When you're looking at some of the new cleaning options and pros and cons lists for individual cleaning accessories it can become confusing what's really a better solution. An easier way to look at your options is to compare them against each other. Looking at steam vs traditional mops you can see how they stack up against each other.

Traditional mops can, in fact, be messy. They get water everywhere, and they're hard to clean themselves. This means more work for you because not only do you have to mop up the floor, but clean where the mop made a mess, and then clean the mop itself.

With a steam cleaner mop you typically have a microfiber pad on the bottom. This pad is reusable. You take the pad off and toss it into the washer with your regular laundry. You usually want to have a couple ones on hand, and many come with multiples, so that you can clean large messy areas without problem. This keeps your house clean, without having to do much to clean the device itself.

With a traditional option you need to rub the floor over multiple times and keep dipping it into water to keep it moist and clean the end off. This can be a lot of work and make using them fairly difficult.

With a more modern steam option the moisture is in the unit itself. When you start off you pour some water into the device, wait a few minutes for it to heat up, and then get cleaning. The cleaner picks up debris on the floor and once the pad gets too dirty to go on you simply switch out to a new one until you're done, and then throw the pads into the washer.

With most traditional mops you need to replace the heads fairly often to keep them in good enough condition to really work. You also need to use some cleaning solutions to get your floor really clean.

Steam mops are more environmentally friendly -- they use less water, no chemicals, and the microfiber pads are reusable. Once you buy one of these you don't really need to buy any accessories to go along with it.

For all of these reasons when you compare steam vs traditional mops we see that steam mops are a much easier to use option.