Our Picks
What is the best smart thermostat?
According to a recent CNET survey, 78% of US adults are stressed about high energy bills -- and with warmer weather around the corner, it’s only going to get tougher. A smart thermostat can help reduce utility costs and make it easier to manage your home's climate. These intelligent devices learn your temperature preferences over time and adjust automatically, which can help cut down on energy use. According to Energy Star, a smart thermostat can save you an average of $50 a year.
The best smart thermostat will let you control your comfort and energy usage better, without costing too much. But with all the options on the market, choosing from the many available options can be overwhelming. After years of testing various models, CNET's experts have picked the Amazon Smart Thermostat as the best overall smart thermostat, thanks to its features and affordability. At just $80, it delivers premium features typically found in much pricier models while seamlessly integrating with Alexa for a coherent smart home experience.
But its competition isn't far behind, especially if you're willing to spend a little more. Here are the best smart thermostats in 2025.
Best smart thermostats of 2025
- Alexa voice integration
- Learns your behavior
- Great price
- No touchscreen
- No HomeKit or Google Home
Most of the features of a high-end smart thermostat at a fraction of the price. The Amazon Smart Thermostat stands out among its peers in the sub-$100 category by having far better technology, including the ability to sense if you’re home and Alexa’s “hunches” to see if a setting will work while saving you energy. It doesn’t have quite the advanced features of a $200 thermostat and its display is fairly basic, but are those worth $120 or more? Another thing I liked: It shows information about your energy and HVAC usage, with explanations about what it all means -- a smart thermostat that makes the user smarter.
One of the selling points of a smart thermostat is that it can save you money, so we can’t say money is no object. But if money were no object, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium would eclipse the competition. It offers the most advanced features, from sensors that track indoor air quality, the ability to show a four-day forecast on the thermostat itself, a virtual assistant that helps with scheduling and an included external room sensor to help keep your whole home comfortable. Plus it doubles as a Bluetooth speaker, which is by no means a necessity for a thermostat but is cool nonetheless.
The newest version of the Nest Learning Thermostat brings the best high-tech smart technology to an attractive device that works even if your home doesn't have a C-wire. The new model builds on its predecessor's attractive design by adding a sensor that can tell how far you are from the thermostat and change the information on the faceplate accordingly. It also comes with an included external room sensor, encouraging you from the start to keep track of the comfort level in more than just one room of your home.
The Sensi Touch 2 is an excellent choice if you’re the kind of person who interacts with the physical thermostat a lot. The app is good and the thermostat is compatible with Alexa and Google Home, but the display on this one really shines. It’s simple, intuitive and clear and allows you to make changes easily. Some other thermostats require you to know what the particular icon means, which can add to the learning curve, but this one is easy and straightforward. Plus the temperature setting is prominently displayed and you can set a range of temperatures very easily with the tap of a finger.
- Easy to install
- Simple app
- Useful features like geofencing
- $200 is a reasonable price, but the value could be better
The Honeywell Home T9 is like a smart thermostat with the soul of a traditional thermostat. You don’t have to open the app to install it and get it running, and the instructions are excellent. The device’s interface is clean and easy to understand, as is the app. It also comes with an external room sensor, and you can set the temperature to target a specific room or to even out the temperature throughout the house.
Factors to consider when choosing a smart thermostat
When you’re shopping for a traditional standard thermostat, there isn’t much to consider. What does it look like? Can you program it? Does it have that cool old-fashioned dial?
When shopping for a smart thermostat, there are a lot more options and some things one person may love while the next person may hate. Here’s what we think is important to consider.
Smart home integration
Smart thermostats all come with some kind of app or option to control the device from your phone. If you have a particular affinity for one smart home family or another, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting a thermostat that will work in conjunction with your other devices. Most smart thermostats will take voice commands from Amazon’s Alexa, but if the rest of your home is running on, say, Apple’s HomeKit, not every device will provide support.
Make sure you’re getting something that will play nice with the rest of your smart home.
Geofencing
For the most part, your thermostat’s job is to keep your home comfortable for you. That means you don’t necessarily need it to be the perfect temperature when you aren’t home. Many smart thermostats feature geofencing, meaning they can track whether or not you’re home and set their expectations accordingly.
Some devices track occupancy based on the phones of those in the household, while others combine that feature with other occupancy sensors. The good thing is that you can set limits around this feature: Do you want it to change the temperature when you’re away? How far away do you have to be for it to kick in? What temperature limits should there be if you aren’t home? The latter is important if you have pets. You don’t want the cats sweltering or freezing while you’re at work.
How smart do you want your thermostat to be?
Everyone wants a different level of control over their thermostat. Some people want to decide at every moment what the temperature should be. (In that case, you can also consider a basic Wi-Fi-enabled programmable thermostat like the Honeywell Home RTH6580WF, which doesn’t have as many smart features as its more expensive peers but can be adjusted from your phone.)
