What “raise a computer monitor” actually means
It usually means one of two things: your screen sits low enough that you’re tipping your chin down all day, or you want to get it up onto a stand so you can slide a keyboard or laptop underneath. Both are solved by lifting the bottom of the monitor a few inches — you don’t need a $250 arm to fix either one. The right tool depends on whether you’ll ever want to change the height again, and how many monitors you’re dealing with.
Riser or arm: how to decide
A riser is a box. It sits under the monitor and adds a fixed number of inches, permanently. That’s the whole feature set, and for a huge number of desks, it’s genuinely enough — if you set your screen up once and never touch it again, paying more for adjustability is buying a feature you won’t use. I cover the exact number your eyes want in Computer Monitor Height: How High Your Screen Should Sit, but the short version is: top third of the screen at eye level, and a riser gets you there in one shot.
An arm earns its price when the height needs to change — shared desks, sit-stand routines, or a monitor that has to move out of the way for video calls or paperwork. Gas-spring arms hold position through friction and spring tension rather than a fixed shelf, which means they can also tilt, swivel and pull the screen closer or further from your face. That flexibility is the whole reason to spend more; if you don’t need it, don’t pay for it.
The weight range is the spec that actually matters
Arms in this category come with a rated weight range, not a hard cap, and that range matters more than you'd think. Install an arm that's rated for way more weight than your monitor actually weighs, and the spring inside won't be under enough tension — your monitor can slowly creep upward on its own. That's the real culprit behind a lot of the one-star complaints on gas-spring mounts: buyers grabbed the heaviest-duty arm they could justify instead of picking the one whose range truly matches their monitor's actual weight. Lift your monitor off its current stand, put it on a scale, and buy for that number — resist the urge to just go bigger because it feels safer.
If you’re setting up more than one screen and want them to move independently rather than sag against each other, that’s a different shopping list — see Building a Multiple Monitor Computer System for how the arms interact when you’re running two or three displays.
Clamp, grommet, or nothing at all
Risers need neither — that’s their whole appeal. Arms need to attach to something, usually a desk-edge clamp or a hole drilled through the desk (a grommet mount). Most arms sold today include both options in the box, but the clamp is worth checking against your actual desk thickness before you buy, especially on standing desks with thick worktops or glass tops that won’t take a clamp at all. I go into clamp specifics in Monitor Arm Clamps: Which Desk-Edge Mounts Actually Hold if your desk is unusual.
What to ignore
Ignore extension length if you sit close to your desk — 25 inches of reach means nothing if your chair is already six inches from the screen. Ignore VESA 200×200 compatibility unless you already know your monitor uses it; most monitors under 32 inches use 75 or 100mm and any arm that lists those will fit. And ignore any roundup that treats the heaviest-duty arm as the automatic best pick — an arm rated for 44 lb holding a 6 lb monitor is a worse experience than a cheap arm matched to that weight, not a better one.
If you’re also fixing the desk, not just the monitor
Sometimes the honest answer to a low monitor is a low desk, and no riser fixes that properly for very long. If height is a chronic problem rather than a one-time nudge, it might be worth looking at the broader Desks & Standing Desks hub, or pairing whatever riser or arm you pick with a chair that actually gets your eye line right in the first place — see Ergonomic Office Chairs. A monitor riser can’t fully undo a chair that sits you too low or too high to begin with.
How I picked these
I built this guide from Amazon's own product listings, manufacturer spec sheets, and the aggregated "Customers say" data Amazon publishes — which pulls from star ratings, review volume, and the most-cited complaint patterns, not from individual reviews or any testing I've done myself. I discarded anything with too few reviews to be reliable, anything where the specs didn't line up consistently from one check to the next, and anything that looked available but was actually out of stock when I verified. When a third-party seller rather than the brand or Amazon handles the listing, I've flagged that, because it matters for warranty claims and returns if you need help down the road. I also skipped products from well-established makers like Fully Jarvis, Herman Miller Ollin, or UPLIFT if they aren't actually sold through Amazon — I wasn't comfortable substituting a competitor just to fill the slot.
Cuttles' Pick