The best smart home devices can make your home more comfortable, safer, and easier to control. In some cases, these connected products can even help you save money.
Best Smart Home Devices: Quick Menu
Whether you’re looking to turn your lights on from your smartphone, stream music to a smart speaker using Alexa (or Google Assistant), lock your doors remotely or automatically vacuum your floors without lifting a finger, the best smart home devices streamline your routine for complete convenience.
The number of smart home brands is constantly growing. Meanwhile, the universal Matter smart home protocol lets devices talk to each other regardless of platform. Still, not all smart home devices are as reliable or as smart as they claim. We’ve tested dozens of offerings across all different categories, from the best home security cameras to the best smart light bulbs. If an app or your voice can control a device, we’re here to help you decide if it fits your needs.
See all of the best smart home devices below.
The quick list
Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (5th Gen) review
The best for most people
Control your smart home, get information, and make calls using just your voice with the best-sounding version of the Echo Dot yet. A new time display and built-in temperature sensors adds even more layers of home automation functionality to the little smart speaker.
The best smart home control panel
No other smart display makes it easier to control all of your connected smart home gadgets. The Echo Hub’s always-on screen shows individual device controls, live security camera feeds, and status of your home at all times so you can quickly manage your smart home from one place.
Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium review
The best smart thermostat
The Ecobee has Alexa built-in, but you can also connect it directly to Siri, so you can use its microphone and speaker directly with Apple’s assistant. It has a built-in air quality monitor and comes with remote sensors with excellent range and battery life.
Philips Hue White Starter Kit review
The best smart light bulb
These smart light bulbs work across every major platform, have a wide range of automation, and can be dimmed down to your preferred brightness level on the fly. This high level of control comes at a small price—you’ll need to set up the included hub to manage and sync up the bulbs.
Nest Cam (battery) review
The best security camera
Cut the cord on your home security system with this high-resolution security camera. If you have a Google smart home this offers loads of value including subject detection (person, animal, or vehicle) in addition to three hours of video storage for free.
August Smart Lock Pro Review
The best smart lock
This easy-to-install smart lock converts the inner half of your existing deadbolt. It has a wide variety of auto-lock and unlock features plus alerts you if your door is left ajar. The extensive platform support spans HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, Z-Wave, Nest, IFTTT, and more.
The best smart home devices you can buy today
Best smart home device overall
The latest Echo Dot has a clever trick up its sleeve—an LED clock built in its face. This seemingly simple addition adds a ton of functionality to the Echo Dot, making an even better smart home companion. In fact, we wish more smart home companies took Amazon’s cue and make minor — yet effective — enhancements to already excellent devices.
More than just the time, the Echo Dot with Clock’s display can also show you the current temperature, song titles, and answers to math equations. It functions as a timer, too. It has an ambient sensor that automatically adjusts the brightness of the display based on the lightning of its surrounding environment, as well as a built-in temperature sensor that can trigger Alexa routines.
The Echo Dot with Clock costs $10 more than the Echo Dot, but based on our experience, we think it’s a worthwhile upgrade for those who want to know the time without having to ask Alexa. Truly the only downgrade is that it doesn’t have the 3.5mm audio out port found on the previous Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (4th Gen).
Read our full Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (5th Gen) review.
Best smart home controller
Amazon’s always-on 8-inch display acts as a wall-mounted or stand-based smart home dashboard. Each smart home device gets its own widget so its status and controls live on your main screen. You can easily adjust your smart thermostat on the fly, look at up to 6 security camera feeds simultaneously, or slide down your smart light brightness without hopping through menus. Its sleek interface gives each element on the screen plenty of room to breathe and sorts all of your smart home devices by type, room placement, and order of importance.
The Echo Hub’s interface is completely customizable so you can add widgets like a To-Do list or your calendar to it or rearrange the layout, unlike any other smart display we’ve tested. We also appreciated its simplified interface as it’s free from the ad bloat that plagues Fire TVs and Echo Shows. You can still use the Echo Hub to play music throughout your whole-home audio setup, watch your favorite TV shows, and pin reminders to its screen such as a family chore list. It also makes for a great intercom panel to drop in on your home’s other Echo devices but keep in mind that it does lack a camera for making video calls.
