The original LiberNovo Omni was one of last year’s most impressive surprises. Launched as a Kickstarter project that raised over $10 million, it raced to the top of our list of best gaming chairs thanks largely to a dynamic backrest that takes a new approach to ergonomics. Rather than one large piece that’s fixed in place and expects you to conform to its wishes, the LiberNovo approach is a flexible one with multiple panels working together to support your spine as you move around throughout the day.

It proved such a success that in the 12 months since it’s already expanded into a full lineup. There’s the updated Omni Gen, the range-topping Omni Pro with active cooling, a big and tall Maxis series, and the chair I’ve spent the past few weeks in, the LiberNovo Omni SE. It’s the cheapest option in the range, stripping out the motor to simplify things and trim the price down to $899/£839 as a result.

Does your chair really need a battery or built-in air conditioning, though? The LiberNovo Omni SE maintains the same ergonomic concept as the more expensive members of the family and opts to focus on the more traditionally necessary elements of a chair. It may be more affordable, but it’s certainly not cheap, and when you strip away the more eye-catching features that made the original stand out, does the LiberNovo Omni SE still do enough to justify its price tag?

Design & Assembly

For a chair that looks this intricate from behind, the LiberNovo Omni SE was wonderfully simple to put together with surprisingly few parts to deal with. The oversized instruction card walks you through the handful of steps, and without much faff I was able to go from box to seat in probably 10 minutes. Once it’s together, the Omni SE certainly looks the part, unapologetically sitting somewhere between the Herman Miller Logitech Embody and a Herman Miller Vantum.

The SE comes in a single Obsidian Black colorway, and LiberNovo offers two seat depth options on its website: 45cm and 48cm. I couldn’t tell you which version I’ve been testing because, inexplicably, my unit’s cushion measured 54cm from back to front of the cushion. I’ve asked LiberNovo what’s up with that, but regardless of size, the cushion foam is divided into three firmness zones. I’m not convinced you notice this when sitting on it, but doing a highly scientific test of pushing my fist into it in various places, I could feel a slight difference between front, middle, and back.

All the soft areas are covered in micro-elastic fabric which feels lovely to sit in and rub your hand over. It’s soft and pliable with quite a lot of texture to it, which looks premium and grown-up, but also attracts dust and debris at a phenomenal rate. I found myself giving the main seat cushion a brush-off with my hand every time I went to sit down. It also runs warmer than you’d expect from a fabric-clad chair, something I noticed a lot more than I wanted to during the UK’s recent heatwave. I now understand why the LiberNovo Omni Pro offers built-in fans; maybe it’s all a cunning ploy to drive people to the $1,299/£1,369 option?

Features

It may have almost all of the nifty little details taken off it, but the Omni SE retains the main important feature that’s shared across all LiberNovo chairs: the Bionic FlexFit backrest. Unlike a ‘traditional’ chair with a solid backrest, here you’re supported by a multi-panel system built around a network of interlinked joints that’s meant to flex and adjust with you as you shift. It reclines differently to a lot of other chairs too, leaning back independently of the seat cushion and pulling the armrests back with it. This all combines to form a very unique sitting experience, but an excellent one overall. The SE gets the same five recline positions as the pricier models in the lineup, ranging from 105 to 160 degrees, though it’s worth knowing this works more like a series of stops for how far the backrest will go, rather than a fixed position you can lock in and stay at.

I’m not generally one for particularly intrusive lumbar support systems, but the LiberNovo Omni SE is doing a great job of converting me; this might be the best lumbar support I’ve used on any chair. It’s a manual job, compared to the motorized adjustment of the original LiberNovo Omni and its Pro models, but the dial is easy enough to reach, and once you’ve found your ideal setting, you’re extremely unlikely to touch it again anyway. As the backrest is made of multiple panels, the lumbar support doesn’t feel like a bar digging into your lower back the way I find most do; it feels like an actual integration into the backrest itself, offering coverage across your whole torso rather than one pressure point.

