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You can easily upgrade your living space with some of the best smart home devices. While the best smart speakers and smart displays are popular gadgets for listening to music or watching TV, they're capable of a lot more than that. Placing one in any room adds a command center where you can control your home, receive notifications, and place calls from one place. With the best smart hubs built-in, they can connect to the best smart lights or best smart thermostats so that you can customize the look and feel of each room on the fly.
Smart home devices can talk to each other and work together to make your home more comfortable, safer, and easier to control. More advanced devices like the Nest Learning Thermostat can even learn from your habits to anticipate your needs and help you save money.
The best smart home devices you can buy today
Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.
Best smart speaker
Among the best smart speakers, the Echo Dot Max is the best for most people, not because it's a standout in any one category — or that it's radically different from its predecessor — but it can do so many things well.
If we start with its performance as a speaker, you'll get better sound out of Sonos and Apple devices, but the Echo Dot Max does punch above its weight, and delivers a nice meaty boom for its size. Unfortunately, Amazon removed the 3.5mm audio jack, so you can't plug in anything directly. But, you can use it with a Fire TV streaming stick to create an ad hoc home theater system, which we found worked well in our testing.
As a smart home hub, the Echo Dot Max not only has Matter and Zigbee compatibility, but it can also act as a satellite for eero mesh Wi-Fi devices. And, it has what Amazon calls "Omnisense" technology, which lets it detect temperature, presence, and tap gestures, to better enable things such as smart home routines, as well as more tailored responses using Alexa+. Speaking of which...
The Echo Dot Max was one of the first smart speakers that could tap into Amazon's new AI-enhanced smart assistant, which is far better at responding to your requests, creating reminders, scheduling things, creating smart home routines, and much, much more. However, you can get Alexa+ on pretty much every Amazon Echo device, so it's not an exclusive feature.
Ultimately, the Echo Dot Max is more of the same from Amazon, but "the same" has been pretty good so far.
Read our full Amazon Echo Dot Max 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 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 home 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 lock
The reason we rate the Yale Assure Lock 2 the best smart lock is that it works with just about every smart home platform — Alexa, Google Home, HomeKit, SmartThings and Matter — and it's a no-fuss lock that doesn't befuddle you when it comes to installation or use.
We also like that the lock comes in several finishes, as well as several configurations. You can get a very basic model with a keypad, or you can get one with a touchscreen or fingerprint reader. Apple users will also like that it supports Apple Home keys, so you can use your iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock the door merely by tapping on it.
We wish battery life were a little longer — a set of four AA Lithium Ion batteries will keep it going for at least four months — but should they die, you can touch a 9v battery to two contacts underneath the keypad so you can get back in your home.
Read our full Yale Assure Lock 2 review.
Best video doorbell
The third-generation Google Nest Doorbell tops our list of the best video doorbells. has a much sharper 2K camera — a big jump in resolution from the previous model — and a wider 166-degree field of view, which allowed us to view a lot more of what was going on in front of our house. While it didn't quite reach down to the bottom of the door, we were able to see when packages had been dropped off.
Daytime and nighttime video was excellent, though we wish it had color night vision. A small quibble among its many virtues. We also like that Google offers six hours of video history for free, something that should come standard with any video doorbell or security camera.
Google also added AI features, which provides much richer descriptions of recorded events, and lets you search through all your footage using more precise language. It worked well in our testing, but unless you need to comb through thousands of hours of footage, we're not sure it's worth the $20/month expense.
Read our full Google Nest Doorbell (3rd generation) review.
Best smart home hub
Amazon's always-on 8-inch smart display can be mounted to your wall or placed on a surface to serve as your home's dashboard. Each of your smart home devices gets its own live widget so its current status and controls are accessible from this main screen. This makes it easy to quickly 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.
The Echo Hub's sleek 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. Each element on the screen has plenty of room to breathe and sorts all of your smart home devices by type, room placement, and order of importance. 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 smart speaker 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 lacks a camera for making video calls.
Read our full Amazon Echo Hub 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 plug
The Kasa WiFi Smart Plug is one of the best smart home devices and our top choice among the best smart plugs. It's just as compact as competing options out there, and while it doesn't have energy monitoring like some other smart plugs, it works 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 plug itself. 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 all of our picks for the best smart plugs.
Best smart smoke detector
The First Alert SC5 Battery Smart Smoke & Carbon Monoxide Alarm is actually a worse version of the product it replaced — the now-discontinued Nest Protect — but we still think it's the best smart smoke detector, because it's offered in both battery- and hardwired options, and both can be interconnected, which makes it by far the most versatile of the models we tested.
The SC5 also uses both electrochemical and photoelectric sensors, so it can detect smoldering as well as fast-burning fires.
Like the Nest Protect, the SC5 gives audio warnings of where an incident may be occurring, but its warning voice is quieter, and the alarm also lacks the pathlight feature of the Nest Protect, which was incredibly helpful even when there wasn't a fire.
At $129, the First Alert SC5 is also not cheap, so it's an investment to fully outfit your home. However, it may be the best choice for those who are looking to replace their now-expired Nest Protects.
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 Home, and Apple HomeKit. 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.
- Best smart locks
- Best home security cameras
- Best outdoor security cameras
- Best smart thermostats
- Best smart plugs
- Best smart light switches
- Best video doorbells
- Best water leak detectors
- Best smart smoke detectors
- Best DIY security systems
- Best smart garage door openers
- Best smart home hubs
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.
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