3 smart speakers to buy instead of the Google Home Speaker

The Google Home Speaker is a fine smart home hub. It supports Matter and Thread, it puts Gemini on your counter, and at $99.99, it doesn’t ask for much. The problem is the second part of the name: it’s a speaker, and it’s not a good one. A single driver leaves the sound thin and tinny; there’s barely any bass to speak of, and it turns shrill the louder you push it. There are no wired inputs, no room tuning, and Gemini for Home was slower to answer me than the assistant on speakers I’ve owned for years.

So if you’re shopping for a smart speaker at this price, you have better options. Whether you want the same kind of countertop assistant done properly, something you can actually carry outside, or an Apple-friendly pick that sounds far better than its size suggests, these are the three I’d buy before the Google Home Speaker.

Amazon Echo Dot Max ($99.99)

If you want exactly the kind of speaker the Google Home Speaker is trying to be — a small assistant that sits on the counter and runs your smart home — the Amazon Echo Dot Max is the one to get, and it costs the same $99.99. It carries the same Matter and Thread support, then adds Zigbee on top, so it talks to even more lights, plugs, and sensors without a separate hub. In my colleague Dave’s testing, Alexa also picked up voice commands reliably, where I found Gemini for Home slow to react.

It sounds better, too. The Echo Dot Max won’t fill a party, but there’s real bass strength behind a kick drum, vocals come through with good clarity, and the midrange has enough strength to carry guitars and podcasts cleanly. It holds together up to around 70% volume before the bass starts to pull back — a world away from the Google, where the low end is missing, and the top end gets harsh almost immediately.

The catch is that it shares Google’s limitations: it’s a single mono speaker, there are no wired inputs, and there’s no battery, so it lives plugged into the wall. But it does the smart-speaker job more completely and sounds noticeably better for the same money, which is why it’s the first alternative I’d point you to. It comes in black, white, or a fairly loud purple.

Sonos Roam 2 ($179)

The Google Home Speaker is bolted to the one spot you plug it in, and so are the other two picks here. The Sonos Roam 2 is the one you can unplug and take with you. It packs a battery good for up to 10 hours and an IP67 rating, so it shrugs off dust and a full dunk in water, ready for the patio, the beach, or the campsite. Then it drops right back onto your Wi-Fi at home, folds into a multi-room Sonos setup, and tunes itself to the room automatically with a feature Sonos calls Trueplay.

For a speaker this small, it sounds good — loud for its size, with instruments and vocals coming through with good clarity. It isn’t especially heavy on bass strength, but nothing in the mix feels underemphasized. You also get smart features through Amazon Alexa or Sonos’ own Voice Control rather than Google Assistant, so if you’re set on having Gemini specifically, this isn’t a like-for-like swap.

The honest downside is the software. The Sonos app can be a genuine headache — we had it fight us for over an hour just to join Wi-Fi, with EQ sliders that occasionally did nothing until we force-quit the app. The good news is you can now pair over Bluetooth with a dedicated button and skip the app entirely for casual listening. At $179, it costs more than the Google, but you’re getting a more capable speaker that goes anywhere, which the Google simply can’t.

Apple HomePod mini ($99)

If you’d rather not buy from Amazon and you live in Apple’s world, the HomePod mini is the obvious $99 alternative. It runs Siri and doubles as a smart home hub through Apple’s Home app: it acts as a Thread border router with Matter support, so it controls your HomeKit and Matter lights, plugs, and thermostat — the same hub role that Google plays. You can also pair two of them for stereo, and setup is about as easy as it gets: hold an iPhone next to it, and you’re done.

For something the size of a softball, it sounds genuinely good. A single full-range driver and dual passive bass radiators push 360-degree sound, with more bass strength than you’d expect from a speaker this small — the highs sit lower in the mix than the bass — while vocals and instruments come through clearly even on busy tracks. There’s no manual EQ to tweak, but set next to the Google Home Speaker’s thin, tinny single driver, the HomePod mini is the better-sounding speaker — and it costs a dollar less.

The trade-offs are that it’s Apple-only: you need an iPhone or iPad to set it up and use it, and it streams over AirPlay rather than working as a standard Bluetooth speaker, so Android users should look elsewhere. It’s also nearly six years old, and Apple is widely expected to launch a successor later in 2026 — fittingly, held up by the company’s own AI-Siri overhaul. But if you want a $99 smart speaker for an Apple home that actually sounds like a speaker, the HomePod mini still clears the bar Google didn’t.