The Best Wi-Fi Mesh-Networking Kits

After spending hundreds of hours evaluating and testing 64 Wi-Fi mesh-networking kits in home and lab environments over the past four years, we’re confident that the Eero 6 system is the best mesh router for most people who need one.

Mesh-networking systems take the weight off just one router, instead spreading multiple access points around your house to improve the range and performance of your Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi that sucks can be more frustrating than no Wi-Fi at all, and the culprit in many cases is one router trying to cover too much house.

Most people, however, don’t need mesh Wi-Fi, and if you live in an average home or apartment, a regular router is just fine.

While we think this year’s new standards of Wi-Fi 6 or 6E are the best options for most people (both our main and upgrade picks are Wi-Fi 6 mesh systems), based on our tests and research, we continue to recommend a Wi-Fi 5 (aka 802.11ac) mesh system as our budget alternative. Wi-Fi 5 laptops, phones, and other devices will continue to dominate your home for the next few years, and you can save some money while you take care of existing needs.

The Eero 6 provides lag-free Wi-Fi all over your home, takes just a few minutes to set up, is easily (and relatively cheaply) upgradable, and can be managed remotely from a mobile phone app, and if all you want is reliable Wi-Fi, you can set it and forget it. Our tests showed it easily streams multiple 4K videos and is more than capable of handling your family’s growing collection of smart devices.

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The Asus ZenWiFi AX (XT8) is the right choice if you currently use or are planning on upgrading to a gigabit or faster internet connection. The upgrade is worth the added expense if you’ve already invested in gigabit internet service and need a powerful mesh setup to work with all that bandwidth. It’s the upgrade pick for those who need Wi-Fi 6 technology to squeeze out the fastest connection, always.

TP-Link’s Deco S4 will spread solid Wi-Fi 5 signals to dozens of devices throughout a large home, but it doesn’t have the top speed or flexibility of our other picks. And if you have more than 50 devices on your network—increasingly possible when you add smart-home products on top of phones, laptops, and streaming boxes—there’s a higher chance the S4 will be overtaxed. Its price reflects that, so Deco S4 is the choice if you need to serve a few folks in a large home, and if your broadband internet service is 500 megabits or slower.