Pentair Clean & Clear Plus 320 sq ft Cartridge Filter vs Hayward SwimClear 325 sq ft Multi-Element Cartridge Filter

Ringside notes

These two are the closest thing to a tie in the category, and that is what makes the matchup useful. The Pentair Clean & Clear Plus 320 reads 4.6★ across 139 owners; the Hayward SwimClear 325 reads 4.6★ across 187. Same score, same four-element construction, five square feet apart. On the numbers there is nothing to separate them, so the honest tiebreaker is where you buy. Online they are equivalent: Hayward's W3 (Open Line) SKU is one year parts with no labor, and Pentair's EC- eCommerce SKU is one year parts. At that point the Pentair simply costs $160 less — $1,439 against $1,599 — and its price held at $1,439 across Amazon and the dealers we checked, so the saving is real rather than a moving target. Change one thing and the answer flips. If a professional is installing it, Hayward's dealer line is the only route in this category to a multi-year term, published at three years parts plus a year of field labor, and if someone else is doing the plumbing, buying through their supply house costs you nothing extra. Two cautions, both ours to state. Hayward's own owner's manual says one year where the schedule says three, so get the term in writing. And Pentair's advantage is prefix-dependent: the plain TradeGrade SKU bought online drops to sixty days, and Clean & Clear Plus is a TradeGrade product. On top of both, every one of these listings on Amazon is sold by a third-party marketplace seller, and both brands require an authorized seller as a second, independent condition. The prefix gets you halfway.