Read our full Amazon Echo Hub review.
Best home security camera
The well-designed Nest Cam (battery) has a simple shape and is one of the easiest home security cameras to install, thanks to its magnetic base. Its 1080p camera captures sharp images day and night, and its microphone and speaker made conversations a breeze. That’s the main reason we consider it the top choice among all the best security cameras we’ve tested.
The Nest Cam (battery) also offers three hours of rolling video storage for free, as well as person, vehicle, and animal detection. If you sign up for a Nest Aware subscription (starting at $6/month), you also get familiar face detection as well as the ability to store up to a month’s worth of video.
Read our full Nest Cam (battery) review.
Best smart thermostat
With its zinc case and much larger touchscreen, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium looks much better than previous generations — on a par with the Nest Learning Thermostat — and is even smarter on the inside. Now, it has an air quality sensor built in, so you can see if you need to open a window or turn on a fan. The huge display also lets you look at the weather forecast for the week.
As before, the best part of the Ecobee is its remote sensors, which make it easier for you to manage the temperature in your entire home. The Ecobee also has Alexa built in and, if you have a HomePod or HomePod mini, can also talk to Siri through the thermostat. The built-in speaker is still not great for listening to music, but it’s a way to get a smart speaker in a room where you don’t want to place an Echo Dot.
Consider a smart air quality sensor if you want to take things beyond climate control. We were impressed by the affordable $70 Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor. It’s one of the best Alexa-compatible devices because it can control other connected gadgets. So if your air quality score drops your air purifier or dehumidifier can kick on instantly.
Read our full Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium review.
Best smart light bulb
Philips Hue White starter kit includes two bulbs and a hub to connect them to other smart home devices. While you can’t change these bulbs’ colors, you can adjust their brightness (up to 800 lumens), and add up to 50 to a single hub. Philips’ bulbs also work with a wide range of smart home systems, including Alexa, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT, Google Home, and Nest. In fact, there’s all sorts of things you can do with Philips Hue bulbs, check out these 9 things you never knew you could do with smart lights.
Philips Hue lights also have an app, Philips Hue Sync, which lets users synchronize their smart bulbs with multimedia content on their Mac or Windows PC. For example, you can set your lights to flash and change color in time with music, video and movies being played on your computer. Users can also modify the color schemes and themes to suit their tastes. For $30 more, you can upgrade your starter kit to include 4 bulbs instead of 2.
Read our full Philips Hue White Starter Kit review.
Best smart lock
We were already pretty high on August’s first-generation August’s first-generation Smart Lock Pro — it was our top pick among the best smart locks — but the company went and made it even better, by shrinking its size and making it work even better with your other smart home devices.
The August Wi-Fi Smart Lock is 45 percent smaller than the original, and it also has Wi-Fi built into it, so you don’t need an extra accessory to connect it to your home Wi-Fi network.
As with the original, we found the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock just as easy to install — it took mere minutes — and it has just as many helpful features, such as DoorSense, which alerts you if you leave your door open.
The August Wi-Fi Smart Lock also works with most smart home systems, including Alexa, Google Assistant, and Xfinity. And, while you can open the lock with your keys or your smart phone, August also sells a wireless keypad as an additional means of entry.
Read our full August Wi-Fi Smart Lock review.
Best video doorbell
The Nest Doorbell (battery) gets almost everything right, and that’s why it’s not just one of the best smart home devices but the best video doorbell we’ve reviewed. The video doorbell’s 3:4 vertical aspect ratio means you can see more of your front door; it can work either wired or on battery power alone, and it has a lot of great features, such as the ability to recognize familiar faces, packages, animals, and vehicles.
Even better is that the camera also offers some of those features for free, as well as three hours of rolling video storage — things that used to require a subscription. If you want longer storage, you can still sign up for Nest Aware, which starts at $6/month. As such, it pairs nice with the Nest Cam.
Read our full Nest Doorbell (battery) review.
