Amazon Echo Pop vs Echo Dot

• 

  Amazon Echo Pop

  best budget

  The Amazon Echo Pop comes in three eye-catching colorways and features a domed design. It’s the cheapest option in the current lineup and an affordable way to use Alexa at home.

  advantage

  • More color options
  • Lower price

  shortcoming

  • Fewer onboard sensors
  • The sound is not very good

• 

  Amazon Echo Dot (5th generation)

  Best for smart homes

  The Amazon Echo Dot is one of the most popular smart speakers in the world. It offers great sound quality, great smart home integration, and great voice recognition. If you have a lot of smart devices, this is the best option for you.

  advantage

  • Temperature sensor and faucet control
  • Easy access to microphone mute button
  • Has built-in Wi-Fi

Main points

• The Echo Pop is a more affordable alternative to the Echo Dot, with an attractive design and a variety of color options.
• The Echo Dot delivers richer, more room-filling sound than the Echo Pop.
• The Echo Dot has additional features such as a temperature sensor, accelerometer, and Zigbee hub, making it a more versatile choice for smart home connectivity.

The Echo Dot has long been one of Amazon’s most popular smart speakers. The reason is easy to understand. It’s one of the most affordable and compact options in Alexa’s range of smart speakers, making it perfect for bedrooms, offices, hallways, and any other smaller space in your home. It also provides decent sound for a small speaker.

The Echo Dot is always the best choice for a low-cost Alexa device. Until the Echo Pop was released. The new speaker is cheaper, has an attractive design, is available in a variety of colors, and offers many of the same features as the Echo Dot in a smaller package.

The question is, how does the Echo Dot compare to the fifth-generation Echo Dot, and which one is best for your needs? We’ve tested and reviewed both devices, and here’s how they compare.

Specifications, pricing and availability

The Amazon Echo Dot, now in its fifth iteration, was a hockey puck-shaped device for years before switching to a spherical design in 2020. The latest version was released in 2022 and currently retails for $49.99.

Echo Pop will be released in May 2023 and will cost $39.99. If you want to add some style to your Pop, you can purchase a silicone cover for an additional $16.99.

Both speakers are regularly discounted on Amazon, especially during sales, which means you can get them for cheaper at certain times of the year. Please pay close attention to our offer range to get the best price.

• 	Amazon Echo Pop	Amazon Echo Dot (5th generation)
  aspect	99×83×91mm, 196g	100×100×89mm, 340g
  Woofer size	1.95 inches	1.73 inches
  Connectivity	Dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Material
  color	Charcoal, Glacier White, Lavender, Midnight Cyan	Charcoal, glacier white, deep ocean blue

design

Sphere and hemisphere

The design differences between the Echo Dot and Echo Pop are pretty obvious. The Echo Dot has a spherical shape, while the Echo Pop has a flat front, creating what Amazon calls a hemispherical design.

Both devices feature LED lighting that signals when in use and work in the same way, but in different locations for each model. The Echo Dot has a glowing ring on the bottom, while the Echo Pop has a small glowing section on the top.

The Echo Dot is available in Charcoal, Glacier White, and Deep Ocean Blue. They’re both subtle, whereas the Echo Pop takes a slightly louder approach.

The Echo Pop comes in lavender and midnight teal options, as well as classic gray and white versions. However, if you want to jazz things up a bit, you can buy blue, red, orange, grey, lavender, purple or even glow-in-the-dark silicone cases. The Echo Pop’s more fun colors and sleeves make it a great gift, especially for younger family members.

Both devices can be triggered using the Alexa wake word, and both have buttons for increasing or decreasing volume and muting the microphone. However, the Amazon Echo Dot has a button that the Pop doesn’t have. The Action Button (also known as the Echo Button) lets you quickly open setup mode, summon your voice assistant without a wake word, answer or reject incoming calls, and you can also program it to control compatible smart home devices.

sound quality

Sound quality is great for such a small speaker

We listened to both speakers and the soundscapes were very different. The fifth-generation Echo Dot has 1.73-inch drivers that produce a lot of bass from its tiny chassis. It has a 360-degree design that projects sound from every angle, and its sound transmission capabilities are surprisingly strong and can be placed flexibly in the room.

Surprisingly, the Echo Pop has a larger speaker inside, measuring 1.95 inches. But the Echo Pop is designed for small spaces, and the sound is projected forward, so it’s best suited for solo listening or limited space. It works best when placed in a corner, on a shelf, or on a bedside table.

Of the two, the Echo Dot offers richer, more room-filling sound, so if you’re interested in sound performance, the Echo Dot is the one for you. The Echo Pop would be better in situations with lower listening demands and is less suitable for entertainment.

Alexa and smart home connectivity

Whether to use Zigbee

Both devices have Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge processor at their core. This means they’ll give you roughly the same Alexa experience, with fast response times and reliable voice recognition. The functionality will also be the same, as they all rely on Alexa’s universal capabilities.

If you use an Eero mesh network in your home, the good news is that both smart speakers can act as extenders, providing up to 1,000 square feet of additional coverage.

The difference lies in the form of additional sensors. Echo Dot has a built-in temperature sensor and accelerometer. This means it can be used to create temperature-based automation, or just to report the temperature of a room. For example, you can also click it to turn off the alarm. Another useful feature of the Echo Dot is that it can double as a Zigbee hub to expand your smart home setup, meaning it can directly control Zigbee devices without the need for an additional Zigbee hub.

Unfortunately, the Echo Pop doesn’t have these features. Overall, it’s a simpler device, which is why it’s a bit cheaper and smaller. You can still use the Echo Pop to control smart home devices with your voice, and if you don’t have a Zigbee device or already have a Zigbee hub, you won’t miss the Echo Dot’s built-in Zigbee functionality.

Echo Pop vs Echo Dot: Which one should you choose?

The Echo Pop is a great addition to the Amazon Echo range. We think it’s one of the brand’s prettiest speakers to date, and the wide range of color options means it’ll easily match your home decor and would make a great gift.

It’s also the cheapest option, which is a big selling point in itself. But the sound isn’t as wide or room-filling as the Echo Dot, so while it’s convenient for adding Alexa to your room, it’s not the best choice for listening to music.

If you want a smart speaker with temperature-based automation and alarm clock usage, you’re probably better off with the Echo Dot: it also offers better sound performance, so if you want background music to play regularly, then using the Echo Dot will get you feel better. Overall, the Echo Dot is a more comprehensive piece of kit, and it doesn’t cost much more than the Echo Pop.

No matter which device you choose, you’ll get a lot of benefits, and you can rest assured that you’re unlikely to find a better smart speaker for the same price.