Echo Hub vs Google Nest Hub: They Are Not the Same Kind of Product

Search for "Echo Hub vs Nest Hub" and you will find a lot of pages that line the two up like boxers. Screen size, speaker, assistant, winner. It makes for a tidy article and it answers a question nobody actually has.

These are different classes of device. The Amazon Echo Hub is a wall-mounted control panel with real smart home radios inside it. The Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) is a cheap bedside display that happens to be able to turn your lights off. Deciding between them is like deciding between a light switch and an alarm clock. The right answer depends entirely on which problem you have, and for a lot of readers the honest answer is that you have neither problem yet and should buy neither device.

That is the useful version of this comparison, so let us do that one.

At a glance

Read the protocols row twice. That is the whole comparison in one line.

The Echo Hub is the better hub, and that is not the same as being the better buy

A hub is a device with radios that speak to your kit directly. The Echo Hub has them: Zigbee, Thread, Matter and Bluetooth, all built in. That means a Zigbee sensor or bulb can join it without a separate bridge sitting in a cupboard. If you do not know why any of that matters, our explainer on Matter and Thread is the place to start, and do you actually need a smart home hub is the more important question.

Mounted on a wall, it is genuinely nice. A panel you glance at as you walk past beats digging your phone out of your pocket and waiting for an app to load. The 8-inch screen was designed around smart home control instead of having it bolted on afterwards, and the Ring integration is the single most praised thing about it in reviews.

Now the rest of it. Reviewers report lag with widgets and gestures. Taps are fine, swipes are where it stumbles, which is an odd fault in a thing you are meant to touch constantly. Hue control is more limited than the Hue app itself. There is no camera, so no video calls. Reviews are genuinely split, and several of them land on the same conclusion: for most people, an Echo Show is the smarter purchase. We agree with them, which is why the Echo Hub sits at 6.8.

Below roughly a dozen devices it is hard to justify at all. It is Alexa-only, so a Google Home household should not be looking at it under any circumstances.

The Nest Hub is a good display that is a weak hub

The Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) scores 7.8, and it earns that as a display rather than as a hub. It is cheap, it sounds better than the original, and it has no camera at all, which is exactly the specification you want on a bedside table.

Its trick is Soli, a small radar sensor that notices when you get into bed, when you fall asleep and when you wake, with nothing strapped to your wrist. Sleep Sensing is free. Google's support page says the preview is available at no extra charge, and while Google has been announcing since 2021 that it will eventually move the feature into Fitbit Premium, it has postponed that every year since. Plenty of articles state flatly that you need a subscription. You do not, at least not today. We wrote up the full timeline and what it would mean if Google finally pulls the trigger in the Nest Hub sleep tracking guide.

The flaw that keeps it out of the eights has nothing to do with subscriptions. Soli tracks whichever body is nearest to it. Share a bed with a partner, or with a cat that likes your pillow, and the radar cannot reliably tell you apart. That is not a bug you can configure around. It rules out accurate sleep tracking for an enormous number of households before Google's pricing plans matter at all. The unit also has to sit close to the bed and unobstructed for tracking to work, the audio is mono, and the bass is thin.

As a hub, it is a Matter controller and nothing more. No Zigbee radio. Your Hue bulbs still need their Hue Bridge.

Why the lower-scoring product might be the right one for you

Our scores rate the product, on the rubric published on our about page. Fitness for a particular job is what an article like this one is for. A vacuum whose brush tangles with long hair is still a good vacuum and still a bad buy for a dog owner, and the score should not lie about either half of that.

So both of these things are true at once. The Nest Hub is the better product of the two. The Echo Hub is the better hub. If what you need is a hub, the 6.8 is your device, and the 7.8 is not a substitute at any price.

Who should buy which

Buy the Echo Hub if you already run a large Alexa household, you have somewhere north of a dozen devices, and you want a permanent glanceable dashboard on the wall instead of a phone in your hand. Ring owners get the most out of it. Accept the swipe lag going in, because it is the most consistent complaint in the reviews and it is not going to be patched away.

Buy the Nest Hub if you want a cheap, camera-free display for a bedroom or a kitchen, you are in or heading into the Google Home world, and you are happy for its hub duties to be light. If you sleep alone and are curious about sleep tracking without wearing anything to bed, that is a real perk and it currently costs nothing extra. Do not build the purchase around it if you share the bed.

Buy neither if you are here because you have some smart bulbs and a plug and you assumed a smart display was the next step. It usually is not. An Echo Show or a Nest Hub-class display does the voice, timers, recipes and music job for less, and a handful of devices does not need a hub at all. If you find yourself wanting one later, that is a signal that your setup has actually grown enough to warrant it, and you can buy then with a much better idea of which ecosystem you are committed to. We have laid out the test for that in do you need a smart home hub.

The short version

The Echo Hub is a control panel for a house that already has a lot to control. The Amazon Echo Hub does the hub job properly and asks a lot in return. The Google Nest Hub is the better-value object and the weaker hub, and it is the one we would point most people towards of the two, while noting that most people would be better served by neither.

Affiliate note. The product links above are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We earn on both of these devices, and we have still spent most of this page telling you to consider buying neither, because a recommendation you regret is worth less to us than the commission. We do not test hardware; we research it, and we say so. How we research and score.