Welcome to the second year of PCMag's survey on what readers think of their smart home devices. After all, the smallest apartment or the grandest mansion can be an automation marvel with the right equipment. Want to deck out your crib with smart lights, smart thermostats, smart plugs, robot vacuums, and smart displays with virtual assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant to help you control it all? The first decision is which brand ecosystem to choose, and we're here to help you figure that out.
Smart Lighting 2020
If you're just looking to dip a toe into the smart home realm, the best place to start is with a smart bulb or two. You can put them on a schedule, have them follow scripts (say, using IFTTT to make a light turn blue when rain is arriving), change their color, and a lot more. Last year, we gave a shared award in this category to a couple of big names, Philips Hue and TP-Link's Kasa Smart. Of the three bulb makers in our survey results last year, they tied for first at 8.5 out of 10. But in 2020, things are different: Kasa Smart kept the same score, but Philips Hue fell to 8.4 (tied with Leviton). And both are behind the new king of the well-lit hill, Wyze, which earned an 8.6 for overall satisfaction.
You know Wyze for having incredibly low-priced yet high-quality home surveillance cameras. Last year, it came out with the very inexpensive Wyze Bulb, now selling for $7.99. This might be the cheapest smart LED in existence, which goes a long way toward making reviewers and customers happy—PCMag's obviously are, as the Bulb earned a PCMag Editors' Choice. The Wyze Bulb's value score is 9.0, the highest number across ever measured in our lighting survey. There weren't that many Wyze users, though, so it didn't get scores for extras like color choice—which is fine, because the current Wyze Bulb doesn't do colors, beyond adjusting white color temperature.
No other bulb maker this year beat Wyze on any measure, but if you do want colors in your bulbs, you'll want to consider Kasa Smart and Philips Hue. Their standout scores include Philips' 8.8 for reliability (tied with Wyze), and 8.7 for color choice—far and away the top score for colors, where even Kasa could manage only 6.9. But Kasa gets top marks for voice controls (higher than devices such as the Amazon Echo or Google Nest Hub smart speaker) with a 8.6.
For more, read The Best Smart Light Bulbs of 2020.
Smart Thermostats 2020
Another upstart takes over a smart home category in the survey this year. Last time, Ecobee stood out against the competition from Honeywell and Google Nest and took the seal of choice with a 9.1 satisfaction rating. This year, however, Ecobee dropped to a (still stellar) 9.0 and was outshone by another: Emerson.
Emerson's Sensi brand thermostats have low prices and in some places are even provided to customers by utility companies. That accounts for the value score it got: 9.1. Emerson also crushed it with a 9.2 for ease of use, 8.8 for setup, and 8.4 for energy savings.
While it didn't win this year, Ecobee is the competition that was just barely beaten. It has higher scores than Emerson for reliability (9.2), automatic temperature (9.1), and scheduling (9.0), and for its mobile app (9.1). You won't regret getting an Ecobee, except you'll pay a little more. Even then, Ecobee's value rating is much higher than Google Nest's. The two leaders are tied for the likelihood to be recommended (9.0), but Ecobee edged slightly ahead of Emerson on the Net Promoter Score that we determine using the same recommendation question.
Google Nest and Honeywell round out the smart thermostat choices, as they did last year. But Google Nest managed to keep the same overall score of 8.7, while Honeywell fell from 8.8 down to 8.5, slipping to fourth place.
For more, read The Best Smart Thermostats of 2020.
Smart Plugs/Power 2020
This survey has had a lot of changes in the winners from the previous year so far, but that stops now. The Readers' Choice winner for smart plugs and power strips and the like remains Kasa Smart from TP-Link. It offers Wi-Fi outlets, smart plugs, and more.
It may not all be amazing news, however, since the overall satisfaction readers have with Kasa Smart fell from 9.0 to 8.8. That score is still high, but the competition for the satisfaction score is a lot tighter than in 2019. Both Smart Life and GE have an 8.7.
Kasa Smart's power/plugs have the top score for reliability (8.9, tied with GE), ease of use (8.9), likelihood to be recommended (8.7), energy reporting (8.2), and an 8.9 for both voice controls and quality of their mobile app.
Where Kasa doesn't come out on top is value. That goes to Smart Life (8.9), tech support goes to Amazon (7.9), and it has a tied setup rating of 8.5 with two other companies, GE and Amazon.
