Best Smart Plugs UK: 4 Top Picks [2026]

A smart plug is the cheapest way into a smart home and, done right, one of the fastest-paying energy gadgets you can buy. For under a tenner you can kill standby power, put a heater on a timer, and see exactly what an old fridge or tumble dryer is costing you per hour.

The problem is choice. Amazon UK lists hundreds of near-identical white squares, many from brands that vanish within a year. This guide narrows it to four plugs that are widely stocked in the UK, work with British 13A sockets, and have long-standing app support.

Best overall: TP-Link Tapo P110. Energy monitoring, a mature app, Alexa and Google support, and it regularly drops under £13.

Best budget: TP-Link Tapo P100. The same plug without energy monitoring — usually around £7-£8 in a multipack. Perfect for lamps and Christmas lights.

Best for Matter homes: TP-Link Kasa EP25. Native Matter support means it works across Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung without vendor lock-in.

Best for Apple users: Meross Smart Plug. One of the few genuinely cheap plugs with full HomeKit support.

How Smart Plugs Actually Save Money

A smart plug doesn't make a device more efficient. It saves money in three ways:

Killing standby draw. A TV, soundbar, games console and set-top box on one extension can pull 15-25W around the clock doing nothing. At roughly 25p/kWh that's £33-£55 a year. Putting the extension on a smart plug that switches off overnight removes most of that.

Stopping over-run. Heated airers, dehumidifiers, oil radiators and towel rails get left on for hours longer than needed. A schedule or a timer on the plug stops that happening.

Showing you the numbers. An energy-monitoring plug turns a vague suspicion into a figure. Once you can see that a second fridge in the garage costs £70 a year to run, the decision to unplug it makes itself.

The Energy Saving Trust puts typical UK standby waste at around £45-£65 a household per year. You won't recover all of it, but recovering half with a £10 device is a strong return.

Before you buy anything, run your own numbers with our standby power cost calculator. If your always-on total comes out under £30 a year, a smart plug will take a long time to pay back; if it comes out over £60, the plug pays for itself in months.

Want to know whether a specific plug is worth its price for one device? Try our smart plug payback calculator — enter the device's standby watts, how many hours a day you'll cut, the plug price and your unit rate, and it shows the payback in months.

*Prices are typical UK street prices checked in August 2026 and move frequently, especially in multipacks.*

1. TP-Link Tapo P110 — Best Overall

The P110 is the default recommendation for most UK homes, and it's the one that keeps appearing in independent UK reviews and best-seller lists.

It reports live wattage, daily and monthly kWh totals, and runtime history in the Tapo app. That's the feature that makes it more than a remote switch — you can move it between appliances for a week each and build a picture of where your electricity is going before you spend anything on bigger upgrades.

The plug body is compact enough not to block the second socket on a standard UK double outlet, which is not true of every model on the market. Setup is a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi pairing in the app, no hub needed, and schedules run on-device so they survive a broadband dropout.

Watch out for: it's Wi-Fi only, so a house with 20+ plugs will start to strain a cheap ISP router. And there's no HomeKit support — Apple households should look at the EP25 or Meross.

2. TP-Link Tapo P100 — Best Budget

The P100 is the P110 with the energy monitoring removed. Same app, same reliability, same 13A rating, usually £4-£6 cheaper — and much cheaper again in four-packs.

Buy these for anything where you only need on/off: lamps, Christmas lights, a coffee machine, a fan. There's no point paying for monitoring on a 6W LED lamp. A sensible approach is one P110 you move around to measure things, plus a handful of P100s for the jobs you've already worked out.

3. TP-Link Kasa EP25 — Best for Matter Homes

Matter is the cross-platform smart home standard, and the EP25 speaks it natively. That means the same plug pairs with Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and SmartThings, and keeps working if you switch platforms later.

It also does energy monitoring, so functionally it's a P110 that isn't tied to one ecosystem. You pay a few pounds more for that flexibility.

Choose this if you have a mixed-device household — an iPhone user and an Android user under one roof is the classic case — or you simply don't want to be locked into whichever assistant you happen to use today.

4. Meross Smart Plug — Best for Apple HomeKit

Apple Home support is unusually rare at the budget end, and Meross is the brand that has stuck with it. If your household runs on iPhones and a HomePod, a Meross plug drops into the Home app, appears in Siri and works in Apple automations and scenes.

Build quality is a step below TP-Link and the app is plainer, but for HomeKit at this price there's very little competition. Check the specific model before buying — Meross sells both monitoring and non-monitoring versions under similar names.

The amp rating. Most UK plugs are 13A/3000W, but some imports are 10A/2300W. Anything with a heating element — kettle, heater, tumble dryer, iron — needs the full 13A.

Physical size. On a double socket, a fat plug can block the socket next to it. Slim-body models like the Tapo range are safer bets.

2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Almost every smart plug is 2.4GHz only. If your router presents a single combined network name, you may need to temporarily split the bands or use the router app's guided setup to get the plug paired.

On-device schedules. Plugs that store schedules locally keep working when the internet drops. Cloud-only schedules don't.

Whether you need monitoring at all. Monitoring is worth it on the big loads and on anything you suspect is wasting money. It's wasted money itself on a bedside lamp.

For most UK households the answer is straightforward: buy one TP-Link Tapo P110 and a multipack of P100s. Use the P110 as a roaming meter to find your expensive devices, and use the cheap plugs to automate the ones you've already diagnosed.

If your home runs on Apple, or you want to stay platform-agnostic, spend the extra few pounds on the Kasa EP25 or a Meross HomeKit plug instead.

The bigger point: a smart plug is a diagnostic tool as much as a convenience. Once you know what your standby load actually is, the rest of your energy-saving decisions get much easier.

*Prices checked August 2026 and subject to change. This article contains affiliate links — see our disclosure. Savings figures are illustrative estimates based on Energy Saving Trust guidance and published product specifications, not guarantees.*