Osaki OS-Monarch Massage Chair Review 2025

Are you tired of making periodic appointments with your local chiropractor to help with your aching back? Has that frustration sent you on a quest for a reasonably priced massage chair so you can enjoy the benefits of a massage from the comfort of your own home?

Suppose you answered yes to either of those questions and are considering the Monarch. In that case, we’re very glad you’re here because once you read this Osaki Monarch massage chair review, we cannot, in good conscience, recommend this model except in one fairly specific case.

Osaki is one of the most respected companies in the industry, and most of their products are amazing. Check out our reviews of their other models.

The Monarch, however, is a swing and a miss.

It’s a decent chair with some good capabilities, but Osaki offers much better chairs for no more money. If you look beyond Osaki at some of the other respected names in the industry, you’ll find no shortage of options that offer a better value than you’ll find here.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the model. As we said, it’s a pretty good chair, and we gave it a pretty good overall ranking, but as you’ll see, there are some flaws that just make it inferior to most of its peers.

In the following sections, we’ll discuss everything this machine can do and where we feel it falls short. That way, you’ll have all the information you need to decide. If that sounds good to you, let’s take a closer look.

Key Features of the Osaki OS Monarch Massage Chair

The Monarch has a similar look and feel to most of Osaki’s chairs. It doesn’t try to hide what it is. 

They’re not ugly chairs, but they don’t mesh easily with most home décor schemes. If you want one of these, you can order yours in black, brown, or taupe—neutral colors that allow you to color match.

You should also be aware that the Monarch is a sizeable piece of furniture, measuring 60” L (73” L when fully reclined) x 42” W x 50.5” H. It’s big enough to fill up just about any room you put it in, so living in a smaller apartment or a tiny home may simply be too big to be useful.

In addition to being physically large, it’s a pretty heavy piece of furniture, weighing in at a cool 200 pounds.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t support as much weight as we’d like. If you weigh more than 260 pounds, you won’t be able to use it at all.

Most chairs today (regardless of type) support 300 pounds of user weight or more. As you can see, this one doesn’t quite rise to that level, though it supports more weight than some of Osaki’s other models.

That, of course, is fine if you weigh less than the supported limit. However, the simple truth is that Osaki’s massage chairs support less than 300 pounds of user weight, so they cater to smaller and more lightly built people.

One final point before we leave this section of our Osaki Monarch massage chair review: the upholstery is PU. That’s pretty standard. Almost all massage chairs today rely on PU because they look and feel like leather but are incredibly inexpensive.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are, PU doesn’t last very long and will start showing its age after no more than two years.

We wish the Monarch had used something else, even if it had raised the price. And with that, let’s look at the actual capabilities of the Monarch.

L-Track & Quad Rollers

Although we started off by saying that we can’t recommend this model, we have to admit that it’s got the basics well covered. It sports cutting-edge technology that includes a 3D L-Track. What that means to you as the person sitting in the chair is that the track is long enough to allow the rollers to move under the seat and massage the glutes and the backs of your thighs.

The 3D designation means that the track has dimensionality that allows the rollers to move up and down, left and right, and along the Z-axis (in and out), applying more or less pressure depending on your needs.

It gets better because Osaki offers a wide range of customization options, including three speed and four roller intensity levels.

3D Body Scan

While the long massage track and quad rollers greatly improve the quality of the massage the Osaki OS Monarch massage chair can render, the body scan is another key component, and Osaki employs truly exceptional body scanning routines.

In practice, any Osaki chair you buy will get it right about 95% of the time, quietly moving the rollers to the perfect positions before your massage begins.

Even better, if the rollers happen to get it wrong, Osaki provides tools via the remote that allow you to tweak the position of the rollers to taste manually.

The combination of the auto scan and the manual adjustment means that you can always guarantee the best massage the machine is capable of delivering, and that’s awesome.

So far, you may be wondering why we can’t recommend this machine. After all, we’ve given it a pretty glowing report, but keep reading, and we’ll get to that.

An Underwhelming Number of Massage Options

This, in our view, is probably the most important portion of our Osaki OS Monarch chair review. 

Quad rollers and good body scanning tech are excellent starts, but it’s the number of techniques and, in the case of Osaki, in particular, the number of pre-programmed massage options that tell the tale.

In terms of techniques, the Monarch offers:

That’s about as bare-bones as it gets because just about every chair on the market today offers these.

This is considered the bare minimum for a “serious” massage chair.

There are two basic paradigms in the world of massage chairs: Make a fiddly chair with all sorts of customization options or make a simple chair with lots of pre-programmed options.

