Hi Elizabeth! Great question. Yes, they both have open treads so it’s still not as safe as non-floating stairs. Your foot can still fall through the openings. (Thankfully, not your whole body). Spiral stairs are actually more unsafe because they’re more compact and harder to navigate being spiral. Since they’re so small, you can’t have more than one person going up and down at a time so you can’t walk next to your kid and hold their hand. New building codes now actually require that you have another set of non-spiral stairs in your building or home if you do have spiral stairs. This is because you would not be able to quickly exit the building in case of an emergency with spiral stairs. We made sure not to have straight floating stairs so that the center would break up the flight of stairs and the reduce the number of treads from a fall. The landing can provide a place to stop and rest also. They’re also very wide floating stairs for multiple people to use at the same time. Hope this helps! XOXO