Drayton Wiser vs Tado: which smart heating system is best in the UK (2026)

If you've narrowed your smart heating shortlist down to Drayton Wiser and Tado, you've already done the hard part. These are the two best multi-zone systems sold in the UK in 2026, and unless your house has a particularly weird heating setup, one of them is right for you. The remaining question is which one.

This guide is opinionated. Both systems work. Both have an active Home Assistant community. Both will save you money on heating bills if you actually use the zoning. The differences sit in four places: how they handle the cloud, what a multi-room kit costs, how the apps feel day-to-day, and how cleanly they slot into Home Assistant. We'll take each in turn and finish with a clear recommendation by household type.

TL;DR — the short answer

For most UK homes, Drayton Wiser is the better buy in 2026. It has a local API on the Wiser Heat Hub, multi-zone TRV kits land at roughly half the cost of the Tado equivalent, and the system keeps working when the manufacturer's cloud has a bad afternoon. The community Home Assistant integration is mature and actively maintained.

Pick Tado if you want the more polished app, you'll lean heavily on geofencing and Open Window Detection, and you're comfortable with the fact that a few advanced features now sit behind a paid subscription tier introduced in 2025. The Home Assistant integration is officially supported and very stable, with some endpoints gated by Tado's Auto-Assist tier.

Both are sound choices. Neither is a mistake. Read the full comparison before you commit.

At a glance

You can pick up the Drayton Wiser starter kit on Amazon, and the Tado starter kit (V3+ or X) is similarly well-stocked there.

What you're actually choosing between

Drayton Wiser and Tado solve the same problem in different ways. Both replace your existing room thermostat with a smart one and add radiator valves (TRVs) to give you per-room control. Both use a hub plugged into your router that talks to the boiler over a wireless link. Both have iOS and Android apps that let you set schedules, raise the temperature when you're cold, and watch the system from the pub.

Where they differ is philosophy. Tado is the older, more polished European product — strong app, mature geofencing, lots of presence-and-weather cleverness, and a recent move to monetise advanced features through a subscription. Drayton is part of Schneider Electric, sold mostly through UK trade channels (Screwfix, Toolstation, B&Q), and tends to win on price and openness while losing slightly on app design.

Zoning and TRVs — the price difference is the headline

Both systems support multi-room zoning via TRVs, and both will let you set, say, the bedrooms to 16°C overnight while keeping the living room at 20°C. The pricing difference is what makes the comparison lopsided.

A Drayton Wiser TRV is around £54 in single units at Screwfix and a bit less per unit in multipacks. A Tado Smart Radiator Thermostat is £74.99 at the official store and rarely drops below £65 even on Black Friday.

For a typical four-bedroom UK semi with eight radiators, you're looking at roughly £430 of TRVs with Drayton vs roughly £600 with Tado. Add the starter kits and you're at about £530 for Drayton (1-channel kit ~£100 at Screwfix + 8 TRVs) and £750 for Tado (V3+ wired kit ~£150 + 8 TRVs) for the same coverage. That's a meaningful gap, but not the 2:1 some older comparisons suggest — Wiser TRV pricing has crept up over 2024–2025.

What does Tado give you for the money? Slightly nicer hardware (the TRV is quieter and the OLED screen is sharper), and a more refined per-zone scheduling UI. It's a real difference. Whether it's £200 of difference depends on how much you'll touch the app.

Boiler compatibility and the install

Both systems are designed for UK heating layouts and both handle the common cases — combi boilers, system boilers with hot water cylinders, S-plan and Y-plan systems with separate heating and hot water zones. Both use a wireless receiver that wires into your boiler's existing thermostat terminals, so a competent DIYer can fit them in an afternoon and a heating engineer can do it in under an hour.

Drayton Wiser uses the Wiser Heat Hub plus a HeatHub-compatible receiver. The 1-channel starter kit handles combi setups out of the box; for S-plan or Y-plan systems with separate hot water you buy the 2-channel (or 3-channel) starter kit instead, which ships with a second receiver included. The wiring diagrams Drayton publishes are some of the clearest in the industry.

Tado uses its Wireless Receiver (or hardwired Smart Thermostat in some configurations) plus the Bridge. Tado has explicit wiring guides for almost every UK boiler ever made — they're famously thorough — and an installer-finder service. The install is no harder than Drayton's, just more menu-driven in the app.

If you have an old gravity-fed system or a combined heating-and-hot-water arrangement that isn't quite S- or Y-plan, both companies have phone support that's actually competent. Tado's is faster to reach. Drayton's is more technically detailed when you do reach it.

Geofencing, scheduling and the day-to-day app

This is the one area where Tado clearly wins. Tado has been one of the leading European players in geofencing-driven smart heating for over a decade, and the polish shows. Multi-user geofencing is reliable, the "leaving home" and "arriving home" detection is sharper than Drayton's, and the schedules are easier to draw on the per-zone heat maps in the app.

Drayton's geofencing is functional but blunter — single-radius, single-user-prominent, and noticeably slower to react. Most Wiser users end up running geofencing through Home Assistant instead, which is more reliable than either vendor's app and lets you build smarter rules (heat the bathroom 30 minutes before the alarm, hold off on heating if the kids are still at school, etc.).

Both apps handle schedules, holiday mode, frost protection, and per-room overrides. Tado's UI is the more polished. Drayton's is more workmanlike but no harder to use once you've found things.

The 2025 Tado subscription change matters here. Tado introduced paid tiers in early 2025 — a Basic plan at roughly £12/year and an Auto-Assist plan at roughly £30/year — alongside per-tier API rate limits (100 requests/day on the free tier vs 20,000/day with Auto-Assist). The 19 February 2025 in-app deadline was when existing users had to choose a tier. Open Window Detection itself remains a free TRV feature; what's gated on Auto-Assist is the automation around it (the auto-pause when an open window is detected, the geofencing-driven heating changes, and the cloud API rate limits that the official Home Assistant integration relies on). The thermostats themselves keep working without any subscription. But several of the things people bought Tado for now require an annual fee — and the rate limits are tight enough that the Home Assistant integration becomes flaky on the free tier. If that bothers you, it should factor into the buy decision; if you'll do your geofencing in Home Assistant anyway, the Auto-Assist tier is the one that keeps the integration responsive.

Cloud reliability — the unglamorous bit

This is the area where Drayton wins quietly and decisively, and most reviews skip over it.

Tado is cloud-only on V3+. Every change you make in the app, every schedule trigger, every "I'm home" detection routes through Tado's cloud before reaching your boiler. When the cloud has a bad day — it has, several times in the last two years — your heating stops responding to the app. The schedule you previously set keeps running on the thermostat, so the house doesn't go cold, but you can't change anything until Tado is back. Tado X is more local: it's a Matter-over-Thread device, and Home Assistant supports it through the Matter integration rather than the cloud tado integration. That's a meaningful improvement, though most installed Tado kit in the UK is still V3+.

Drayton Wiser exposes a local API on the Heat Hub. Home Assistant talks to it directly over your LAN. No internet required for HA control, schedules continue, manual overrides work, and the system keeps doing its job through Schneider Electric's worst day at the office. The cloud is still there for the official app, but your HA-driven automations don't depend on it.

For a system that decides whether your house is warm in February, this is a meaningful difference. Not a deal-breaker for Tado — it doesn't go down often — but a clear point in Drayton's favour.

Home Assistant integration — both work, one is local

Both systems have working Home Assistant integrations. The question is the quality.

Tado V3+ has the official tado integration shipped in Home Assistant core. It's stable, well-maintained by HA contributors, and exposes climate, sensor, water heater and binary_sensor entities for every zone. It uses Tado's cloud API, which means it inherits the cloud dependency above and the per-tier API rate limits described earlier — on the free tier, the integration becomes unreliable. Tado X, the newer line, is not supported by the core tado integration; the official Home Assistant docs route Tado X devices through the Matter integration instead, which talks locally over Thread.

Drayton Wiser uses the community wiser_heat_api integration, installed via HACS. It's been actively maintained for years, supports the core Wiser product range (room stats, TRVs, smart plugs, light switches), and crucially it talks to the Heat Hub locally. No cloud round-trip. Sub-second response times. Works during internet outages.

We run Tado at habbb HQ ourselves, and we manage Wiser installs for several customers. Both are fine to live with. The Wiser local-API setup is noticeably snappier when you tap a button, and it doesn't generate the small but real number of cloud-timeout warnings that Tado occasionally produces in the HA logs.

