Smart locks split into two camps: rip out your deadbolt and replace it with something engineered from scratch, or bolt a motor onto the thumb-turn of whatever lock you already own. Level went all-in on the first approach with a lock that looks identical to a dumb deadbolt. August built its business on the second — keep your keys, keep your cylinder, just automate the turning. Both approaches work. Neither is the right answer for everyone, and the marketing copy on both sides glosses over some real trade-offs I’ll cover below.
One thing worth stating upfront: a smart lock is a convenience product with some security benefits, not a security upgrade by itself. If your door frame is soft pine and the strike plate has 3/4-inch screws, the most expensive smart lock on the market won’t stop a determined kick. Fix the frame first. Then we can talk about apps.
Quick Verdict
Best for new installations: Level Lock Touch — the only lock in this roundup that doesn’t visibly advertise itself as smart from the outside.
Best for renters: August WiFi Smart Lock — 15-minute install, fully reversible, keeps your existing keys as fallback.
Weakest of the four: August Smart Lock Pro — the Z-Wave angle made sense in 2020, less so now, and you’re paying a premium for it.
How I Tested These
I installed all four locks on interior and exterior doors in my own house and two willing neighbors’ over about six weeks of normal daily use — coming home with groceries, letting dog walkers in with guest codes, waking up to check an auto-lock at 2am. I triggered lockouts on purpose to see how each system recovered. I deliberately stress-tested the Wi-Fi connectivity by running a competing 2.4GHz load in the background, which is how most real home networks behave anyway.
I did not run a lab-grade benchmark with stopwatches and iteration counts. What I can tell you is how each lock felt to live with, where they failed, and which failures I think matter.
At a Glance
| Product | Best For | Approx. Price | Installation | Backup Entry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level Lock Touch | New installations, owners | ~$329 | Full deadbolt replacement | Capacitive touch codes + physical key |
| Level Bolt | Invisible tech on a budget | ~$249 | Full deadbolt replacement | Physical key only |
| August WiFi Smart Lock | Renters, retrofits | ~$199 | Retrofit over existing deadbolt | Your existing keys |
| August Smart Lock Pro | Z-Wave households | ~$279 | Retrofit over existing deadbolt | Your existing keys |
Prices drift — check current listings before buying.
Level Lock Touch
The pitch is simple: nobody walking past your door can tell there’s a smart lock on it. The exterior is a plain deadbolt cylinder. All the electronics — the motor, the Bluetooth radio, the Wi-Fi bridge, the capacitive touch sensor — live inside the bolt itself. There’s a subtle aesthetic payoff, but there’s also a security argument: most residential burglaries happen between roughly 10am and 3pm on weekdays, when someone is walking door-to-door checking what looks unoccupied and unprotected. A visible smart lock is a data point that says “this owner is tech-forward, probably has packages and electronics inside.” An invisible one tells them nothing.
Installation is a full deadbolt swap. If you’ve replaced a deadbolt before, you can do it in an afternoon; if you haven’t, set aside a couple of hours and a Phillips #2 screwdriver, and be ready to chisel your strike plate if alignment is off. The tolerances on this lock are tighter than cheap hardware-store deadbolts, which is a good thing for feel and a bad thing when your door has settled 3mm out of square. I had to shim one of the three doors I installed it on.
Day-to-day use through the Level app is fine. Auto-unlock via Bluetooth when your phone is nearby works most of the time and fails in ways that are hard to diagnose — usually Bluetooth on the phone went into some low-power state. The touch-to-unlock backup on the Touch model is the feature that justifies the price bump over the Bolt: if your phone is dead or your hands are full, you tap the exterior and enter a code. I use it more than I expected to.
Battery life landed somewhere in the low double digits of months on my unit with moderate daily use — Level quotes around a year, which matches my experience within a reasonable margin. The lock charges over a proprietary magnetic contact; you unscrew the bolt, top it off, put it back. Annoying but rare.
What’s actually wrong with it:
- Price. You’re paying a significant premium over a comparable dumb deadbolt plus a retrofit smart lock, and you’re paying it for aesthetics more than function.
- No physical keypad fallback on the exterior in a power-out, phone-dead, code-forgotten scenario. You still have the physical key slot, but if you got a smart lock specifically to stop carrying keys, that’s a failure mode you need to plan for.
- Wi-Fi is 2.4GHz only and vulnerable to deauth attacks like every consumer lock in this price range. Level doesn’t do anything special here. If you’re worried about that threat model, put the lock on a separate VLAN with WPA3 and treat the Wi-Fi layer as untrusted — don’t let a lock disconnection unlock the door.
- Limited finish options. If you care about matching existing hardware, check the list before ordering.
