Arius One Alternative: A Comparison From the Competitor That’s In Stock
If you’re thinking about preordering the Arius One, the real questions are about the wait and the salt routine. And full disclosure, I work for the other side: I’m a health consultant at GRN Labs and we make the AG Water Softener. Everything about Arius below comes from their own product page.
First, credit where it’s due. The Arius One (formerly the Aquus One) uses real ion-exchange resin, the same chemistry inside a whole-house softener. That puts it in a small club. Most products sold as “softening” shower heads are chlorine filters that don’t touch hardness minerals at all. Arius went further and built the filter and the softener into one unit.
So the chemistry argument that fills this category doesn’t apply here. Both products soften water for real. The differences are in the day-to-day.
The preorder part
The Arius One is $296.87 and sold as a preorder. Arius says units ship by the end of August 2026. Their product reviews come from prototype testers.
None of that is a knock. Every product starts somewhere, and disclosing the tester reviews is the right way to handle it. But it does mean that if you order today, you’re buying on their timeline and their prototype feedback, before any customer has a unit in the bathroom. Worth knowing before you pay, and worth rechecking their page after August, since their ship date may have arrived by the time you read this.
The AG is currently in stock. It ships free in the US with tracking, and delivery runs 12 to 18 days.
Same resin, different salt day
Once resin has swapped out enough calcium and magnesium, it’s full and needs a salt recharge. Both products work this way. The difference is who does the recharging.
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With the Arius One, per their instructions: you add salt, wait about 4 hours for the brine (salt water) to form, turn the valve to REGEN, and run it for about 10 minutes. They say to expect this roughly every 2 weeks for a two-person household.
The AG recharges itself from an included brine tank in about 30 minutes, every 3 to 5 weeks, using plain non-iodized salt. Automatic still means you fill the tank and reinstall the unit afterward. It’s the difference between a chore you schedule and one you mostly forget about.
The terms
The Arius One is $296.87 with a 60-day guarantee. It weighs 19 pounds and measures 18 x 12 x 4.5 inches. Their page says it “installs in 10 minutes, with no plumber, drilling or permanent changes required.”
The AG is $249 with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 12-month warranty on top of it. It mounts on a standard half-inch shower arm and works with the showerhead you already own.
And the combined-unit point belongs to them: Arius builds filtration and softening into one system. If you want both jobs done by one machine and the preorder timeline works for you, it’s a reasonable pick. The AG does one job, softening, without a filter attached.
How to decide
If a hands-on salt routine every couple of weeks sounds fine and you’re comfortable waiting on a preorder, the Arius One is a real softener from a team that got the chemistry right. Read their page and check the ship status yourself.
If you’d rather have the unit this month and skip the hands-on recharge, that’s the case for ours. I put the full side-by-side on one page, with the prices and terms side by side.
Either way, confirm your water is actually hard first. A ten-dollar pack of test strips settles it, and under about 120 ppm no softener will change anything you notice, theirs or ours.
