Savant vs Control4 – Which Smart Home Solution is Best?

Savant and Control4 — both are exceptionally popular smart home solutions, and for good reasons. They are versatile, full-featured, and can integrate nearly all parts of your home. It doesn’t stop with the home, either. Savant and Control4’s A/V solutions are also fantastic with businesses, including conference room solutions.

But which is best? Each system has its own supporters, but what’s best will probably depend on your needs and budget. We will consider 6 areas: home theater, lighting and shades, user experience, home security, energy management, and price.

If home theater (or audio/video integration throughout the house) is high on your list, then you want Savant. Savant will cost more, but they use higher quality hardware for a super polished experience. Much of this is due to embedding Apple products into their setup, such as the Apple TV, Mini, and iPad. If you’re a fan of Apple products, then you’ll feel right at home with a Savant setup.

If you would describe yourself somewhat as an audiophile (or videophile), then Savant does have the premium setup to deliver the goods. For example, it supports IP audio (over ethernet) which delivers 100% lossless, pristine audio even over long distances in your home. They also can provide speakers with custom grills and an exceptionally smart remote control with their Pro X2.

Savant also supports IP video, which allows for both small and large-scale video distribution with integrated controls.

Control4 has definitely made progress in this area in recent years. Their whole-home audio and home theater solutions will also please and integrate with all of the major music streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, AmazonMusic, iHeartRADIO and more.

Control4 does offer custom speaker grills to blend with existing furniture, however, they don’t currently integrate high-quality IP audio format.

Lighting and smart window shades are equally impressive with both systems. Some of the features include: preset scenes, schedules for lighting/shades, customizable lightbulbs with millions of colors, sleek lighting wall controls, and all accessible through your smartphone app. A lot of powerful features here that are sure to please nearly everyone.

Control4 used to have the lead with wireless wall controls, which was a big selling point for retro-fitting a home without opening the walls up for new wiring. But Savant has wifi enabled light controls now too, so they’re equal there now.

Where Savant does stand out, though, is the user interface. Their lighting customization in the app is outstanding. You take a picture of your room and then tap on each light in the picture to control it!

Another feature customers love with Savant home automation is how easy it is to program their own scenes. To create a “scene”, you can choose one or multiple rooms and then customize everything from lighting and shade levels to the room temperature and entertainment systems. Control4 can create custom scenes but it’s not nearly so easy to do for the average user. Creating preset scenes allows you to tap a single button in the Savant app to get the house ready for dinner guests, a party, going to bed, or for “mockupancy” which is where you set the house to simulate occupancy through lighting, shading, and the TV while you’re away from home.

A number of years ago, Savant redesigned their user interface. It’s sleek, sexy, and powerful. It makes it easy to show off your smart home system to friends. The Savant Pro Remote X2 is simply gorgeous with a touch-screen and can handle voice commands.

While Savant was focusing on creating a sleek interface and mobile app, Control4 focused more on improving backend functionality, such as integrating with more 3rd party products (Nest, Alexa, MyQ Garage, Ring cameras).

Fast forward to today, and the differences between them have lessened. Savant has added support for many popular 3rd party products like Alexa and Ring cameras. And Control4 has redesigned their mobile app to look more modern, including an updated remote control called the Neeo remote that also has a touch-screen.

However, the Control4 remote does NOT have voice controls. Once you get used to telling your Savant remote what to do, it’s hard to go back.

On the other hand, Control4 still has more 3rd party products that it supports than Savant. This may or may not be an issue. If you are having Savant installed throughout your entire house, then it probably won’t matter because all the hardware installed will work with Savant. But if you are trying to integrate a smart home solution with a variety of pre-existing products that you’ve purchased (that are less mainstream), then it’s more likely that Control4 will support them.

Feel free to contact us about what 3rd party products will work with Savant. For most customers, we find that Savant already supports the products they need.

Both Savant and Control4 integrate home security into their systems nicely. Through their smartphone apps you can view camera feeds and video doorbells, speech over an intercom, arm/disarm the system, lock/unlock doors, open the garage door, and more.

Savant does have the upper hand in this category when it comes to security level access. With 3 levels of access it gives you greater control over who has access to do what. This is a great feature if you have workers, staff, or friends that you may need to grant a level of access to.

As we’ve seen Savant and Control4 match in many categories. However, Savant has a major area that Control4 is not involved in, and that is energy management solutions. Called Savant Power, it brings your home’s electrical system into the 21st century.

What does it do? Savant power panels allow for energy monitoring, optimization, and energy grid independence when combined with home solar and a battery solution. This really is a huge game changer for the modern home. Your entire home’s electrical panel and system can now be easily controlled through a Savant app.

Why is it helpful? Well, energy efficiency is a big cost saver for a larger house. Not only with newly built homes, but even with existing homes, greater efficiency pays for itself over time. This is especially true if you’re looking to have a more energy sustainable home, integrating solar power.

With Savant Power, Savant has expanded their technology outside of just smart home automation and into the world of smart energy.

If price is one of your biggest factors, then Control4 is the cheaper solution. Savant can cost up to 25% more. As mentioned, Savant uses higher-quality hardware and uses many Apple products. Savant is also aimed more toward being an entire-house solution, and not a 1 or 2 room solution. Of course this raises the cost.

For most customers we recommend Savant. Why?

Savant has also made improvements in catering to smaller setups that cover just a room or two with their S2 host solution. This makes allows Savant to better compete with Control4 for small solutions. However, if keeping the cost down is a primary goal, then Control4 will still be cheaper most of the time.

Although Savant usually costs more, the superior user interface and superb audio/video solutions more than make up for it. Our customers are always happy with the quality and polish of Savant’s system.