4 Best Smart Toilets, Lab-Tested and Reviewed

It depends on your needs and budget. If you’re not sure whether you’re ready to invest in a smart toilet—or if it’s not in your budget right now—a bidet attachment is a great alternative, says Katy Halevah, who leads CR’s testing of toilets. A bidet attachment offers personal cleansing, but it won’t include premium features you’ll see on a smart toilet, such as a heated seat or a warm-air dryer. They’re easy to install on existing toilets and usually cost under $100, making them a budget-friendly and convenient way to experience the benefits of a bidet.

A step up from a bidet attachment is a bidet seat. Pricewise, it falls between a bidet attachment and a smart toilet. A bidet seat is a good choice if you want more upscale features without replacing your entire toilet. (You’ll still have to remove your toilet seat.) Depending on the model, bidet seats offer additional features such as heated seats, warm-air dryers, nightlights, and automatic lid opening and closing. They fall into two types: nonelectric and electric. Electric bidet seats typically have more features but require access to an electrical outlet and might require more installation effort than a nonelectric seat.

If you’re looking for the most luxe bathroom experience and you have more room in your budget, a smart toilet is the way to go. Compared with a bidet attachment or seat, it offers the most complete set of amenities: bidet, warm-air dryer, heated seat, deodorizers, nightlights, and automated functions, including auto-flush and automatic opening and closing of the toilet seat lid. Some models also dispense a liquid foam barrier that rests on the bowl water, designed to reduce splashing and trap odors, and feature self-cleaning functions for the bidet wand and toilet bowl. Smart toilets also offer more options for personalization. Different users can save, for instance, their preferred settings for water pressure or the heated seat’s temperature.

Before you buy a smart toilet, make sure that your bathroom has the resources to support it. You’ll need access to a 125-volt ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) outlet in your bathroom, says Bill Strang, president of corporate strategy, e-commerce, and retail at the toilet manufacturer Toto. (A GFCI outlet protects you from electric shocks and is required by code in bathrooms.) 

It’s also important to measure your bathroom space before purchasing a smart toilet. In particular, make sure that the rough-in dimensions of your toilet and bathroom match, Strang says. (A toilet rough-in is the distance between the finished wall in your bathroom and the center of your toilet’s waste pipe opening.) While most standard bathrooms have a 12-inch rough-in, some older homes may have a 10-inch one, and a 12-inch smart toilet won’t fit in that smaller bathroom, Strang says.

Some smart toilets are tankless and require adequate pressure from your water supply to flush properly, according to guidelines from the online kitchen and bathroom fixtures brand Horow. If your home has low water pressure, your smart toilet might not deliver a strong, consistent flush that washes waste away. If the pressure is too high, parts of your smart toilet might wear out faster, and your toilet could leak.

Compared with a traditional toilet, a smart toilet also has more parts that will require regular maintenance. You’ll need to replace the bidet’s water filter and the deodorizer’s air filter periodically. Batteries for the remote control and the toilet’s backup flush system (if available) also need to be replaced. And if the smart toilet has a foam “shield” function, the cleaning solution that provides that barrier will need to be replenished. 

Customer support is another important factor. Because smart toilets contain more electronic components, there are more potential points of failure. If a part malfunctions or wears out, you’ll probably need to work with the manufacturer to obtain replacement parts or a whole new toilet, Halevah says. 

The best-performing smart toilets in our tests deliver strong flushes that effectively remove waste. Many also impressed us with their bidet functions. While one of the models is on the pricier side, costing around $3,000, we also have a top-scoring choice that’s under $1,000.

In our evaluation of smart toilets, we consider a toilet’s ability to remove solid waste, clean the bowl, and flush quietly. We also assess how well the bidet cleans the user. An Overall Score is calculated based on a smart toilet’s performance in each category.

For solid waste removal, we gauge whether the automatic flushes of a smart toilet can deliver a flush strong enough to effectively evacuate solid waste from the bowl and into the drainage system. (We use marble-sized plastic beads, weighted sponges, and water-filled condoms to simulate waste.) High-scoring models can move these items effectively in one flush and are less likely to clog.

To assess how well the bidet cleans the user, we run each bidet on its highest setting for 30 seconds against a clear plexiglass panel spread with Nutella. (Quite a visual, we know.) Then we use a computer program to analyze how much Nutella (waste) the bidet stream removed.

We assess each smart toilet’s bowl-cleaning capability using two tests. For the first, we apply red water-based paint to the front bottom of the bowl just above the waterline and then flush it twice to see how much paint the flush removes. For the next test, we draw a line around the bowl about an inch under the rim with a water-soluble pen, then measure how much of the pen marking remains after a flush. The more paint and pen markings removed, the better a toilet scores for bowl cleaning. 

Bowl cleaning shows how well a toilet’s flush removes waste from the bowl’s surface, leaving it free of residue. While some smart toilets might come with additional features, such as the foam "shield" described above, we don’t use these features in our bowl-cleaning tests, preferring to judge by the toilet’s flushes alone.

For noise, we put each smart toilet in a quiet chamber and use a decibel meter to measure how loud its flushes are. A high-scoring toilet is quieter and better suited for nighttime use, when noise can disrupt people’s sleep.