Amazon is hosting another Prime Day sales event that ends tonight, called Amazon Prime Big Deal Days. This sales event is a great opportunity to check items off your holiday shopping list and save some major dough on smart home devices.
Like other Amazon-branded devices, Echo speakers, smart displays, and other smart home peripherals see their biggest discounts of the year during Prime Day in July and October. These discounts are often bigger than the ones you'd find during both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Read below for the best deals on Amazon Echo devices we've found so far.
The reliable Amazon Echo Dot is the perfect compact smart speaker to bring Alexa into your home. It's small enough to sit on your bedside table or living room mantle yet powerful enough to listen from across the room and deliver vibrant, room-filling sound.
The Amazon Echo Hub is a smart display for any smart home enthusiast. Think of it like your smart home control panel that'll make you feel like you're in a Jetsons episode. Because it has a single purpose, it doesn't show any ads or any suggestions like the Echo Show, only what you need: smart home control at your fingertips.
The compact Echo Pop is the smallest Amazon smart speaker. It's perfect for a dorm room, compact and unobtrusive enough to fit on a bookshelf or desk. With built-in Alexa, you can easily ask the virtual assistant questions or jokes or run smart home routines.
After launching the Echo Spot to celebrate Prime Day in July, Amazon is offering a 44% discount through the October sales event. The new Echo Spot is a compact smart speaker with a small display showing the clock. It works like a traditional alarm clock, with the added AI bonus of built-in Alexa.
The Echo Show 8 is 43% off ahead of October Prime Day. Its 8-inch high-definition display makes this smart speaker my favorite kitchen companion, whether I'm watching videos on YouTube while I cook, looking up recipes, or asking Alexa my curious kids' questions of the day.
Review: Echo Show 8
An Echo Pop and a fifth-generation Echo Dot (left) and a fourth-generation Echo Dot (right).
Amazon is hosting its October sales event, Prime Big Deal Days, for two days on Oct. 8 and 9.
Yes, Echo and other Amazon devices get the biggest markdowns during Prime Day sales events. As a smart home reviewer who always looks for great deals, I've purchased a few Echo devices during Prime Day for this very reason.
Amazon's most compact Echo speakers are on sale for $23 or less a piece, but how do you know which one is better for you? The Echo Pop, currently priced at $18, has a front-facing speaker that projects audio in front of the device, so it can be placed on a corner or against the wall. The Echo Dot, available for $23, is a round speaker that projects audio in all directions, has less audio degradation when the volume goes up, and has an action button to wake Alexa, unlike the Echo Pop.
The Echo Pop is also unreliably responsive when you try to call on it with the wake word, especially when the volume is up high, making the lack of an action button more evident.
If I had to choose between the $18 Echo Pop and the $23 Echo Dot, I'd choose the latter.
ZDNET cares greatly about curating the best deals for our readers, ensuring we only feature the deals worth your hard-earned money. We combine our experience testing different smart home products and looking for deals to give you the best offerings currently available so you can be sure that a deal featured on ZDNET is a good one.
ZDNET's experts are searching through Prime Day sales to find the best discounts by category. These are the best deals so far:
You can also find the best October Prime Day deals by price:
And the best deals from other retailers this week: