Despite my less than stellar experiences with pushchair makers’ web sites, I managed to decide on a new pushchair. In the beginning of August we bought a second-hand Bugaboo Chameleon. (I’m not going to honour their atrocious web site with a link.)

One month later, I gave up and decided to get a new Stokke. The Bugaboo wasn’t a bad pushchair, really, but Stokke suits me much better. (Eric spends less time pushing the pushchair about and wasn’t as interested in the choice as I was, but he also liked the Stokke better.)

The deciding factor for me was the ease of “driving”. The Bugaboo started misbehaving as soon as the road sloped sideways. The pushchair was pulling me off the road, and the struggle to keep it straight left me with achy wrists every single afternoon. Add a heavy load of groceries and I was near tears at times. I never had that kind of trouble with the Stokke. I think the frame of the Bugaboo has a fundamental design flaw, at least for my body: the angles at which I can apply force (determined by the angle, attachment points and shape of the handlebar) were very inefficient given the direction I wanted to push or turn it.

Also, the handlebar on the Bugaboo can be raised and lowered, but its angle cannot be changed. When I had it at a comfortable height, I was walking way too close to the pushchair, so my toes kept hitting the rear axle. I had to either walk with my arms outstretched, or the handlebar too high, in order to avoid that. The Stokke doesn’t have a rear axle – the lower section of its frame is sort of x-shaped – and both the height and the angle of its handlebar are adjustable, which made it much easier to adapt to how I stand and move.

The two pushchairs are quite similar in many ways – robust design, well constructed, adaptable, expensive – and if you haven’t tried them you might well think that they’re pretty much the same. But once you take a closer look, it turns out that there are a lot of differences.

• The Bugaboo has suspension on its front wheels. It’s also got foam rear wheels, while the Stokke has hard wheels with a layer of rubber. So the Bugaboo offers a smoother ride, especially on uneven roads, and is slightly easier to push up and down over pavement edges. But I think the suspension contributed to its headstrong behaviour on sloping roads.
• The Stokke has better options for adjusting the handlebar. The Bugaboo only allows you to adjust the height, and changing it means unscrewing and then rescrewing two screws. Which means you wouldn’t adjust the handlebar every time you hand over the pushchair to your partner when you’re out walking together. With the Stokke we definitely do that. In fact adjusting the handlebar is so easy that I change it for a 100 metre uphill stretch, when I want a slightly different angle, and then put it back when I reach the top.
• The Bugaboo allows you to reverse direction by just flipping the handlebar to the other side, so you end up with the large fixed wheels in front and the small swivel wheels at the back. Their instruction manual says it’s good for tricky terrain, snow and sand and such. The Stokke has nothing like that.
• The Stokke has a more convenient basket. The Bugaboo basket has a curved bottom which makes it harder to pack (especially with boxy things like cartons of milk and juice) and it’s a bit difficult to access (almost impossible with the carrycot in place). The Stokke basket/bag has a flat bottom and is perfectly accessible with the seat facing backwards, and relatively convenient with the seat facing forwards, too.
• The Bugaboo is lighter: 9.3 kg vs. Stokke’s 12.5 kg according to the official stats. Which was a real surprise to me, because the Stokke feels lighter when I’m pushing it.
• The Stokke can go up and down stairs: you don’t need to lift it, you can pull it up step by step, i.e. less strain for your back, and no need to wait for someone to help you. This is less important in Stockholm where all train and tube stations have lifts, but in London this feature made all the difference.
• On the Stokke you can raise and lower the seat, and at its highest, the seat comes much higher up than on the Bugaboo, or any other pushchair I’ve seen for that matter. I like that a lot, especially when Ingrid was a baby.
• The Bugaboo carrycot has a carrying handle and can be used as a Moses basket. The seat can also be lifted off the pushchair and used separately. The Stokke doesn’t give you that option.
• The Stokke comes with an infant insert for its seat, so the seat can be used from about 3 months’ age. (We never even bought a carrycot and got by with just the seat, since we didn’t use the pushchair much in the first months.) The Bugaboo has quite a deep seat so when it’s upright, small children tend to sink down into a “sack of potatoes” position.
• Releasing the seat for reclining can be done with one hand on the Stokke, so the other hand can stabilize the seat and slowly lower it down. On the Bugaboo you need two hands to push two buttons on either side of the seat, so the seat always reclined with a jerk. Or perhaps there is a trick that I just didn’t discover yet.
• The Bugaboo has a more “normal” shape, while the Stokke has a central axle which means that you need a special “split” foot muff and can’t use any old sleeping bag. It’s also a bit tricky to wrap a sleeping kid in a blanket when there’s a stick in the way.
• The Stokke has a removable plastic footrest. Especially in autumn and winter, I often removed the footrest to shake off the gravel and dust. On the Bugaboo, the footrest is part of the seat, i.e. made of fabric and not removable, i.e. it gets pretty gunky pretty fast.
• The Bugaboo has much more convenient brakes: the brake handle sits on the handlebar and is easy to put on and off. On the Stokke, the brake is operated by a little lever that sits down by one of the wheels, so you can only reach it with your foot, and sometimes I need to jiggle it a few times before I get the brakes on or off.

Edited on October 4th to add another paragraph (on brakes).