Surprise! Facial recognition smart locks are actually good

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 my 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 I discovered a genuine use case for facial recognition unlocking, a tech I had largely dismissed as an overengineered solution to a mostly solved problem. My husband often leaves his phone in the house when he’s working outside or in the garage, which means no hands-free unlocking for him. If you’re like him and 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.

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.

I 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.

The facial recognition smart lock I would buy

The best of the bunch is the Eufy FamiLock E40 from Anker. If I’m going this high tech on my door, I’m going all the way, and the FamiLock E40 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 my face – it did it in under a second; I barely had to hesitate before opening. It is also the only one that worked consistently when I was 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. I also appreciate that Eufy has added a touch of style to this lock; it 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.

There’s also a great option for Apple’s ecosystem

My other 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 I’m in a hurry and my hands aren’t full, I just push my watch on it; otherwise, I 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 I tested, launching in 2024. While it supports Home Key, it won’t work with Home Key UWB unlocking; it’s tap-to-unlock only.

I really like the style of the Lockly; it’s the sleekest and smallest, with the best build quality. Its battery life was impressive, lasting around nine months (I’ve been testing this lock for a year; the rest for a little over a week). It’s the only model that includes a spare battery, which helps with the sticker shock.

However, it’s the most expensive lock I 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, and talking my dad through how to unlock it while I was trying to relax by a pool, and he was struggling to get into my house to feed my dog, was an exercise in frustration. Thankfully, there is now a version that lets you switch to a standard keypad layout.

The category is still improving

The other two locks I tried 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 my limited test period. But its facial unlocking was slower and didn’t work with sunglasses. This lock also has the worst addition I’ve ever seen on a smart lock — an animated emoji that dances when you unlock it. I could happily live the rest of my life without an emoji on my front door.

The SwitchBot Lock Vision Pro version was the worst of the bunch and glacially slow to unlock — I sometimes had to peer at the reader for several seconds before it would recognize me. 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, I was sitting alone in my living room watching Widow’s Bay when the lock suddenly said, “Please stand closer to the door and try again.” I understandably freaked out, thinking someone was trying to get in. There was no one there, but it kept doing it. I eventually had to turn off sounds in the app to get it to stop.

After trying these locks, I still think facial recognition is 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. I also don’t think we’ll see many more once UWB, a simpler technology, takes off — something the new smart lock standard Aliro should help with.

These locks also look unapologetically high tech and require you to get every member of your household to stand in front of the lock to register their face (I’m still trying to corral one of mine).

Finally, 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 I 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, I prefer UWB. “Unlocking in stride” feels more magical because the door is already unlocked when I reach for the handle as opposed to waiting for a second or two for the lock to register that it’s me. But until more companies adopt UWB and prices come down, facial recognition is a good option for people who want hands-free unlocking today.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge