Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) vs Aqara Hub M3: Is the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) Worth £60 More?
Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) or Aqara Hub M3? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Priya Raghunathan
The short answer
Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) at 3 hours free, subscription for more against Aqara Hub M3 at Full automation offline. Where they part company is who they suit: the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) is the one to get if you are households expecting deliveries who want reliable package alerts, the Aqara Hub M3 if you are anyone who wants a smart home that survives an outage.
Price difference: The Aqara Hub M3 undercuts the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) by £60. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) | Aqara Hub M3 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £179 | £119 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Video | 1440p HDR, 3:4 aspect | — |
| Field of view | 166 degrees | — |
| Power | Wired, 16-24VAC | USB-C or PoE |
| Storage | 3 hours free, subscription for more | — |
| Protocols | — | Matter, Thread, Zigbee 3.0, Wi-Fi |
| Extras | — | IR blaster, microSD slot |
| Local control | — | Full automation offline |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent a month installed in a real home, not a bench. A three-bedroom flat with sixty existing connected devices, a congested 2.4GHz band, and deliberate router reboots to see what recovers on its own.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Response time | Command to physical action, measured a hundred times across the day, reported as a median and a worst case. |
| Reliability | Failed or dropped commands as a percentage over the full month, logged automatically. |
| Recovery | Time to come back online after a power cut and after a router restart, five trials each. |
| Local control | Whether the device still works with the internet connection physically unplugged. |
| Setup | Timed from opening the box to a working automation, by someone who has not used the app before. |
We deliberately do not report advertised range figures, which assume an empty room and no other radios.
The honest caveat: Every home’s radio environment is different. Reliability here is a strong signal, not a guarantee.
Where the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) wins
- A tall 3:4 view that shows parcels on the doorstep
- On-device package and person detection
- Three hours of history without paying
It also has the edge on the intangibles: the taller aspect ratio is the single most useful thing about it.
Where the Aqara Hub M3 wins
- Automations that keep running with the internet unplugged
- Zigbee, Thread and Matter in one box
- A PoE option
And in day-to-day use, we pulled the WAN cable for three days and every automation kept working.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) has one clear weak point — event history beyond three hours needs a subscription — and the Aqara Hub M3 has its own: an unintuitive app. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the Aqara Hub M3 costs £60 less. Unless a tall 3:4 view that shows parcels on the doorstep is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Eufy S3 Pro Cam at £219 — it scored 4 out of 5 and suits anyone who refuses a monthly fee for their own footage. If the budget will not stretch, the Meross Smart Plug Mini at £12 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) the thing you adjust to is event history beyond three hours needs a subscription, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its video (1440p HDR, 3:4 aspect) is the part you stop thinking about. The Aqara Hub M3 asks for a different accommodation: an unintuitive app, against a protocols of Matter, Thread, Zigbee 3.0, Wi-Fi that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
Both launched in 2024, so neither starts with a support-window advantage. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: event history beyond three hours needs a subscription on one side, an unintuitive app on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen), which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) for a tall 3:4 view that shows parcels on the doorstep. Buy the Aqara Hub M3 for automations that keep running with the internet unplugged.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the smart home we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) vs Aqara Presence Sensor FP2: Is the 2024 Model Worth the Change? and Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen) vs Ecobee Smart Thermostat: Which Suits You Better?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
