Why Aqara is the best smart home brand you’ve never heard of

Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung. It’s these smart home brands that get the most attention, but there’s another one that makes cool products that, at least here in the United States, are easy to overlook.

Aqara makes everything you need for a smart home

If you don’t want to shop, you don’t have to

Aqara has been around since 2009, but if you walk into a Best Buy in the United States, you probably won’t see Aqara on store shelves. The brand has a greater presence overseas, but smart home owners used to searching for the best brands online may already know what Aqara has to offer.

Indeed, Aqara is a brand that manufactures most essential products, like smart locks and thermostats. You will also find a wide range of sensors, such as motion, water leak and contact sensors. You can also get smart curtain controllers, cameras and video doorbells. If you’re the type to dabble in just one business, you can do that with Aqara, much like with competing brands like SwitchBot and TP-Link Tapo.

In the past, this meant exposure to vendor lock-in. You needed an Aqara hub to connect everything and control how it works. Fortunately, that has changed.

Aqara has fully embraced Matter

Many Aqara products now work with any ecosystem

There are different standards for connecting smart home devices together, such as Zigbee (Zigbee is the best!) and Z-Wave (no, Z-Wave is the best!). Both have their advantages, but nothing about either makes them compatible across different ecosystems. A Philips Hue bulb using Zigbee can only connect to a Philips Hue hub. In the past, these lights could only be controlled using the Philips Hue app or smart home platforms explicitly supported by the hub.

There is now a newer protocol called Matter, which is a shared language that all major smart home platforms speak. This includes the Aqara Hub, which controls Aqara’s various smart home products and all third-party Matter products. Many Aqara devices can now be controlled by any smart home platform that supports Matter, whether or not you own an Aqara hub.

Here’s the thing. Some of these products are among the best in their category. If you’re in the market for an occupancy sensor, the Aqara FP300 is a good choice to consider, even if it’s the only Aqara device you buy. It can detect occupancy, lighting, temperature and humidity. It supports Matter over WiFi and Thread, and you can configure it to use Zigbee if you have an Aqara hub.

We haven’t reviewed the FP300, but our editors have tried other Aqara products over the years. Mark LoProto spoke positively about the Aqara U200 smart lock. Adam Davidson wrote about how he uses Aqara temperature and humidity sensors in this home (I’m personally a big fan of the new TIMMERFLOTTE temperature and humidity sensors from IKEA). Patrick Campanale described Aqara’s G410 Doorbell Camera Hub as a do-it-all doorbell with no compromises.

I understand that in the age of paid brand deals all over social media, it’s easy to feel skeptical about what I’m telling you, but just like we shout out brands like Ryobi and Milwaukee for providing great power tools, we don’t want you to miss out on great smart home products just because you’ve never heard of them. Unlike those two brands, which can be purchased at any Home Depot, Aqara is more of an option that only real people know about.

Aqara’s smart lock is the first to adopt Aliro

For now you need a Samsung phone

Aliro does for smart locks what Matter does for most smart homes. It is an interoperability standard from the Connectivity Standards Alliance that unifies the way smart locks communicate with smartphones. This way, there can be consistency in how we control our smart locks through apps and unlock them with a tap on our phones, without the need to install a myriad of apps from different vendors.

Samsung Wallet is the first digital wallet to support Aliro locks, allowing you to unlock your door by tapping a compatible Samsung Galaxy device against a compatible lock – and Aqara’s U400 smart lock happens to be the first compatible lock.

Aqara thinks about the future. I’m especially happy to see the company’s new W200 thermostat hub double as a Matter controller. Having Matter support integrated into the products we already have in our home makes the entire smart home ecosystem easier to adopt. I may have a Homey Pro mini now, but I got my start through Samsung SmartThings on a Frame TV. At the same time, this Aqara thermostat also supports Thread and Zigbee, connecting all your devices, whether they’re older sensors from before Matter or future devices from when Thread solved its problems.