If you're going to put effort into Home Assistant automations — heating that follows occupancy, schedules that respect calendar events, energy dashboards that track gas use against tariff — both systems will reward the effort. Wiser will simply do it faster and survive a bad cloud day.

Ecosystem (HomeKit, Alexa, Google)

A small but real difference: Tado supports HomeKit, Alexa and Google Assistant. Drayton Wiser supports Alexa and Google but not HomeKit.

If your household runs on iPhones and you live inside the Apple Home app, Tado is the easier fit. If you're using Home Assistant as your primary control surface (which, if you're reading this, you probably are or will be), HA has a HomeKit Bridge that exposes any HA entity to HomeKit anyway — so you can put Wiser zones into Apple Home through the back door if you really want to. It's an extra step, but only a small one.

Which one should you buy?

Let's drop the fence-sitting.

Buy Drayton Wiser if:

• You want multi-zone (3+ rooms with TRVs) and the price difference matters.
• Local control and cloud-independence are important to you.
• You're going to do most of the cleverness in Home Assistant anyway.
• You're an HA-curious household who plans to add automations over time.

Buy Tado if:

• You want the most polished standalone app and don't plan to lean on HA much.
• You're a HomeKit household and want native Apple Home support.
• You're doing one or two zones, where the per-TRV price gap matters less.
• Geofencing-led automation in the app itself is a key selling point and you're happy paying for Auto-Assist.

Don't agonise over it. Either way you're getting a competent, well-supported smart heating system that will pay back its cost in 18–36 months of better scheduling and fewer hours of heating an empty house. The wrong answer is to keep a dumb thermostat for another winter while you research.

Where habbb fits in

Both systems are managed by habbb out of the box. We run Tado in the founder's own home and Drayton Wiser in several customer homes. Both integrations get added at provisioning time and form part of what the £30/month subscription keeps maintained — updates tested before deployment, integration quirks watched for, the cloud-dependency footguns flagged before they bite.

What habbb doesn't include is the install of new automation logic. If you ask us to write a "heat the bathroom 30 minutes before my 06:45 alarm but only on weekdays the kids are at school" rule, that's a separate quote (from £45 for a simple one). The boiler-service analogy applies: we keep what you have working. Adding a new radiator is a separate job.

If you want the comparison short: pick Drayton Wiser for the price and the local API; pick Tado for the app polish and HomeKit. Either way, Home Assistant will hold the whole thing together far better than the vendor app alone.

FAQs

Is Drayton Wiser the same as Wiser by Schneider?

Yes. Drayton is a Schneider Electric brand in the UK; "Wiser" is Schneider's broader smart-home line globally. The Wiser Heat Hub and Drayton Wiser products are the same kit, just sold under both names depending on channel.

Can I mix Drayton TRVs with a Tado thermostat?

No. The TRVs talk to their own hub on a proprietary wireless protocol. You commit to one ecosystem.

Does Tado still work without the subscription?

Yes. The thermostats keep working, schedules run, and you can change temperatures from the app on the free tier. What's gated on Auto-Assist (~£30/year) is the geofencing automation that actually triggers heating changes when you leave or arrive, the auto-pause behaviour when Open Window Detection fires, and a higher API rate limit (20,000 requests/day vs 100 on the free tier) — the last of which is what the official Home Assistant integration needs to stay responsive. Open Window Detection itself, as a TRV-level safety feature, remains free.

Will either work with my old combi boiler?

Almost certainly yes. Both Drayton and Tado list compatibility for every UK boiler going back 20+ years. Check your model on the manufacturer's compatibility checker before buying — it's a 30-second job.

Which has better Home Assistant support?

Both have working integrations and both are managed by habbb. Drayton Wiser edges it because the integration runs locally — faster response, no cloud dependency. Tado's integration is officially supported in HA core and very stable, but lives or dies with the Tado cloud.

Can I install it myself?

Both are designed to be DIY-installable for someone confident turning the boiler off at the consumer unit and connecting three or four wires. If you've never touched a thermostat, get an electrician or heating engineer in for the wiring — they'll do it in under an hour and the install warranty stays clean.