The lowest-scoring vendor in the category is almost always Belkin's Wemo brand.
For more, read The Best Smart Plugs and Power Strips of 2020.
Smart Displays 2020
We rated smart speakers and their integrated virtual assistants most recently in our 2019 survey on headphones and speakers. Google came out on top for that one. That's not going to change when you graft a screen on to the speaker, at least not this year. Smart displays—those devices that are essentially a smart speaker with an LCD—are a great way to take control of your smart home, and the Google Nest brand is the one readers like best.
Google Nest is the new logo/look for anything and everything Google has for smart homes, but here, we're talking about the Google Nest Hub and Google Nest Hub Max, the smart displays you can use to interact with Google Assistant. Readers gave the brand an 8.6 for overall satisfaction, compared with Amazon's Echo Show line of smart displays, which got an 8.3. While there are companies making smart displays that comprise Google Assistant or Alexa, none of them were in use with enough PCMag readers to make the cut. This is a head-to-head-fight between the two big-name companies.
That said, it's not much of a fight. Google Nest comes out ahead of Amazon on all but one criteria we asked people to rate. And we ask about a lot. Not only the usual stuff, such as value and ease of use, but also smart-display-specific items such as the quality of the screen and sound, how well the virtual assistant does finding facts and info, how it does streaming media, and key to this survey, how well it controls a smart home.
The only item where Amazon won is under communications—using the smart display like a speaker phone—with an 8.3 (Google Nest got an 8.2). Google rules in every other spot, with standout scores like a 9.2 for timers, alarms, and reminders; 9.1 for setup, 9.0 for reliability, and 8.9 for screen quality. Maybe most telling, people like the Google Assistant, rating it an 8.5 compared to Alexa's 8.2. And video streaming, a must on a smart display, gets an 8.8 on Google Nest—probably because it's great for YouTube, whereas an Amazon Echo Show's video streaming got an 8.2.
For more, read The Best Smart Displays of 2020.
Robot Vacuums and Mops 2020
Last year, we got enough responses for only one vendor (iRobot), so we didn't hand out an award. This time, we got two brands with the requisite number—enough to at least do some comparing. Sadly, they don't appear to be part of a product category that people are very fond of. Apparently, the PCMag audience is fine with running traditional dust suckers themselves. Probably because even the most independent robot cleaner is going to need some attention occasionally.
That said, if you're ready for a circular robot maid to get the floor cleaned, iRobot—our winner with an overall score of 7.9 out of 10—is the brand you want.
iRobot's numbers are typically ahead of its lone competitor (Ecovacs) in this head-to-head, in particular in our most important measures of overall satisfaction and the likelihood to be recommended. That 7.9 overall score is up from the 7.6 iRobot would have had last year, if it hadn't been the only vendor. This year, its best numbers come from simple setup (8.5), ease of use (8.4), and the quality of the mobile app (8.3).
There are a couple of key areas where Ecovacs, makers of the Deebot brand of vacuums, comes out ahead. One is value—hard to beat the Ecovacs 8.1, probably because it has some sub-$200 vacuums in its roster. iRobot's value score was 7.2—and that's well down from the great 8.4 it had for value last year, when this wasn't even a contest. The second is almost a tie: For actual cleaning, Ecovacs is slightly ahead with an 8.0 to iRobot's 7.9. Something to consider, if cleanliness is your key criteria.
It's interesting to note that when we asked questions in this survey, we phrased them for "vacuums and mops," but the response shows that robot mops are barely used. Only 2 percent of the qualifying answers admitted they had a mop-only robot. There were a few more (6 percent) with combo mop/vac devices, but overall, no one wants robots dumping water on the floor.
For more, read The Best Robot Vacuums of 2020 and The Best Robot Mops of 2020.
Full Results
The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Smart Home Devices was in the field from July 13, 2020, to August 2, 2020. For more information on how our surveys are conducted, read the survey methodology. Wondering about smart locks? This year, we'll be asking about them in a future survey on smart home surveillance cameras and security systems.
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Further Reading
- Exclusive: August Smart Lock Flaw Opens Your Wi-Fi Network to Hackers
- Google Buys Stake in ADT to Help It Sell More Nest Devices
- PCMag.com Readers' Choice/ Business Choice Survey: Sweepstakes Rules
- Alexa-Jamming Device Stops Amazon Smart Speakers From Listening
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