Best Smart Displays of 2025

The latest version of the Nest Hub with Google services arrived in 2021, and it's a great entry point for the category. It's the smartest and best overall, making the low price even more appealing. 

Thanks to the built-in Google Assistant, the Nest Hub responds to all of the same voice command options as the Google Home Mini smart speaker. The Google smart display touchscreen is a little small at seven inches, but the adaptive brightness makes pictures look particularly great. Google will even customize a slideshow of family pics as your screensaver.

You can also control your smart home devices, like your smart doorbell, with an intuitively designed control panel. Unlike most of the other smart displays (and unlike its big brother, the Nest Hub Max), the Nest Hub doesn't have a camera, but that might be a bonus if you have privacy concerns and want to put it on your bedside table.

The second-generation smart home hub model includes Sleep Sensing and Quick Gestures thanks to Google's Soli mini radar. The colorful fabric design on this Google Assistant smart display allows the device to blend in anywhere, although the tablet touchscreen comes in handy if you want step-by-step help through a recipe in the kitchen.

For a long time, the Nest Hub occupied pride of place on this list, thanks to its photo display aesthetic, pleasant user interface and more naturalistic voice assistant. It lacks the built-in camera for easy video calls found on the Echo Show 8. Add that to Amazon Alexa's growing smarts, and the Show 8 has been upgraded to share the "best display" honor with the Nest Hub. Both are great smart displays.

With the Show 8, Alexa will respond to your voice control and voice commands, plus you can use the tablet screen to play games, browse recipes, watch movies and Prime Video trailers, control your smart home and more. The 8-inch touchscreen is small enough to stay out of the way but big enough that you won't have to squint. In the mornings, Amazon's sunrise alarm feature can help ease you out of your sleep with a screen that starts getting brighter 15 minutes before your scheduled wake-up time. The camera also comes with a physical shutter for privacy.

Google Assistant still makes better use of the touchscreen than Amazon -- in particular, the cooking directions and smart home controls are better -- but the Echo Show 8 is close enough, and it comes with a camera for video chats. In short, the Show 8 is Amazon's best smart display yet.

If you want a 10-inch touchscreen powered by Alexa, the third-generation Amazon Echo Show 10 is the latest and greatest in smart display technology. With a motorized base, the Echo Show 10 can follow you around the room during video calls or while you're watching video content on the device. The 10.1-inch tablet HD display looks good, and the device comes with a 13-megapixel front-facing camera, plus a physical shutter for privacy. Amazon also added adaptive color to this Echo device model. 

You can use the Echo Show 10 as a smart home security camera and view it remotely in the Alexa app. Group video calling is supported for up to seven people, and Drop In lets you make a call directly to your display from anywhere with the Alexa app. Occupancy and vacancy-based routines can trigger other smart home devices when the Echo Show 10 senses someone entering or leaving the room. 

This Alexa device is Amazon's priciest smart home hub display and the most feature-filled smart screen. We think most people will still get by just fine with the Echo Show 8 for considerably less money, but if you're after Amazon's boldest smart display yet with the impressive sound to go with it, this is the way to go. That room-filling sound comes from 2x 1-inch tweeters and a 3-inch woofer to ensure that the audio from the Echo Show 10 is just as elevated as the display itself.

For many years, the Echo Show 10 has been Amazon's largest smart display, but in December 2021, we got the Echo Show 15. This 15.1-inch smart display brings everything that you'd expect from the rest of the Echo Show lineup and allows for more screen room, better entertainment options and the flexibility to mount the screen on your wall.

Though users could access many of the best streaming services, like Prime Video and Netflix, on the Show 15 from the start, in September 2022, Amazon brought the full Fire TV interface to the smart display, making it an even better multimedia device. However, due to the device's thinness and rear-firing speakers, audio is a bit of a letdown on the Echo Show 15. Thankfully, you can group speakers together to improve the audio if you have more than one Echo device.

Adding another way to take advantage of the extra large screen real estate, Amazon first introduced Widgets with the Echo Show 15. This feature lets you put small customizable interactive blocks of the things you want to see right on the home screen. I keep my shopping list, a calendar with upcoming events, my favorite smart devices and a weather widget on my device. This makes quickly glancing at information really easy as it is all up front for me.

The Amazon Echo Hub is truly a smart display because though it does have speakers, you likely won't use them for a party. Instead, the 8-inch display is designed to be a central control point for managing your favorite Alexa smart devices. The easy-to-navigate dashboard allows you to control individual devices or an entire room. This device has been great in my home, with my wife and children less familiar with everything that is set up in our home. This way there's a simple way to see what smart devices are available.

In addition to being a smart home management device, it also functions as an Alexa speaker, allowing you to use voice commands to do everything else you'd expect from a typical smart speaker. The Echo Hub can even be a digital photo frame to show all your favorite memories. But thanks to sensors on the device's front, as you approach it, the screen will show you smart home devices and be ready to help you out.