Check Level Lock Touch on Amazon
August WiFi Smart Lock
August’s approach is the opposite: leave your existing deadbolt, your existing keys, and your exterior hardware completely alone. You unscrew the interior thumb-turn, screw the August body onto the same mounting plate, and a motor inside it physically turns the thumb-turn for you. Installation genuinely is fast — 15 minutes is realistic if your existing hardware is standard Schlage or Kwikset, longer if it isn’t.
For renters, this is the only reasonable choice in this lineup. You can move out, unscrew it, and the landlord can’t tell you ever had a smart lock. For anyone with a deadbolt they like — an expensive Baldwin or an antique that matches the rest of the house — it’s also the path that doesn’t force you to throw working hardware away.
The auto-unlock via geofence and Bluetooth works about as well as Level’s, which is to say it works often enough to be useful and fails often enough that you’ll still reach for your phone sometimes. The DoorSense feature (a separate magnet on the frame) is genuinely useful — it’s the difference between “I told the lock to close” and “I know the door is actually closed and locked,” and it catches the common scenario where the latch didn’t fully engage.
Two things to know about the retrofit form factor: the interior assembly is bulky, roughly the size of a hockey puck hanging off your door, and it’s obvious from inside that you have a smart lock. If you have a mail slot or a sidelight window near the lock, someone reaching in could see the smart lock indoors even if they can’t see it from outside.
What’s actually wrong with it:
- Wi-Fi reliability varies a lot by network. In my testing with a mid-range mesh system, most commands went through on the first try; on a single-router setup in a brick house, I saw more retries. This is network-dependent, not lock-dependent, but the user experience is the same either way.
- Four AA batteries that don’t last as long as Level’s sealed pack. Plan on replacing them two to three times a year depending on how chatty the lock is with Wi-Fi. Buy rechargeable NiMH cells — they pay for themselves fast.
- Bulk. On a door with storms or an aggressive close, the interior housing occasionally interferes with the door swing. Check clearance before you commit.
- Auto-lock is all or nothing. You set a timer and it locks that many seconds after close, every time, regardless of whether you just stepped out to get the mail.
Check August WiFi Smart Lock on Amazon
Level Bolt
Level Bolt is the Touch without the touch. Same invisible form factor, same app, same motor and battery — just no capacitive sensor on the exterior, so no code entry. Phone-only smart access, plus the physical key.
For a lot of people, this is actually the right Level to buy. If you’re mostly unlocking via phone and you’re fine treating the physical key as your “oh no, the battery died” backup, you save meaningful money and get slightly longer battery life because you’re not powering the touch sensor. I’d recommend Bolt over Touch for anyone whose household is one or two people who reliably carry phones. I’d recommend Touch if you have kids, a housekeeper, a dog walker, or anyone else who needs code-based entry.
The installation story is identical to Touch, which means the same caveats about door alignment and the same multi-hour first-timer learning curve.
What’s actually wrong with it:
- You lose the main reason to spend extra on Level in the first place if you also live alone and rarely grant guest access — at that point a cheap retrofit is more practical.
- No exterior entry method other than the physical key. If you came to smart locks specifically to stop carrying keys, the Bolt hands them right back to you.
- Same Wi-Fi and app dependencies as Touch. When the Level cloud is having a bad day (it happens, rarely), remote unlock is unreliable.
August Smart Lock Pro — The Weakest of the Four
I want to be direct about this one because the marketing positions it as the flagship: in 2026, the Pro is the lock in this lineup I’d recommend least often. It’s the older Z-Wave-plus-WiFi August in a market that has largely moved past Z-Wave for entry-level smart homes. If you already run SmartThings, Hubitat, or Home Assistant with a Z-Wave stick and you specifically want local control of your lock without a cloud roundtrip, fine — it’s the only product here that can do that. For everyone else, you’re paying more for connectivity you won’t use and inheriting the same bulky retrofit body as the cheaper WiFi model.
The DoorSense magnet is included, which is genuinely nice, and local Z-Wave does keep working when your internet doesn’t — a real advantage since cutting the cable or internet line is a basic step for anyone who’s actually thought about breaking in. But the standard August WiFi model plus a cellular-backup alarm panel solves the same problem better: it gives you a path off the premises when the internet goes down, which a local Z-Wave lock alone does not.
What’s actually wrong with it:
- You’re paying a premium for a radio most buyers won’t use. The Z-Wave ecosystem has narrowed, not grown.
- Bulkier and uglier than the standard WiFi August, for no exterior benefit.
- Battery life is the same as the cheaper model, despite the price increase — the extra radio has a cost in both dollars and power draw.
- Setup has more failure modes because you’re configuring two wireless stacks.
Check August Smart Lock Pro on Amazon
Who Should Buy Which
If you own your home and care about how your front door looks: Level Lock Touch. The invisible form factor is real, the build quality justifies the price, and the capacitive touch codes give you a backup when your phone is dead.