All that movement is great when it’s there by design, but it also extends into unintended areas and forms my biggest source of irritation with the LiberNovo Omni SE. Unfortunately, this challenger brand has fallen into the same trap I’ve seen far too many established players fall into: the armrests and headrest have no way to lock their position and love to go walkabout. You can lock the height of the armrests in place, but not the rotation or lateral position.

They’re not quite as loose as the ones on the FlexiSpot C7 Morpher (I’m not sure any chair will manage to top those), but they rarely stay where you put them. The headrest is even worse, and it’s more annoying because it’s luxuriously soft and comfortable for the brief window it holds still, but it then wilts back down to its lowest setting under the smallest amount of pressure. On a few occasions, even something as simple as standing up out of the chair was enough to hear it slip down a couple of notches.

Performance

I can’t help but have a certain skepticism when a brand wanders so far from the path laid out by the rest of the market. I’m all for innovation; I’m just battle-scarred from ‘innovations’ like 5D armrests on the AndaSeat Kaiser 4 that make the experience worse in the name of being different. With that nagging away in the back of my brain, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from LiberNovo’s Bionic FlexFit backrest. It didn’t take long to convert me to the dynamic life, however. The Omni SE is an undeniably comfortable chair.

There’s quite pronounced sculpting to the backrest, and the way it welcomes and supports you in equal measure is delightful. It’s designed to move with you as you adjust throughout the day, and it does, though I actually found myself needing to reposition far less often than in something like the Secretlab Titan Evo NanoGen that I had been using. That’s a comfortable chair too, but you sit on top of it, where I felt like I was sitting in the Omni SE. A word of warning though: the wings of the backrest are pretty slim-fitting, so if you’ve got a broader frame, you’ll want to look at the Maxis version instead.

When you first sit down, the seat cushion is soft, verging on squishy, and it feels great for about the first ten minutes of any session. It has the feeling of quite open-cell foam, so that softness fades and there’s a noticeable bottom-out once you’ve been at your desk for a while. It never becomes uncomfortable; it’s just a real departure from something like the Secretlab Titan Evo, which leans on noticeably firmer cold-cure foam that holds its shape better over a full working day.

Much like the Elgato Embrace, the LiberNovo Omni SE is almost entirely plastic. The star base is nylon, rather than reinforced aluminum alloy on the Pro, and a noticeable amount of general creaking, rubbing, and settling emerges from various points of the all-plastic frame throughout the day. None of it suggests anything is going to break, but it doesn’t do much for the premium feel LiberNovo is going for either. The gas cylinder also sits so low in the base that it scrapes against my plastic carpet protector every time I move, which is an oddity I’ve never encountered on any chair before.

Should you buy the LiberNovo Omni SE?

The LiberNovo Omni SE isn’t like any gaming or office chair I’ve sat in before, and it’s better than most of them. The comfort delivered by that dynamic backrest is simply a step above a traditional bucket racing chair, and I can see it being the start of a new phase of development wars across brands. Yes, the SE does away with all of the more eye-catching headline features of its siblings to keep the price tag in triple digits, but it still delivers on the core experience and puts what’s most important in a chair first.

It’s not without a few drawbacks. It’s quite slim through the sides, which hugs a smaller or average frame nicely but is likely to feel tight if you’re a bigger user, and the combination of unsettled armrests, a wandering headrest, and a noisy plastic build takes some of the shine off what should still be a premium chair. But none of that overcomes the excellence of that dynamic ergonomic support, which makes the LiberNovo Omni SE a fundamentally comfortable place to spend your working day. If you run warm or have a bigger frame, it’s worth putting the Omni Pro on your shortlist instead.

How I tested the LiberNovo Omni SE

I used the Omni SE as my main desk chair over several weeks of daily work, including through a UK heatwave, which turned out to be a useful, if uncomfortable, stress test for how the fabric handles warmer conditions. Testing covered solo assembly and extended work sessions of several hours at a time, with special attention and testing paid to the armrests, headrest, lumbar, and recline settings.

For more on how we test gaming chairs, take a look at the GamesRadar+ hardware policy.

The rest of our gaming furniture recommendations can be found on our lists of the best console gaming chairs, the best gaming desks, and the best standing desks.