Independent reviews of 28 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.
Buy this if radon is a real concern where you live, or you are moving into a home and want to know before you commit. For that job it has almost no rival at this level. If you do not care about radon, a cheaper multi-sensor monitor covers the rest of what it does for a lot less. Two honest catches. The price is high for something that only measures and never cleans the air. And the headline sensor, radon, needs two to three weeks of data before the number is trustworthy, so patience is part of the purchase. Taken for what it is, a careful long-term watch on your indoor air, it is excellent.
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
Buy this if you want to clean the air in a large room and you value smart control and strong particle removal. It is a lot of purifier for the money. The hidden cost is the filter. Plan on replacing it every 6 to 12 months, sooner if you have pets or a smoker in the house, and each one is a genuine Levoit part you keep buying for the life of the unit. The bonded filter is the honest trade-off for the compact cylindrical shape, and it means the odd unnecessary carbon swap. If you mostly run it flat out, the noise at maximum speed will bother you, so size the purifier to the room instead of pushing a small unit hard.
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
A reliable, no-nonsense timed feeder for dry food, and the missing app is a deliberate design choice that works in its favour. You set the schedule on the unit with buttons and a screen, so there is no Wi-Fi to drop, no app account to manage and nothing to break when a firmware update lands. The trade-off is honest. You cannot check on a missed meal or dispense a portion from your phone while you are out, so if remote check-in is what you want, this is the wrong feeder. Battery backup is the feature that earns its keep. A feeder that dies in a power cut means the pet does not eat, and this one keeps its schedule on D batteries when the mains goes. Feed it kibble at the smaller end and it dispenses cleanly. Feed it large or awkwardly shaped pieces and it can jam. Within those limits, most owners get exactly what they came for.
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
Buy this for a bedroom, a nursery or a small office, where its quiet running and genuine auto mode matter most. Ask it to clean a living room and it will run flat out and still struggle, so match it to the room. The hidden cost is the filter, the same as on every Levoit. Plan on a replacement every 6 to 8 months or so, sooner with pets or smoke, and each one is a genuine Levoit part. Because the carbon and HEPA are a single bonded unit, you sometimes bin a HEPA layer that still had life in it. Within a small room and with that running cost understood, it is very easy to live with.
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.
A good smart fountain for owners who will actually keep up with it. Cats tend to prefer it to a bowl once they adjust, the water stays clear thanks to the filter and the UV-C light, and the app notifications earn their place because this fountain does need looking after. Plan for the upkeep before you buy. The plates, bowl and filter want a rinse every few days and a proper wash weekly, or the pump starts to hum and the sensor throws false empty alerts. Budget for a new filter roughly every 30 days, and know that a fair number of owners see the pump fail near the one-year mark, though replacements are sold separately. If you want the smart water-quality features and don't mind the routine, it is a solid pick. If you want something you can ignore for weeks, look elsewhere.
Typical price £53–£75
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
A capable treat-tossing camera that plenty of owners are happy with, as long as you buy it knowing what the free version does. Watching live, talking to your dog, panning the camera by hand and tossing a treat all work without paying anything. The AI features Furbo is marketed on, activity and barking analysis, person detection and video history, need the Furbo Nanny plan at a recurring monthly fee. As a no-subscription camera it is a good 1080p pet cam that can throw kibble, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. The thing to understand before buying is how much of the sales pitch you only get once you start paying.
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
For the right owner this is reassuring kit, and reviewers back that up. If you have a dog that bolts, a large or rural property, or a real fear of a runaway, the near real-time location and the escape alerts do the job well. The catch is the business model itself. Tractive is useless without a paid plan, and that plan never ends. The fee does cover the SIM and the mobile data with no extra charges from a carrier, so what you pay Tractive is what it costs. Weigh that ongoing cost honestly against how often you would actually use it. Two practical limits matter too. The tracker only reports where there is cellular coverage, so it can fall silent in the exact remote spots where a lost dog is hardest to find. And leaving live tracking on drains the battery from days down to hours, so it is a tool to switch on when your dog is missing, not to run around the clock. It also suits medium and larger dogs better than very small ones. Buy it as an insurance policy you are willing to keep paying for, and it earns its place.
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 this if you already live in an Alexa home and just want a sense of whether your air is clean, without spending much. The missing screen is the defining trade-off. You cannot glance at a wall display, so the numbers stay hidden until you open the app or ask an Echo. It works best as a trigger, kicking off a routine that switches on a purifier when PM2.5 climbs, and less well as an instrument you read off directly. Do not lean on its carbon monoxide reading for safety, because it is not a certified CO alarm. If you want CO2 or a display you can see across the room, spend more and look elsewhere.
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.