If you rent, or you have a nice existing deadbolt you want to keep: August WiFi Smart Lock. It’s the only lock here that’s fully reversible and doesn’t force you to abandon hardware that works. For a full roundup of renter-friendly options, see Best Smart Locks for Apartments 2026.
If you own, you only need phone-based unlock, and you want to save $80: Level Bolt. The trade-off is giving up exterior codes — make sure that’s a trade you actually want.
If you’re deeply invested in Z-Wave and want local control: August Smart Lock Pro, reluctantly. Otherwise, skip it. For a broader look at all smart lock options across platforms, see Best Smart Locks 2026.
Things the Marketing Glosses Over
Wi-Fi locks and deauth attacks. Consumer Wi-Fi smart locks can be knocked off the network by cheap, widely available deauth gear. This doesn’t unlock the door by itself — a properly designed lock fails closed — but it does mean you can’t trust “I’ll get a notification if something happens” as your only security layer. The mitigations are WPA3 on your home network, segmenting IoT onto its own SSID, and pairing the lock with a hub or alarm that has cellular backup. None of that is discussed in the product pages.
Auto-lock timing is a compromise, not a feature. Set it too short and you’ll lock yourself out the moment you step onto the porch for a package. Set it too long and the door sits unlocked for minutes after you leave. I’ve settled on around 90 seconds with DoorSense confirming closure, which works for my routine. Your mileage will vary.
Battery warnings aren’t always early. Both brands have dropped me from “plenty of battery” to “replace now” faster than the advertised warning window. Keep a spare set of AAs in a drawer by the door if you’re running August, and don’t ignore the first low-battery alert on Level.
Professional installation isn’t always worth it on a smart lock. These aren’t complicated to install if your door is in good shape. What professional installation buys you, mostly, is someone else’s problem if the alignment is off. If you’re already comfortable with a drill and a chisel, save the money.
Integration With the Rest of Your Security
A smart lock is one component of a layered setup. The locks here all integrate with Apple Home, Alexa, and Google — Level more natively, August through broader platform support. What none of them do on their own is tell a monitoring center that something is wrong at 2am. For that you need a panel with cellular backup; if you haven’t thought about that layer, my home alarm comparison covers what to look for. A video doorbell at around 48 inches mounting height — the sweet spot for actually capturing faces instead of the top of a hat — is the other obvious complement; I go into that in the video doorbell roundup.
The point being: a smart lock alone, without a camera you can see who’s at the door on and an alarm that can dispatch someone if things go wrong, is a convenience product. That’s fine. Just don’t buy it thinking it replaces the other layers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I install Level Lock myself?
Yes, if you’ve replaced a deadbolt before. Plan on an hour to two hours the first time, have a Phillips #2 screwdriver and ideally a chisel on hand for strike plate adjustment, and be ready to shim if your door isn’t square. August is genuinely the easier install — about 15 minutes over your existing deadbolt.
What happens during a power outage?
These locks all run on batteries independent of house power, so an outage by itself doesn’t affect them. What an outage can do is take down your Wi-Fi, which means remote and cloud-dependent features stop working until the router comes back. Local Bluetooth unlock from your phone still works in that state. Keep the physical key available as the ultimate fallback.
Which integrates best with a smart home setup?
Level has direct HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Assistant support and doesn’t need a bridge. August supports more third-party platforms in general, including SmartThings and some alarm panels, and the Pro adds local Z-Wave if you care about that. Match the lock to the ecosystem you actually use, not the one with the longest integration list.
Are these locks as secure as a traditional deadbolt?
Mechanically, roughly equivalent — they’re Grade 2 or Grade 3 residential locks by any reasonable measure. The attack surface that a dumb deadbolt doesn’t have is the radio and the app, and that’s a real but narrow threat; most break-ins don’t involve any technical attack at all. What matters much more than the lock model is the door frame, the strike plate, and whether the long screws actually reach the stud behind the jamb.
Do I need a monthly subscription?
No. Core smart lock features — phone unlock, guest codes, auto-lock, activity log — are subscription-free on both Level and August. Subscriptions only enter the picture if you bundle them with video cameras or third-party monitoring services.
What if my phone dies and I’ve forgotten my key?
On Level Touch, you can enter a code on the exterior capacitive pad. On Level Bolt and both August models, you’re relying on your physical key. This is the scenario that should decide whether you spring for Touch over Bolt — if you and the people in your household regularly leave the house without a phone or without it charged, the code entry is worth the extra money.
How do these hold up in extreme temperatures?
Both brands are rated for typical North American outdoor conditions, roughly -20°F to 150°F in the operating specs. Battery performance does drop in hard cold — if you’re in a climate with regular sub-zero winters, expect to replace or recharge more often in those months. The retrofit August is slightly better insulated by virtue of sitting entirely on the warm interior side of the door.