Popular Smart Home Kit That Scores Low With Us (and Why)

Why this page exists

An affiliate site that rates everything 8 and above is telling you nothing. If every product clears the bar, the bar is decoration, and the score is just a badge on the way to the buy button.

We publish our rubric on /about and we use the bottom of it. Here it is, in full:

Read the bottom two rows carefully, because they are the point of this article. Nothing below is a bad product. Nothing below scores under 6. These are five popular, well-reviewed, frequently recommended pieces of kit that score low with us, and each one has a specific, nameable reason behind the number. We still link every one of them, because a low score is not a ban. It is a warning aimed at a particular reader, and if you are not that reader, the product may be exactly right for you.

We do not test hardware. We are research-led: we read the specialist reviews, the owner complaints, and the manufacturer specs, and we say what the weight of evidence supports. Everything below is sourced that way.

Amazon eero Max 7 (2-pack) — 6.5

Our lowest score on the site.

The flaw. Reviewers report performance falling off at longer distances. That is the one thing a mesh system sold for large homes cannot afford to do, because distance is the entire reason you buy mesh. It is also expensive for the Wi-Fi you actually get. One well-regarded reviewer is scathing about the value, and most of the reviews we read end up steering readers to the cheaper eero Pro 7 instead. A 6.5 is a narrow-case score and we mean it as one.

What it is genuinely good at. The setup and the app are the best in the business. Nobody else makes a mesh system this painless to get running, and if you have ever spent an evening arguing with a router's admin page you will understand why that is worth something. The built-in Zigbee, Thread and Matter hub earns its keep too. That is a real hub inside a real router, and it removes a box from your shelf.

Who should still buy it. Someone who wants the hub and the effortless app, and who is going in with eyes open about the distance question. If your home is compact enough that the range drop-off never bites, you get the nicest software in the category and a smart-home hub thrown in. That is a coherent reason to buy.

See the Amazon eero Max 7 page for the full breakdown, or our guide to mesh Wi-Fi for large homes if coverage is the thing you are actually solving for.

Amazon Echo Hub — 6.8

Narrow case only, and the reviews are genuinely mixed rather than quietly negative.

The flaw. The interface lags on swipes. Taps are fine, but swiping through panels is not as slick as a wall-mounted control surface needs to be, and you notice it every day. It is expensive for what it does. Several reviewers conclude that an Echo Show is the smarter purchase, and it is hard to argue with them below roughly a dozen connected devices. It is also Alexa-only, so if you are hedging between ecosystems this is a commitment.

What it is genuinely good at. The Zigbee, Thread and Matter radios are real, so the panel is doing hub work as well as displaying it. And a wall panel you glance at does beat pulling a phone out of your pocket, unlocking it, and finding an app. That sounds small. Over a few hundred repetitions a month, it is not.

Who should still buy it. A large, committed Alexa household. If you have thirty devices, you are not leaving Alexa, and you want one glanceable surface by the front door, the Echo Hub does the job and the score reflects a narrow fit rather than a poor product.

Full detail on the Amazon Echo Hub page.

Netgear Orbi 970 (3-pack) — 7.2

The flaw. The price is extraordinary. Reviewers reach for language we would not print. That alone would not sink a score, because some people can absorb it, but owners also report sporadic disconnections and slower speeds once a lot of devices are connected. That is a reliability complaint about a product whose whole pitch is reliability at scale, and it is the reason this sits at 7.2 rather than in the 8s. Security and parental controls need a further paid subscription on top.

What it is genuinely good at. Raw performance and coverage are near the top of the class. The dedicated backhaul does exactly what it promises, keeping the link between nodes off the same airspace your devices are using. When it is working, very little beats it.

Who should still buy it. A very large house where money is genuinely not the constraint. If you have the square footage to justify three nodes and the budget to not care, the Orbi 970 will cover it. Our 7.0–7.9 band exists for precisely this shape of product: good, with a real flaw that rules it out for a whole group of buyers. The group ruled out here is anyone for whom the price is a decision.

More on the Netgear Orbi 970 page, and a wider look at the category in mesh Wi-Fi for large homes.

dreame L10s Ultra Gen 2 — 7.4

This one is the clearest illustration of how our scoring works, so it is worth slowing down on.

The flaw. The brush tangles with hair. If you have a shedding pet or long-haired people in the house, you will be cutting hair off the brush roll, and that is a chore the machine was supposed to abolish. High-pile rugs above roughly 15mm are also not vacuumed effectively.

What it is genuinely good at. Excellent value. Suction is rated alongside machines that cost a great deal more, and the MopExtend edge cleaning is a clever bit of engineering that gets the mop into the places round mops habitually miss.

Who should still buy it. A home with hard floors and no shedding pets. For that home this is a strong recommendation and a bargain.

Now, why does a vacuum that tangles on hair still score 7.4? Because the score describes the machine, and the machine is good. Fitness for your particular home is the guide's job, and this paragraph is it. If we dropped the score to 5 for the hair problem, we would be telling a childless couple with a tiled kitchen and no dog that we would not buy this vacuum, which is false. We would buy it. Mixing "is this good" with "is this right for you" is how review sites end up with every score squashed into the 7.5 to 8.5 range, saying nothing about anything. So the number stays honest and the warning goes here, in plain words: pet owners, look elsewhere.

Full spec on the dreame L10s Ultra Gen 2 page.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro — 7.6

The flaw. Without a paid Ring plan you cannot save a single second of video. Not one clip. There is no local storage to fall back on either, so the day something happens on your doorstep is the day you find out whether you were paying. There is no onboard siren. And the battery, advertised in months, can fall to about a fortnight on a busy street, because every passer-by is an event.

What it is genuinely good at. The 4K image is excellent, and it is the kind of excellent that matters, because a plate or a face you can actually read is the difference between footage and evidence. The radar-based 3D motion detection cuts false alerts convincingly, which is the complaint that drives most people to abandon their doorbell notifications entirely.

Who should still buy it. Someone happy to pay the subscription. That is not a dodge. If you are going to pay anyway, the ongoing cost is priced in and you get one of the best doorbell images available. The score is low because a large group of buyers do not want a subscription, and for them this product is close to useless.

If you are in that group, read Ring doorbells without a subscription before you buy anything, and see the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro page for the rest.

What to take from this

Five products. Scores from 6.5 to 7.6. Not one of them is a product we are steering you away from, and you will not find that instruction anywhere on this page. Our scale reserves it for anything below 6, and none of these are there. Every one of them is a reasonable buy for the right household, and we have said which household that is.

What we have done is name the flaw. Distance drop-off. Interface lag. Sporadic disconnections. Hair tangles. A subscription wall. Each of those rules a product out for a specific group of people, and each of those groups is large enough that a site pretending otherwise would be doing them a disservice.

If you read a review site where nothing scores below 8, you have learned nothing except that the site would like you to click.

Affiliate note. The links above are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We earn that commission on every single product on this page, including the one we gave 6.5, and we scored them the way we did anyway. That is the only thing that makes the number worth reading. How we research and score.