Best Smart Home Devices of 2025

Amazon’s fourth-gen Echo is still impressive more than a year after its initial launch — even if you pay its full $100 price (you can often find it on sale if you keep an eye out). Between its new sphere-like profile, powerful sound output and a few forward-looking features, the Echo is still king of the countertop.

Google’s Nest Audio speaker, which also launched in 2020, is a solid competitor with the Echo. Apple’s recent HomePod Mini plays well in the Apple sandbox but Amazon wins out in two key categories: Its speaker is far more powerful and it features a built-in Zigbee receiver and Amazon Sidewalk Hub that make connecting devices like lightbulbs and locks much more seamless and reliable.

Meanwhile, Alexa and Google Assistant are pretty much at parity right now. While Amazon boasts about more skills and support for more third-party devices for its voice assistant, the numbers for Google Assistant also lands in the tens of thousands, meaning you really don’t miss out on anything significant either way.

Read more: Best Smart Speakers of 2025

Google Assistant does a better job at mimicking natural conversation flow but the difference isn’t really that noticeable in your day-to-day interaction with each speaker. Most of the time you’ll ask a smart speaker for the weather, to set a timer and maybe have it play a song or two. Both devices are good at all of that.

Google has another card to play, which you can read about below.

Google’s Nest Mini smart speaker isn’t as powerful as the new Echo, but it’s a great budget-friendly option for Google users.

The audio quality in the Nest Mini is respectable, given its price and profile. It also has a wall-mounting notch on the underside, if that’s what you’re into. An interesting presence detection method that uses the speaker and microphone to determine your proximity to the Nest Mini helps it trigger LED indicators that help you make better sense of the otherwise obscured physical volume controls.

That’s all fine, but the thing that puts the Nest Mini over the top is the machine-learning chip embedded inside the tiny speaker. With that chip, Google says, the Nest Mini can learn what commands you give to it most often and it will then begin to process those commands locally, rather than on Google’s servers.

Anything that helps to keep control of your smart home inside your home is worthwhile. Letting you continue to issue certain voice commands even if the internet goes out and improved response times are great too. The Nest Mini doesn’t have the audio output jack that allows you to connect Echo Dots to better-quality speakers, it’s still one of our favorite devices — particularly for people who already use Google services such as Gmail and Calendar with any regularity.

Amazon may have introduced the smart display with the Echo Show, but Google refined the concept with the Nest Hub (formerly the Home Hub) in terms of its design and in the way it leverages its voice assistant. Now there’s a second-gen model, released in 2021, with a lower price and more features.

You get the same Google Assistant features in the Nest Hub that you get with the Google Home speaker line, along with a screen interface that gives you just the right amount of visual feedback. It will show you your spoken commands so you know Google heard you correctly, it can deftly walk you through a recipe from popular cooking websites, and it works seamlessly with Google-supported smart home cameras and video doorbells to display their camera feeds onscreen. Google’s Soli is also onboard for Sleep Sensing and Quick Gestures like pausing media with an air tap in front of the display.

Read more: Best Smart Displays of 2025

Google prudently opted out of including a video camera on the Hub itself, getting ahead of some privacy concerns, and likely prompting Amazon to include a manual video shutter on its new, smaller Echo Show 5 display. If you really want a Google-based smart display that allows for video chatting, a few third-party options can make that happen, as well as the larger and more expensive Nest Hub Max. Even without it, the Nest Hub is the best, most affordable marriage of a voice assistant and a display interface on the market.

Wi-Fi is everything — particularly once you start spreading things like smart speakers, smart lights, smart plugs and smart everything else from room to room. After all, those connected doodads won’t do you much good if they can’t, you know, connect.

That’s why a mesh router that’s built to spread a strong, speedy signal throughout your house might make for a particularly smart upgrade — especially if you’re living in a big home. Of the ones we’ve tested, we think the Nest Wifi is the smartest pick. About $95, the two-piece starter kit was able to fill the 5,800-square-foot CNET Smart Home with decent signal strength and it never once dropped our connection as we moved around conducting speed test after speed test. On top of that, the range extender doubles as a smart speaker, so as you spread a reliable connection from room to room you’ll be spreading Google Assistant’s footprint in your home with it.

Read more: Best Wi-Fi Routers in 2025

The Nest Wifi doesn’t support the newest, fastest version of Wi-Fi, called Wi-Fi 6, but you really won’t notice the difference Wi-Fi 6 makes unless you’re already paying for super-fast internet speeds of 500Mbps or more. Our upgrade pick, the Eero Pro 6, is the best choice if you want to serve up that kind of speed. What you will notice with the Nest Wifi is the ease of installation, the simple network controls that sit right alongside your smart home controls in the Google Home app, and advanced Wi-Fi features like device prioritization, WPA3 security and 4×4 MU-MIMO support, which lets the Nest Wifi boost speeds to devices that use multiple Wi-Fi antennas, like the MacBook Pro.

The Nest Wifi is best for Google smart homes, so Alexa users will likely want to stick with the Eero or Netgear Orbi. If you just want solid Wi-Fi that you and your growing number of internet-connected gadgets can rely upon, put the Nest Wifi right at the top of your list.

We often point to smart plugs as the entry point for anyone interested in trying out a connected home device. They’re cheap, they’re simple to install and they perform a function that’s pretty easy to grasp, toggling power on and off remotely.

Read more: Best Smart Plugs of 2025

You can find a lot of smart plugs out there. TP-Link’s Kasa Mini is our favorite. It includes a single outlet that connects to your network via Wi-Fi. The app is well-designed and lets you program the plug to turn on or off on a schedule or even based on your location. It works with Google Assistant and Alexa, and it doesn’t cover up the adjacent outlet on a standard two-outlet wall fixture.