Top pick
This user-friendly website offers the most affordable houseplants we tested. Though the plants didn’t always arrive in flawless condition, Horti places a strong emphasis on giving customers the knowledge they need to help their plants thrive.
From ordering through delivery, we were impressed by Horti’s attention to detail. Plants were packed and shipped with care. We also appreciated the company’s commitment to educating its customers on best houseplant practices, both on its website and in the literature it includes in its shipments.
Horti offers a fun array of indoor houseplants, including rare, low-light, full-sun, pet-friendly, hard-to-kill, and hanging varieties. The wide selection should keep repeat customers feeling enthusiastic about returning to the site for more options as they grow their plant collections and become more confident in their green-thumb abilities. The fact that Horti’s prices are lower than those of the other sites we tested also bodes well for folks looking to purchase multiple plants, either all at once or over time. (For more on how much houseplants typically cost, as well as how we chose the plants we ordered, see below.)
We ordered three Sansevieria snake plants and three Pilea peperomioides Chinese money plants from Horti. We ordered two of the snake plants and two of the money plants in 4-inch plastic grow pots; the snake plants cost $18 each, while the money plants cost $20 each. We also ordered one of each plant with a 6-inch “Horti white pot,” which is what the company calls its terra-cotta plant pot hand-painted with a slanted white stripe along the bottom. The snake plant with a 6-inch Horti white pot cost $36, while the money plant with a 6-inch Horti white pot cost $38.
On all Horti orders we placed, shipping cost extra, ranging from about $10 to about $14 per two-plant shipment. Because we ordered our plants in winter, Horti added a to each shipment at no additional cost.
Deliveries are thoughtfully packaged. Horti’s deliveries took us the longest to unpack, at an average of just under four minutes. As one tester described her shipment’s contents: “Everything was tightly packed inside in a way that neither plant could move.”
Our Horti packages all came with heat packs (one was still giving off heat upon arrival), as well as the most labels (such as “This Side Up,” “Handle With Care,” and “Be Gentle—Live Plants Inside”) in comparison with the other services we tested. Perhaps not coincidentally, Horti got the highest marks for packages that were clean on the inside, with hardly any spilled dirt.
The printed and online care instructions are top-notch. “Horti had the most delightful in-package materials out of the bunch,” one tester raved. Each plant came with its own care card, listing that particular species’s light, water, and warmth needs. The cards also stated whether a particular plant was toxic to pets. Three additional cards gave tips for repotting and watering, as well as best practices for helping your plant acclimate to its new home. (Strangely, though, one of our three shipments did not include these care cards.)
For more info on topics such as “How to Overcome Your Brown Thumb” and “What Makes a Happy Plant?” the cards direct you to the website’s , which reads like a fun blog that we would enjoy referring to again and again.
The soil comes in great condition. Although our Horti plants , we appreciated how they were potted and what they were potted in. Our money plants arrived in sufficiently damp soil with moistened paper towels on top, while our snake plants arrived in suitably drier (but not concerningly dry) conditions.
As best we could tell by closely examining each plant’s growing medium, our Horti plants were each potted in a specific medium according to needs; for example, the snake plants appeared to be potted in succulent soil rather than an all-purpose mix. One tester called this attention to detail “quite distinct compared to other companies.” In addition, the two plants we ordered with Horti white pots each came with a dehydrated organic soil wafer (an included slip of paper identified them as Wonder Soil Planting Mix Wafers) to encourage repotting the plants from the plastic nursery pots they were sent in. (Two of the experts we spoke to said that repotting a newly received plant is a good idea, even if it is shipped in good soil; see “” below.)
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The site really tries to sell you a subscription. Horti goes hard on its Plant Subscription Box options, which we did not specifically test. While Horti’s homepage makes it appear as if subscriptions are all the company offers, hovering over “Shop” in the top-bar menu reveals the options for à la carte plant shopping. Items are helpfully grouped into categories such as hard-to-kill plants, low-light plants, and full-sun plants. We do, however, wish that we could further winnow down those categories with sort-by filters such as “Price: Low to High” or “Price: High to Low,” which are not available on the site.
The plants aren’t the prettiest of the bunch. Our testers described three of the six plants we received from Horti as “a little ragged,” “a little droopy,” and “not the spiffiest, but not the worst.” While imperfections do not indicate that a plant is diseased or doomed, we had certainly hoped not to see them in a plant arriving straight from a commercial nursery. (In general, though, don’t fret if your plant arrives looking a little underwhelming. As The New Plant Collector author Darryl Cheng told us, “You can just clip off any browned tips or damaged leaves… People do often treat imperfect plants like they bought a white T-shirt and it arrived with a stain on it, but a plant is a living thing and there’s a lot of recovering it can do.”) We received a money plant from Horti that shed four of its leaves soon after we took it out of the box, although we felt good about the plant’s overall fullness even after those leaves abandoned ship; we were also pleased to see that a (a baby plant) was starting to peek through the soil.
One of the snake plants we received from Horti came with some tan marks along the edges and a leaf that was crispy and crumbling at the very tip—but again, we were confident in the plant’s vitality overall, as it boasted a healthy root system and also had a pup making its way to the surface. Although we may not want to give Horti’s not-always-perky-looking plants as gifts, we’re comfortable recommending them for people who want to buy plants for themselves because they were well priced, they (usually) arrived with loads of helpful literature, and they appeared to be packaged with care.
You have only one “nice” pot option. Aside from a plastic nursery pot, the only other planter Horti offers is its signature terra-cotta pot painted with an angular stripe across the bottom. We would appreciate seeing a greater variety of pot options, especially for gift purposes.