3 smart speakers you can buy instead of Google Home Speaker

The Google Home Speaker is a great smart home hub. It supports Matter and Thread, puts Gemini on your counter, and for $99.99, it’s not asking for much. The problem is the second part of the word: it is a speaker, and it is not good. One driver leaves less and less sound; no bass to speak of, and it just gets loud when you push it. No wired input, no room tuning, and the Gemini Home was slower to respond to me than the speaker assistant I’ve had for years.

So if you are buying a smart speaker at this price, you have better options. Whether you’re looking for the same kind of countertop assistant that’s well-made, something you can carry outside, or an Apple-friendly choice that sounds a lot better than its size suggests, these are the three I’d buy ahead of the Google Home speaker.

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

It feels better too. The Echo Dot Max won’t fill the party, but there’s real bass power behind the kick drum, vocals are heard clearly, and the midrange has enough power to handle guitars and podcasts cleanly. It holds together up to 70% of the volume before the bass starts to back off – a world away from Google, where the low end is lacking, and the high end gets heavy quickly.

The catch is that it shares Google’s limitations: it’s a single speaker, no wired input, and no battery, so it’s always plugged into the wall. But it does the job of a full smart speaker and sounds a lot better for the same money, which is why it’s the first option I’d recommend. It comes in black, white, or a very loud purple.

The Google Home speaker is tied to the one you connected it to, as are the other two selected here. The Sonos Roam 2 is the one you can take out and take with you. It packs a good battery for up to 10 hours and an IP67 rating, so it’s dustproof and dunk-proof, perfect for the patio, beach, or campsite. Then it streams right back to your Wi-Fi at home, folds into a multi-room Sonos setup, and tunes itself into the room automatically with a feature Sonos calls Trueplay.

For such a small speaker, it sounds great — it’s loud for its size, with instruments and vocals coming through with crystal clear clarity. It’s not particularly heavy on bass power, but nothing in the mix sounds a little under-emphasized. You also get smart features with Amazon Alexa or Sonos’ Voice Control instead of Google Assistant, so if you’re serious about having a Gemini outright, this isn’t a like-for-like replacement.

The only downside is the software. The Sonos app can be a real headache – we fought with us for more than an hour just to join Wi-Fi, with EQ sliders that didn’t do anything until we forced to quit the app. The good news is that you can now pair via Bluetooth with a dedicated button and skip the app altogether to just listen. At $179, it costs more than Google, but you get a capable speaker that goes anywhere, something Google can’t do.

If you’d rather not buy from Amazon and live in Apple world, the HomePod mini is the obvious $99 option. It uses Siri and doubles as a smart home hub with 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 played by Google. You can also pair two of them in stereo, and setup is about as easy as it gets: just hold the iPhone next to it, and you’re done.

For something the size of a softball, it feels really good. A single full-range driver and dual bass radiators push 360-degree sound, with more bass power than you’d expect from such a small speaker – highs are always lower in the mix than bass – while vocals and instruments come through clearly even on busy tracks. There’s no manual EQ, but set next to the smaller, smaller Google HomePod’s single driver, the HomePod mini is a better-sounding speaker — and less expensive per dollar.

The trade-off is that it’s Apple only: you need an iPhone or iPad to set it up and use it, and it streams via AirPlay instead of working as a standard Bluetooth speaker, so Android users should look elsewhere. It’s almost six years old, and Apple is expected to launch a successor later in 2026 – ideally, headed by the company’s AI-Siri redesign. But if you want a $99 smart speaker for Apple’s home that sounds like a speaker, the HomePod mini still clears the bar that Google didn’t.