Even with nearly every major tech company making a smart speaker for your living room and kitchen, Bluetooth speakers still have a place near and dear to our hearts. It’s fun and easy to ask an Amazon Echo or Google Home to play your favorite track or tell you the weather, but smart speakers have a few crutches—first and foremost, stable Wi-Fi.
They also often aren’t portable or waterproofed for the great outdoors. By (mostly) forgoing smarts, Bluetooth speakers are nearly always more versatile, more rugged, and more portable, and they’ll work with any smartphone. They also sound as good or better than many of their smart-speaker equivalents. In the past few years, we’ve tested hundreds of Bluetooth speakers and researched dozens more online, and we can happily say they are still some of the best small devices you can listen to. Here are our favorites right now.
Be sure to check out all our buying guides, including the Best Soundbars, Best Wirefree Earbuds, and Best Smart Speakers.
Updated October 2020: We added the KEF LSX and Vizio 2.1-Channel Soundbar.
