case once with the C7B-Pro, adjusting the armrests to my preferred position once on the first day of testing and keeping their exact position the entire period through. The armrests slide front-back, left-right and pivot diagonally to suit the exact position you want to maintain and helpfully maintain that position stably throughout the entire day.

The real killer part of this chair for me, however, is the lumbar support. A lot of chairs claim their lumbar/back support is great but are often pretty minimal in the amount of relief they provide (at least in my experience).

This was the first chair I’ve used in a long time that specifically had an isolated portion of the backrest that you could adjust on its own to granularly set your preferred level of lumbar support. It takes a little finesse to get it just right, but when you do, you really feel the difference.

I have thrown double-digit shifts at this thing over the last few weeks and I get up at the end of them just fine. That’s a big deal for me and scores big points in FlexiSpot’s favor in achieving it. No aches, no twinges, no adjusting….nothing. Impressive, indeed.

Much like the armrests, the lumbar support is very stable once you have placed it where you like it, not budging an inch since building the chair and setting it up. You can also pair this with the adjustable neck rest to work out the exact position that most benefits you and whatever physical condition you might be in.

The other features of this chair are all pretty table-stakes stuff for ergonomic office chairs. Swivel base for 360-degree movement, hydraulic bar/lever to adjust seat height – that sort of thing.

Design and build

I’m no interior designer, so the look of a chair isn’t enormously important to me overall. The C7B-Pro from a design perspective is perfectly fine and serviceable, if a little “corporate PowerPoint template” for my personal tastes.

Build quality is a high point for this chair – nothing on the C7B-Pro feels cheap or badly machined and I’ve never once felt a wobble or a single problem with anything remotely mechanical during testing.

Adjustments to the various positionable parts are easy to perform, change and remain stable throughout the day, which is a testament to the parts being well-engineered that they neither stick nor become loose over repeated alignments.

You’re not going to impress the Herman Miller-heads or the Secret Lab streamer kids with this chair, but who needs clout with chair aficionados when you have functioning vertebrae after long days at the computer, eh?

Comfort and performance

Comfort is a very high point for the C7B-Pro and my primary purchasing metric for any sort of office chair I intend to use as a daily driver. Getting it to optimum comfort levels requires a little finesse and iterations adjusting the various levers and paddles, but you’ll quickly find a set of component positions that work for you.

After that, you’ll find you have an exceptionally comfortable chair to sit on that errs towards the firmer side, but not in a negative way. The C7B-Pro provides support as and when you need it if you’ve set it upright, and has been one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever had the pleasure of working from for a solid length of time.

The mesh material that the chair is upholstered in isn’t my favorite I’ve ever sat on, and I found myself draping a hoodie over the backrest of this one more than a few times. However, that might just be my personal preference and some might like it!

That mesh, however, does provide great ventilation for those really hot days, meaning you ideally eliminate uncomfortable back sweat if you’re caught up inside working over the summer. Performance-wise, I didn’t spot any issues whatsoever over the testing period and experienced no component, material, or part failures.

Most importantly, the C7B-Pro won that most rare of prizes from the most exacting critic in my house: an instant butt-on-chair from my cat, Beef. I’ve seen this guy try expensive beds out once and turn his nose up at them, but he leaped up straight away and sat right down – a paw of approval if ever there was one.

Value for money

The FlexiSpot C7 isn’t the cheapest ergonomic office chair out there at a current sale price of $349, but as with most things – you get what you pay for. I don’t think it’s overpriced, but it is still likely to be outside the reach of many.