Independent reviews of 20 smart home products, with links to the Amazon store for your region.
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The strongest all-round performer for pet hair on hard floors and low to medium carpet, with an obsessively complete dock. If most of your floors are thick, high-pile carpet, look elsewhere: that is the one surface where reviewers find it least convincing.
Typical price £1100–£1400
The most reliable way to start smart lighting, and the layer that survives you changing your mind about ecosystems. It works with Alexa, Google and HomeKit alike, so your lighting is not locked to whichever hub you bought this year.
Typical price £130–£170
The strongest smart thermostat for a North American heating system, and the one to buy if you want room sensors done properly. It is a 24VAC device for forced-air, heat pump and low-voltage boiler setups, so it is the right answer in the US and Canada and the wrong answer almost everywhere else.
The best no-subscription doorbell for most homes. The second, downward-facing camera catches parcels on the step that single-lens doorbells miss entirely, and the footage stays on the device rather than on a company's servers.
The best-value flagship for pet hair, and the one we recommend to most people. You are trading a polished app and a tidy dock for a machine that cleans like something twice the price, and for most households that is the right trade.
Typical price £360–£600
Still the easiest streaming stick to live with, and the one to pick if you are not already deep in Amazon's ecosystem or you want Dolby Vision without paying for a full set-top box. Buy it for the app-first interface and the neutrality, but go in knowing Roku is monetising the home screen harder every year.
The best all-round Wi-Fi 7 mesh for most large homes, and the one we would buy. It gets you most of the Orbi's real-world performance for a great deal less money. Check where you intend to put the nodes, because they have audible fans.
Typical price £749.99
The best-value route into room-by-room heating control if you have a combi boiler and no interest in a monthly fee. Buy it for the zoning and the OpenTherm modulation, not for a slick app.
Typical price £130–£170
The default cheap smart plug for Alexa and Google homes, and the one to pick if you want a rough answer to what an appliance costs to run. Treat the energy figures as indicative, not metering. If you are on Apple Home, or you want Matter, buy the P110M instead.
If you already have a Thread border router, this is the plug to buy and the trade-offs are mostly about money. If you do not, buy the hub first or buy a different plug, because the Matter version has no Bluetooth fallback and will not run without one.
The cheapest sensible way into Google Home, and a good bedside or kitchen display. Sleep Sensing is still free, whatever you may have read. Just do not count on radar tracking you accurately if you share the bed.
Typical price £70–£100
The best streaming box, and the wrong Apple TV for most Matter and Thread households. If you want an Apple TV to act as a Thread border router, pay the extra and get the 128GB Wi-Fi + Ethernet version, which is the model with the Thread radio. Buy this 64GB one if you want the fastest, cleanest, ad-free streaming experience on your TV and you are happy for its smart-home role to be a Home hub over Wi-Fi.
Typical price £199
The best video quality you can get on a battery doorbell, and the right choice inside the Ring and Alexa ecosystem. Understand that the subscription is not optional if you want recordings, and that it is a permanent cost for as long as you own it.
Typical price £179.99
The best-engineered smart thermostat for a European boiler, and the one to pick if you want Matter and OpenTherm rather than another proprietary cloud. Price the subscription in before you buy, because the money-saving features are behind it.
Typical price £120–£160
Buy it for the app catalogue, the speed and the format support, and go in knowing you are renting screen space to Amazon in return. If ads on a device you paid for will irritate you every single evening, that is a real cost and you should buy a Roku or an Apple TV instead. If you are already deep in Prime, the interface is arguing for content you were probably going to watch anyway, and the annoyance is much smaller.
Superb value if you want strong vacuuming and class-leading edge mopping, and it is the one machine here we would steer pet owners away from. Reviewers consistently report hair tangling around the brush, which is precisely the failure mode a shedding household cannot tolerate.
Typical price £290–£480
Genuinely the coverage king, and genuinely hard to justify. If your home is large enough or awkward enough that the Deco BE85 cannot cover it, this will. If it can, buy the Deco and keep the difference, which is substantial.
Typical price £1700–£2400
A dedicated wall panel for a serious Alexa smart home, and only for that. If you have a lot of devices and want a glanceable dashboard instead of a phone, it delivers. If you have a few bulbs, buy an Echo Show and save the money.
Typical price £110–£180
Buy it only if you are certain your home will stay Alexa-only. In that one case the setup really is trivial and it does the job. Everyone else is better served by a Kasa, Tapo or Meross plug that costs the same or less, works with every major platform, and actually reports how much power the thing is drawing.
Buy it for the effortless app and the built-in smart-home hub, not for raw performance. Reviewers report it fading at distance, which is an awkward flaw in a system aimed at large homes, and most of them think the cheaper eero Pro 7 makes more sense.