The best smart home devices are dramatically bringing your dumb household into the future, letting you control everything from the front door lock to the bedroom lights with a phone, tablet or even a smart speaker.

Here’s the problem: upgrading to a smart home isn’t as easy as simply buying a single device. It’s a complicated new category of products with dozens of choices that promise a future-ready home, but vary in quality, performance and price.

Because smart homes rely on components being able to communicate with one another, before you stock up your shopping cart with all the latest and greatest smart home gadgets make sure they’re compatible with any other smart devices you own including your phone, tablet and any smart speaker you already own.

Standards and personal preferences aside, we’ve picked out a list of eight gadgets that we believe are the best smart home products you can buy.

Here are our recommended best smart home devices to get your existing house, apartment or other domicile up to speed:

If you’re starting your smart home from scratch, you’ll want to consider which smart home ecosystem you’ll want to build off of. There are quite a few out there, including Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, the Amazon Echo platform, IFTTT, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and more. The best smart home devices for 2017 | TechRadar