Commercial Electric Smart Thermostat: Despite the name, this new offering from The Home Depot is 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 setting a schedule based on sunrise or sunset.

Cync Smart Thermostat: This thermostat from GE Lighting, now owned by Savant that offers other home energy products such assolar 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 ($205), 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 for that. 

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 fromAmazon’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. 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 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 theHoneywell 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.

Installation and HVAC compatibility

Read my full guide on smart thermostat installation guide here.

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.

You’ll want to watch out for two potential complications: First, 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. 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 smart thermostats we’ve looked at that require a C-wire come with these kits. If not,you can pick one up for under $25.

The second installation complication is seeing if your thermostat requires any high-voltage wires. This is most common for thermostats that power older electric furnaces or electric baseboard heaters. Today's smart thermostats can support high voltage wiring or those heating devices until you upgrade your system. High-voltage wires are usually labeled and support current at 120 volts or more.

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 acomfortable 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.

Most of the home energy products we test and evaluate here at CNET have a lot of numbers attached to them: theefficiency of solar panels and thepower 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.  

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 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.

Because smart thermostats use a variety of sensors to monitor your activity, you may have privacy concerns. Idig deep into thermostat privacy in this guide, but the bottom line is that there isn'ttoo much to worry about. Smart thermostats can't "watch" you or record video of your home, only get a broad sense of when people are moving around and when a house is still. Companies typically log data on how the thermostat and app are used, like when the thermostat begins an automatic temperature change and when it's manually altered.

Thermostat brands use that info for product analysis as well as marketing efforts. Within limitations, they may give it to third parties if you consent. Remember, if you use a voice assistant, it's probably recording your temperature commands for later analysis unless you have voice assistant settings to turn that option off.

Winter 2026: Honeywell Home has a new thermostat available now and it looks like their best model by far. Not only does it possess a new 5-inch touchscreen that show times, dates or indoor air quality, but it can also integrate with certain video doorbells, notably those from Ring. That means you can use the thermostat to see and speak out of your doorbell when you're nowhere near the entryway, giving it a quick spot on my list.

Entry-level smart thermostats are now more affordable. There's a great focus on improving AI capabilities, and most modern options can learn user preferences over time and adjust settings automatically based on that. Connectivity features also are improving, allowing you to manage your entire system remotely using voice assistants or apps.

Some latest smart thermostats go beyond temperature monitoring. These options include motion sensors, air quality monitors and can even detect water leaks.