Best Smart Home Hub
The smart home hub is the brains behind your automated devices. It connects and controls them, and lets you manage them from a single app on your phone or tablet. While some hubs are better than others at these tasks, choosing the right one for your household depends on your current and future plans for your automated home. Consider the types of devices you’ll want to control and what kinds of connectivity they use. Most modern devices work on Wi-Fi, but you can also find smart products that connect over other technologies like Bluetooth, Z-Wave, and Thread. These mesh networking technologies offer a wireless connection that can’t interfere with your home Wi-Fi network and requires less energy from the devices you connect to it.
Some smart home products, such as a smart doorbell or smoke detector, come with their own standalone app that can be used to control them without a separate hub. For other devices, such as a smart thermostat or home security camera, you’ll need a hub that can communicate with them over the internet or another type of connection. Smart hubs can also help you integrate those different systems, but it’s important to choose one that supports the protocol used by the devices you own or plan to buy.
If you’re looking for a smart home hub that does the most for your money, we recommend the Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen). This voice-activated hub works with Alexa and supports a wide variety of connected smart devices from brands including Honeywell, Ecobee, GE, Philips Hue, and Ring. The Dot’s Ethernet port allows you to plug it directly into your router, which can improve stability and reduce signal dead spots in your home.
What is the Best Smart Home Hub?
For more advanced automations, we’ve also seen great results with Samsung’s SmartThings Hub 2. We found the user interface a bit cluttered and complicated at first, but once you get to know the system it’s easier to navigate. We love the ability to create more granular schedules and routines using SmartThings’ built-in tools and third-party apps, and the fact that the Hub 2 can send commands over your existing home Wi-Fi (as well as through an Ethernet connection) makes it more versatile than its competitors.
The runner-up in our best smart home hubs roundup is the Wink Hub 2, which is a little more expensive than the Dot but has the benefit of supporting multiple protocols and an easy-to-use online automation tool called If This Then That. This feature lets you create simple automations with a few clicks and can help cut down on the number of hubs you need to run your automated home. In our tests, the Hub 2 was reliable and easy to use but didn’t quite match the flexibility of Apple HomeKit.
A freelance science, technology, and lifestyle editor with more than a decade of experience testing consumer gadgets, Victoria Woollaston is a longtime contributor to our smart home tech category. She has firsthand experience with all of the smart hubs in this guide and has a smart home with a smart thermostat, smart lights, and multiple smart outlets, as well as a smart video doorbell and a smart security camera.