Like many smart home devices, smart thermostats make it easy to automate the management of your residence’s heating and cooling, making you HVAC system work more efficiently. Their ability to automatically adjust the heating and cooling as needed not only ensures your home stays comfortable ’round the clock, it can also help you save on your energy bill, since your home never gets too cold or too hot, no matter the time of year.
The best smart thermostats don’t just maintain temperatures and manage schedules, they also offer a good load of functions from their companion apps. You can, for instance, set an Away mode that overrides any pre-existing schedules when it detects that nobody’s home, so your HVAC doesn’t end up wasting energy heating or cooling an erstwhile empty house. There’s also geofencing, which can activate the heating or cooling when it detects you’re within a certain distance away from the house, as well as air circulation and humidity adjustments, among others. Suffice to say, you can get a lot of convenience from smart thermostats compared to the basic programmable ones of old.
The best smart thermostats work best when they play nice with the rest of your smart home systems. As such, you want to choose one that’s compatible with the other smart devices in your home. The good news is, there’s a lot of cross-compatibility among devices out there, which is only bound to get better with the introduction of the more universal Matter smart home standard. Granted, there’s a prevailing feeling out there that Matter has stalled a bit, but we’re still hopeful.
These are the best smart thermostats to bring efficiency to your home’s heating and cooling systems.
Amazon Smart Thermostat
Pros
- Very affordable
- Does the basics right
- Simple to use
Cons
- No advanced features
- No room sensor support
Compatible with: Amazon Alexa
Let’s be honest: some people just want a cheap and simple way to manage their home temperature. Amazon’s smart thermostat gets you that. There’s not much in terms of functionalities, but it gets the basics right and, for some folks, that’s all they really care about.
First things first, it’s designed to work with Alexa’s ecosystem and nothing else. There’s also no dedicated app, requiring you to control the device either from the device itself or through voice commands using an Alexa-compatible device (including your phone with the Alexa app). You can set the device to run on a timed schedule, with basic home, away, and sleep detection, so it will still optimize your energy consumption in a pretty efficient manner. It does come with a learning feature called Amazon Hunches, where it uses Amazon devices (e.g. Echo and Ring) to track your habits, readings from which it will use to deduce your habits and suggest customized settings.
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Sensi Lite
Pros
- Very affordable
- Basic smart features
- Well-designed app
Cons
- No advanced features
- No room sensor support
Compatible with: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
This smart thermostat is almost as affordable as Amazon’s offering, while coming with a slightly different yet similarly basic feature set that, to be honest, we like much better. For instance, it has wider support, being compatible with Amazon, Google, and Samsung’s smart home platforms. It also has a companion app, which gives you an easy to way to set your thermostat remotely, where you can set different heating and cooling schedules, any of which you can assign to activate any day of the week. The app offers a few more basic items, such as activating early starts, geofencing, and detailed usage tracking. Having an app is just so much more convenient compared to having to do everything on-device or via voice commands. This is also one of the rare smart thermostats that doesn’t require a C wire connection in most cases (it uses AAA batteries instead), making it easier to install.
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Mysa Smart Thermostat
Pros
- Supports less common heating and cooling systems
- Groups multiple thermostats for easy management
- Good feature set
Cons
- Might require purchase of multiple thermostats
- No room sensor support
Compatible with: Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home
If you have an older heating and cooling system such as baseboards and in-walls, this is the smart thermostat you’ll probably want to get, as it’s specifically designed to work with those less common setups. It’s also well-equipped, being compatible with Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Home, while getting a good selection of mostly basic smart features. You can schedule and automate your heating and cooling, with the app allowing for detailed settings, complete with support for grouping multiple thermostats that you can group into heating zones and manage as one system. Why would you need multiple thermostats? That’s because many baseboard systems are designed as independent units for every room, which will require to buy a separate thermostat for each one.
It uses geolocation to detect home presence, much like any smart thermostat, while coming with extras like geofencing, early activation, vacation modes, and energy-saving assistance. You can also share your account if you want to give others access to the thermostat, which is very useful. We also love the in-depth energy reports from the app, which can really help you figure out how to best optimize your energy use.
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Sensi Touch 2
Pros
- Large touchscreen makes on-device adjustments easy
- Easy to use scheduling system
- Remote sensor support
Cons
- No exact temperature setting for Away mode
- No advanced features
Compatible with: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
We love this smart thermostat’s larger 4.3-inch color touchscreen, which allows it to show a bit more information than your typical compact panel, making it easier to control directly from the device. It’s also the first thermostat in the list that supports room sensors (up to 15 of them), allowing it to carry out whole room monitoring. As with others, it lets you set schedules for different days of the week and have it manage your home temperature for the most efficient use of energy. All the usual smart features are onboard, too, from tracking your presence (or absence) at home and geofencing to early starts and more. It doesn’t let you set an “away” temperature, by the way, instead simply setting it three degrees out when it detects your absence. It should be fine for many folks, but we do prefer being able to set specific temperatures in those cases.
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ecoBee Smart Thermostat Premium with Smart Sensor
Pros
- Wide smart home platform support
- Uses humidity measurements for better temperature management
- Smart learning AI
- Room sensor included
Cons
- Expensive
- Some features need a subscription
Compatible with: Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
This smart thermostat doesn’t just monitor temperature, it also keeps tabs on humidity readings, allowing it to do a more precise job when adjusting the temperature in the house. Do note, this only happens when you use the Eco+ mode, which we particularly loved with this thing. It gets all the usual basic features, so you can set schedules, specify temperatures to set when you’re away, geofencing, and so on. However, it also has a Schedule Assistant that learns your behavior over time, then suggests potentially better schedules that could net better energy efficiency results. It also keeps tabs on how long it takes your HVAC system to heat and cool your home, which it can use to set its own “early start” point (you have to enable Smart Recovery modes for this). Suffice to say, this thing is very smart.
We love the fact that it comes with one remote sensor that it can use to detect the temperature in a different room, as well as detect the presence of people inside. You can also pair it with additional sensors if you’d like to keep tabs on different areas of the house, which should help the thermostat work even more effectively. Other features include a smart Bluetooth speaker with either Siri or Alexa onboard, Spotify Connect, an air quality monitor, smoke alarm detection, and real-time weather monitoring.
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Google Nest Learning Thermostat (4th Gen)
Pros
- Beautiful design with large display
- Rich set of smart features
- Smart scheduling adjustments
- Room sensor included
Cons
- Expensive
Compatible with: Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Matter
This year, Google finally upgraded their top-shelf smart thermostat, bringing Matter compatibility, along with a few other tricks, along with it. For instance, it offers an entirely different app experience, since you need to use the Google Home app instead of the Nest app. Truth be told, we liked the Nest app better, since it’s more focused and narrowed down, but the new app experience is fine, too, once you get the hang of things. It’s especially handy when you want to coordinate how your smart home works. Lastly, it requires no C-wire, which many folks will probably appreciate.
This smart thermostat has all the usual features, such as detailed scheduling, geolocation, geofencing, away mode, and more. The learning AI seems to be pretty impressive, doing a good job of anticipating any changes that will make the house feel more comfortable in the short time we’ve had with it. As such, we can only imagine it getting better with longer use. It also comes with a remote sensor for monitoring a different area of the house, giving it access to more complete information.
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