Osaki prefers simple chairs, and some of their models come sporting about two dozen pre-programmed massage routines.

This isn’t one of those.

It only has four pre-programmed options, which are:

While we like the memory slot, the simple truth is that with only a few basic massage techniques on offer and not much pre-programmed options, you’re almost certain to “outgrow” this chair sooner rather than later. It will simply leave you wanting more.

It Offers a Very Good Airbag Massage

Most of Osaki’s Monarch chairs come sporting 24-second-generation airbags, and this one is no exception.

The Monarch can render a very good full-body airbag massage that you can customize via three different intensity levels. This aspect of the chair’s design is on par with significantly more expensive models but isn’t enough to elevate the Monarch to “must-have” status.

Generous Lumbar Heat

Heat is a powerful therapeutic feature, and we love it whenever we see heat offered. The heat here is only limited to the lumbar region, but the heating elements are oversized. In practice, that means you get heat over most of your back, which is fantastic.

If the Monarch had more customization options and an additional advanced technique or two — those things, combined with the generously sized heated area, would make this model a wonder. Even without those things, the large heated area is one of the standout aspects of this design.

An Exceptional Calf & Foot Massage

Osaki has put much effort into delivering a superb calf and foot massage. The foot massage is rendered by a trio of rollers in each footwell that utilize a technology the company refers to as “Reflexology,” while airbags render the calf massage. Both the airbags and the foot rollers can be adjusted for intensity via three levels.

The result is amazing, and honestly, the quality of the foot massage is the standout feature of this design.

Suppose you have a job that sees you spending several hours a day on your feet, and you’re specifically looking for a relatively inexpensive chair capable of giving you a great foot massage. In that case, this is probably the chair you want and is the one circumstance where we’d give the Monarch a glowing recommendation.

In almost any other circumstance, you can get more bang for your buck with some other model.

A Few Finishing Touches

Our Osaki OS Monarch review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t highlight the extras and finishing touches this model brings to the table, and there are a few, including:

Curiously absent here is any sort of massage timer. All of the Monarch’s massages last a default 20 minutes, and most of Osaki’s other models have a timer, which leaves us feeling a twinge of disappointment.

Pros & Cons of Osaki Monarch

Make no mistake, the Osaki Monarch does have a lot going for it. It also sports several features that are incredibly well-implemented. In our view, the most important of these are:

The body stretch might even be considered an honorable mention here because although it’s not the best in class and isn’t as well implemented on the Monarch as on some of Osaki’s other models, it’s still not bad. Also, it represents a second therapeutic feature of a modestly priced chair.

Unfortunately, the Monarch also has a relatively modest maximum supported user weight limit, few massage techniques, and only a handful of pre-programmed routines. So, if you want something other than a basic massage or a foot massage, this one is probably going to leave you wanting more.

Osaki Monarch Massage Chair Review Conclusion

We tried hard to love this model, but we just couldn’t at the end of the day.

If you were to stumble across the Monarch early in your search for the perfect massage chair and you didn’t look at too many other models besides this one, you’d probably not hesitate to pull the trigger and spend the money.

If you did, you’d be reasonably happy with your purchase, but the moment you start comparing the Monarch to comparably priced models, you realize that there are any number of better deals out there, and that’s the real problem.

As mentioned in the previous section in our Osaki Monarch massage chair review, the model is certainly not an awful chair. If your needs are basic and you’re mostly looking for a chair that can make your feet quit aching and maybe do a little something extra, it’s a great choice. 

However, in the grand scheme, plenty of other models do a better job and offer more value. In light of that, we can only give this one a provisional recommendation.

Other Options to Consider

If this one turns out not to be a good fit for you, here are a couple of other options you can consider:

This is the chair the Monarch tries to be. This one offers you more of just about everything. You get more options, pre-programmed routines, and a better all-around chair. You also get it for not much more money. It would be worth delaying your purchase for a bit to save the extra money to get this model instead.

This chair is flat-out amazing. It’s one of the best values in the massage chair ecosystem today. Packed with features and offered by a company that’s every bit as well-respected as Osaki, the 6800 is a technological wonder filled with features you’ll love.

Official Manufacturer Support

References & Resources:

• Osaki Massage Chair, Official Brand Website.
• Osaki OS-Monarch Massage Chair User Manual.
• Effects of a Full-Body Massage on Pain Intensity, Anxiety, and Physiological Relaxation in Taiwanese Patients with Metastatic Bone Pain: A Pilot Study, National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• My Back Went Out. What Do I Do?, WebMD.
• Sore After Massage: Why This Happens and What To Do, Healthline.