Some smart thermostats can be too smart for their own good. One of the most common complaints I’ve heard is that some products will hold the temperature you set them to only for a little bit, and then they’ll revert to what the thermostat believes the temperature should be. If that would annoy you, focus on the ones that offer you the most control like the Honeywell Home T9 Smart Thermostat.
Installation
Not all thermostats are installed exactly the same way, but they’re all pretty similar. Expect to need a screwdriver, a pair of pliers capable of moving wires around and potentially a drill and a level. Installation is pretty simple once you’ve done it once or twice: Turn off the power, mark the wires, take off the old one, wire the new one, and put the thermostat up. There is one potential complication you’ll want to watch out for: Does your system have a C-wire?
There are usually five or so wires that come out of your wall to connect a thermostat. The older wires tend to carry just enough electricity to power an old-school thermostat. Smarter devices, which can tell you the weather or maybe play your playlist and need an internet connection, need more power than that. This is achieved through a C-wire, designed to carry more electricity to the thermostat. Not every home is wired with one, but if you don’t have one, you have a couple of choices.
The first is to get a thermostat that doesn’t require a C-wire. This is where the Nest thermostats are set apart because they’re capable of charging their batteries off the other wires. Although some customer reviews report short-cycling and other issues, so keep an eye on it.
The second option is to install an adapter kit. This involves adding a device to your HVAC system that converts one of the existing wires into a C-wire. Fortunately, most of the smart thermostats we’ve looked at that require a C-wire come with these kits. If not, you can pick one up for something like $26.
External sensors
Your thermostat knows what the temperature is because it has a thermometer inside of it. The device’s understanding of the temperature inside is usually limited to the temperature exactly where you mounted it to the wall. What about that stuffy bedroom?
Many smart thermostats come with or are at least able to connect to separate room sensors. These room sensors allow you to train the thermostat to keep your house as comfortable as possible throughout the home. With external sensors, thermostats can target an individual room and get it to a comfortable temperature at a certain time (the bedroom at night, the home office during the day, etc.) or find a setting that makes everywhere as comfortable as possible, not just the room with the thermostat in it. Some even have proximity sensors in their room sensors, meaning they can tell when a room is occupied or not.
How we test smart thermostats
Most of the home energy products we test and evaluate here at CNET have a lot of numbers attached to them: the efficiency of solar panels and the power output of batteries. Not so with smart thermostats. All of these thermostats can perform the basic functions of turning your heater on when it’s cold and your AC on when it’s hot. Some of our scoring is based on tangible, mathematical data, but it’s mostly about the myriad ways you can interact with the thermostat to get the comfort level and energy savings you want.
We’ve experimented, tested and handled each of the thermostats mentioned on this list, including installing them on a testing rig that simulates a standard HVAC system, programming them and trying their various features.
We used this rig, built by our CNET Labs engineers, to hook up a variety of thermostats to test their interfaces and apps.
The 10-point scores we give smart thermostats are based on these metrics:
- 20% is based on the available smart home connectivity and other features, including geofencing and external room sensors.
- 20% is the price, with a formula that rewards less expensive products. Our methodology takes into account the price of any included room sensors.
- 60% is completely subjective, based on our assessment of what the device offers, how easy it is to install, how easy the app or interface is to use and what features it has that might be non-standard for thermostats but helpful or useful for consumers.
Choosing a thermostat is an incredibly subjective and personal choice, and our goal in scoring is to highlight those products that do the most and do them well. Your buying decision should focus on your priorities, which might not align exactly with ours, so be sure to look at more than just a score when choosing a device you will probably interact with almost every day.
Other smart thermostats we've tested
Commercial Electric Smart Thermostat: Despite the name, this new offering from The Home Depot is in fact a residential thermostat built to operate with the company’s Hubspace smart home platform, although it’ll work with Alexa and Google Home. It’s a fairly straightforward system that allows significant control but lacks truly smart features. My favorite feature is being able to set a schedule based on sunrise or sunset.
Cync Smart Thermostat: This thermostat from GE Lighting, now owned by Savant which offers other home energy products such as solar batteries, offers good smart home interactions and the ability to buy an external sensor, but it lacked some of the more advanced features offered by other thermostats, while still costing more than the Amazon model.
Nest Thermostat: The Nest Thermostat was a compelling choice at a mid-level price range ($130), but a few things held it back. For one, it lacks the intuitive interface and features of its smarter big sibling (the Nest Learning Thermostat), and it wants to use the Google Home app instead of the more intuitive and feature-rich Nest app used by the Learning model. The installation prompts send you straight into scheduling, so prepare yourself for that.