Contactless sleep technologies hold promise for longitudinal, unobtrusive sleep monitoring in health and disease at scale, but few have been evaluated in older people. The performance of three contactless sleep technologies (a bedside radar [Somnofy] and two under-mattress devices [Withings sleep analyser and Emfit-QS]) were compared to polysomnography and actigraphy [Actiwatch Spectrum] in a sleep laboratory study during a 10-hour time in bed period which induced mild sleep disturbance. The data were collected in a group of older men and women (n=35; 70.8±4.9 years; 14 women) several of whom had health problems and/or sleep apnoea. We conducted a comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of the devices involving estimation of robust performance metrics (both sleep summary and epoch by epoch concordance) for classification of sleep vs wake and NREM and REM sleep stages. All devices overestimated total sleep time and the sleep stage estimation was unsatisfactory in this group of older people in whom sleep efficiency was relatively low. Our findings indicate that even though these devices provide some useful information on sleep behaviour, the performance of contactless sleep technologies requires improvement before they can serve as an alternative to polysomnography and actigraphy for estimating most sleep variables in older individuals.