Hands-free unlocking is the future of smart locks. The best smart home tech removes friction, and having your door unlock for you as you walk up is as frictionless as it gets — no passcodes to remember, no need to have a free hand to wave, press, or poke at the lock. One way to achieve this nirvana is through facial recognition. You already unlock your phone with your face; why not your home?
Hands-free unlocking using geofencing has been around for a while, but it can be slow and unreliable, and requires an app running in the background on your phone. Newer innovations — facial recognition and unlocking using an ultrawideband (UWB) radio — are much better. In testing, UWB is the best experience. All it needs is your phone or watch somewhere on you to identify you as you approach, and it’s fast and reliable. But today, locks with UWB antennas are expensive, and very few are available.
It was while reviewing one of them, the Schlage Sense Pro, that a genuine use case for facial recognition unlocking was discovered, a tech that had been largely dismissed as an overengineered solution to a mostly solved problem. Many users often leave their phone in the house when working outside or in the garage, which means no hands-free unlocking for them. If you don’t want an unlocking experience tied to a device, but want the speed and convenience of hands-free unlocking, facial unlocking may be for you.
How Facial Recognition Works on Smart Locks
Facial recognition on smart locks uses infrared sensors to create a three-dimensional map of your face. Different companies use different methods — such as structured light, stereo infrared cameras, or time-of-flight sensing — but they’re all designed to do the same thing. The 3D part is key as it captures depth, so holding up a photo generally won’t fool them.
The Best Facial Recognition Smart Locks
We tested the four locks you can buy today with facial recognition unlocking: the $300 Eufy FamiLock E40, the $350 Lockly Visage Zeno, Lockin’s $199 Veno Solar Face, and Switchbot’s $230 Lock Vision Pro. There’s also one on Kickstarter that will launch next month, and Switchbot has a couple of variations.
Eufy FamiLock E40: Best Overall
The best of the bunch is the Eufy FamiLock E40 from Anker. If you’re going this high tech on your door, this is a complete package. Along with excellent facial unlocking features, it also has a fingerprint reader, keypad, and a physical key, plus it doubles as a video doorbell. Stick this on your front door, and you are good to go.
Of all four locks, the E40 was the fastest at unlocking using your face – it did it in under a second; you barely had to hesitate before opening. It is also the only one that worked consistently when wearing sunglasses. The rest did fine with hats, but struggled with sunglasses. The E40 also includes a backup battery that keeps the keypad active even if the main battery dies and biometrics don’t work — a nice touch.
The lock portion supports the smart home standard Matter, so it can work in your ecosystem of choice, and viewing recorded footage from the built-in 2K video doorbell is subscription-free. The design looks more like a traditional lock than any of its competitors do.
The downsides are that the Eufy is huge and expensive, and its lithium-ion battery takes nine hours to fully charge, though you can still use the lock while it’s charging. The main battery drains quickly; it dropped 40 percent in a week of testing. Overall, while expensive, the Eufy E40 offers a lot of value, looks good, and works well — as long as you’re willing to charge it regularly.
Lockly Visage Zeno: Best for Apple Ecosystem
Another favorite is the also-expensive Lockly Visage Zeno. This is the only lock that can do both Apple Home Key and facial recognition. Home Key is a nice backup when facial unlock is a tad too slow, since it’s super easy to tap your phone or watch to unlock it. If you’re in a hurry and your hands aren’t full, just push your watch on it; otherwise, let the facial scan do the work.
The Lockly was slightly slower to unlock than the Eufy, taking about 2 seconds. It also struggled with sunglasses; it eventually unlocked, but took longer. The Lockly is also the oldest model tested, launching in 2024. While it supports Home Key, it won’t work with Home Key UWB unlocking; it’s tap-to-unlock only.
The style of the Lockly is sleek and small, with the best build quality. Its battery life was impressive, lasting around nine months (tested for a year). It’s the only model that includes a spare battery, which helps with the sticker shock.
However, it’s the most expensive lock tested, and while facial recognition was good, its keypad is far too fiddly. Lockly’s PIN Genie system shuffles the digit layout every time you use it, which can be frustrating for guests. Thankfully, there is now a version that lets you switch to a standard keypad layout.
Lockin Veno Solar Face and SwitchBot Lock Vision Pro: Mixed Results
The other two locks tested have a lot of room for improvement, but they are also much less expensive. The main selling point of the Lockin Veno Solar Face is its built-in solar panel for extended battery life, and it worked well during a limited test period. But its facial unlocking was slower and didn’t work with sunglasses. This lock also has the worst addition ever seen on a smart lock — an animated emoji that dances when you unlock it. Most people can happily live without an emoji on their front door.
The Lockin is priced at $160 (on sale from $200) and offers Matter-over-Thread support. It has only a key, keypad, and face unlock, fewer methods than competitors. Its IP53 weather rating is low, and the design is compact but plasticky.
The SwitchBot Lock Vision Pro was the worst of the bunch and glacially slow to unlock — sometimes you have to peer at the reader for several seconds before it would recognize you. Its fingerprint and palm-vein unlocking were more reliable, but it didn’t like sunglasses at all and kept seeing people who weren’t there. One night, as the user sat alone in their living room, the lock suddenly said, “Please stand closer to the door and try again.” This caused understandable panic, but there was no one there — it kept doing it. The sound had to be turned off in the app to stop the alerts.
At $170 (on sale from $230), the SwitchBot offers three biometric methods but suffers from finicky face unlock and plasticky build quality. It supports Matter-over-Wi-Fi but the phantom voice alerts are a dealbreaker.
Tradeoffs and Considerations
After testing these locks, facial recognition still seems like more tech than you need for your front door. Even if you don’t want to pay the premium for UWB, keypads and fingerprint readers work very well, are widely available, and are much less expensive. They are a touch slower, though, and do require you to use your hands.
There are other tradeoffs for the speed and cool factor facial unlocking offers. Locks that support it aren’t as expensive as the current UWB locks, but they’re still pricey. And while there are more facial-recognition locks available than UWB locks, there still aren’t many. Also, it’s unlikely we’ll see many more once UWB, a simpler technology, takes off — something the new smart lock standard Aliro should help with.
Not everyone will be comfortable storing their facial biometrics in a door lock, although for some it may feel more secure than using your phone as a key — only Nicolas Cage has successfully stolen someone’s face. The good news here is all the locks tested claim to store and process data locally rather than in the cloud, which improves both privacy and performance.
Facial recognition felt a bit weird at first, but it works and has that sci-fi cool factor. After living with both technologies, UWB is preferred. “Unlocking in stride” feels more magical because the door is already unlocked when you reach for the handle as opposed to waiting for a second or two for the lock to register that it’s you. But until more companies adopt UWB and prices come down, facial recognition is a good option for people who want hands-free unlocking today.
Source: The Verge News