Best smart plug
The $25 Wemo WiFi Smart Plug is one of the best smart home devices and our top choice among the best smart plugs. It’s more compact than competing options out there, even its predecessor the Wemo Mini. And while it doesn’t have energy monitoring like some other smart plugs, the Wemo WiFi Smart Plug does work with all the major smart assistants.
This smart plug has a physical switch, so if you don’t want to use your voice or an app to turn your appliance on or off, you can click the switch on the Wemo. It also has a clever Away mode. which can make it seem like you’re home even when you’re not by turning a lamp on intermittently.
Read our full Wemo WiFi Smart Plug review.
Best smart smoke detector
The Nest Protect is the top choice among the best smart smoke detectors. When it picks up on something in the air, it sounds an alarm and lets you know what room in your home triggered the alert. Plus an LED ring on the bottom of the alarm changes color in case of an emergency, giving you and the people you live with a visual cue.
What we like most about the Nest Protect is how well it integrates with some of the best smart home devices. When you use smart home routines, your smart smoke alarm can automatically turn on your lights, making it easier for you to get out of your house. However, these routines only work for those who have converted their Nest account to a Google Assistant account. It also does not natively work with Alexa.
Read our full Nest Protect review.
Best smart home hub
For years, the Samsung SmartThings hub was one of our top picks for the best smart home hubs because it had both Zigbee and Z-Wave inside, so you can connect to hundreds of devices, more than most other hubs. What’s more, the SmartThings app is loaded with functionality, which lets you create a wide range of different scenarios for all of the gadgets in your home. Best of all, SmartThings now works with Nest and Matter products, making it a truly complete smart home hub.
However, Samsung is no longer making its SmartThings Hub, so to use its SmartThings platform, you’ll need the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, which replicates all of the same functions. It’s essentially the same hardware, but with a different logo on the front, and in our testing, it worked just as well.
Read our full Aeotec Smart Home Hub review.
Best smart garage door opener
If you’re looking for the best smart garage door opener, look no further than the Chamberlain MyQ. It includes a sensor for your garage door as well as a hub that connects to your Wi-Fi network. When you send a command using your smartphone, it is relayed to the hub, which then goes to the sensor that activates your garage door. The MyQ app, available for Android and iOS devices, lets you check to see if your door is open, and then close — or open — it remotely.
MyQ will work with most brands of garage door openers made after 1993 that have standard safety sensors, according to Chamberlain. Currently, MyQ works with Nest, SmartThings and Xfinity Home smart home systems. The one thing it doesn’t do, though, is work with Alexa.
Read our full Chamberlain MyQ review.
How to choose the best smart home devices for you
Choosing the best smart home devices is different for every shopper. Most of the decision comes down which smart home platform you prefer – you’ll want to buy devices that are compatible with your voice assistant so you can create routines or control your gadgets hands-free.
You have three main choices: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant/Home, and Apple HomeKit/Siri. To help you get started, we have guides on how to use Alexa and how to use Google Assistant, as well as an Alexa vs Google Assistant vs Siri face off.
Alexa generally comes out on top, as it works with the most smart home devices, and has the most third-party skills. However, Google Assistant can do some things that Alexa can’t—such as control Chromecast TVs—and it’s rapidly being built into a number of third-party devices in conjunction with its Works With Nest program. HomeKit’s availability is also growing, and could be the right platform for you if you use Siri often on your iPhone or iPad.
You’ll also want to check out our other smart home guides below and you might also be interested in AI is coming to your home – here’s how it could revolutionize your kitchen.
How we test the best smart home devices
All of the best smart home devices above are top picks within respective categories. We compare and contrast each gadget to similar options, taking variables like price, ease-of-setup, voice assistant compatibility and appearance into account. For example, the third-generation Amazon Echo is our favorite smart speaker overall because it has the best sound for the value, and represents its category on this list. The same goes for the Nest Cam and fifth-generation Ecobee.
That said, there are a number of excellent options within each category that are not featured on this list. If you’re looking for more buying choices, we have individual pages that detail all the best smart lights, smart doorbells, smart security cameras and more we’d consider reliable purchases for your growing smart home.
Check each of them out for more in-depth testing information for every category of smart home devices you should consider for boosting your home’s IQ.
