Best WiFi Meat Thermometers [Tested]

We tested the top selling Wi-Fi thermometers to tell you everything you need to know about purchasing the best thermometer for your smoker or grill.

Everything comes with Wi-Fi today. You don’t need a Wi-Fi enabled fridge to tell your Wi-Fi enabled toaster what the ideal bread settings are for your breakfast, but you may well need a Wi-Fi thermometer if you enjoy grilling or own a smoker.

Your classic probe thermometer has the temperature information you want, but a Wi-Fi thermometer puts that information in your hands anywhere, not just when you’re standing by the smoker.

In this report, we break down what you need to know about these smart wireless devices and reveal our Top Five Picks for 2022.

☆ = Half star | *No fan controller capabilities

ABOUT WI-FI SMART THERMOMETERS

SELECTING THE BEST PIT CONTROLLER AND TEMPERATURE MONITOR

If you want to cook low and slow, you need to maintain a temperature around 225° for several hours, maybe all day if you’re cooking a whole brisket. Too low a temperature won’t cook your food and can put you in the danger zone for bacterial growth. Too high a temperature and you overcook the meat into a dry and chewy mess.

If your life involves more than sitting by the smoker, you need a way to monitor and maintain your pit temperature while you’re off doing other things.

A Wi-Fi thermometer for your smoker lets you check the temperature of your meat and your cooking environment from your phone at a glance. These devices feature multiple probes, so you can keep an eye on each piece of meat and your ambient temperature simultaneously. You can configure the phone app to send you alerts if one of the thermometers goes too high or too low. It’s like getting an emergency call, “This is Meat! I’m in trouble here…”

Pit (Thermostatic) Controller

These fans turn on as the temperature drops, adding air to the fire which increases the temperature. It’s like a thermostat for your house, except running hotter. The more advanced models let you create more complicated programs so you run the smoker at different temperatures for different segments of the cook.

For control that’s even more automated, [almost] all these thermometer systems can control a pit fan.

Bluetooth Connectivity

Wi-Fi is a step up over Bluetooth thermometers at this level of complexity. Bluetooth links up one phone to your thermometer with a direct connection, limited to about 100 feet minus losses to walls. A Wi-Fi thermometer reporting data to the cloud has basically infinite range, so you can keep an eye on your pork butt while running to the store. Some of the best products here do both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth so you can use them to their full potential at home or take them out camping where there’s no Wi-Fi without sacrificing performance.

Wi-Fi Thermometers [Tested & Reviewed]

PRODUCT REVIEWS FOR 2023 (UPDATED: 04/18/23)

1. Signals — Best for Grilling

ThermoWorks is a name that makes us jump up and take notice. They make our the best instant-read thermometer and our favorite Bluetooth model, so we walked in with very high hopes for their Wi-Fi thermometer, the Signals. Recent update: Signals secures its top spot for grilling with a new version of the ThermoWorks App and Cloud software.

The Signals supports four thermistor probes with a temperature range of -58°‒572°. It includes three food probes and one ambient probe with grill clip. In your first signal that the company put ease of use first, they’ve got color-coded rings for each end of each probe, so you can see at a glance which one is which. As you might expect from Thermoworks, the probes are very accurate, advertising ±1.8° in the usual cooking range. Our testing says that’s conservative — we found them within 0.7° on all our comparisons to the calibrated reference thermometer.

User Experience

The base station is super-easy to use. You get a full view of all four channels at their alarm setpoints. Setting those alarms is as easy as selecting a channel, pressing set, then adjusting the number with the arrow keys.  There’s a volume button for the alarms ranging from muted to quite loud (they say 90 dB, but we didn’t haul out the decibel meter). The quality of the base station is what makes us pick the Signals as Best for Grilling. You can run everything you need without needing to break out your phone.

Connectivity

Phone connection is solid, though. It connects through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so you’re good on the beach or your backyard.

With the new version of the app, you can assign colors to each channel to match the ring on the probe itself, making the graphs more readable. Setting alarms is easy, and all alarms go to both your phone and the base station. You can view temperature graphs in the app too, and save an unlimited number in their new cloud system, or download your data as a .csv file for local storage. The app and cloud software now include a notes section so you can better log your cooks. We never had too many complaints about the app, but the latest update wiped two of them away.

Pit (Fan) Controller

The Signals can control the ThermoWorks Billows fan if you want to do an automated cook, but it’s very much an add-on. It runs its own ambient probe, and you set the temperature. It automatically sets alarms 25° in both directions of that point. It works, though the app isn’t that good and sends up a lot of questionable alerts. ThermoWorks did add lid detection to their software, so it doesn’t kick the fan up to maximum when you open the grill anymore. If you care to see more watch our Billows review on YouTube.com.

Durability

The Signals’s durability is one of its strongest suits. It feels rock-solid, and sits up conveniently on a flat surface with its nice grippy base. It’s rated as IP66, which is completely dust-resistant and water resistant “against powerful jets”, though not waterproof. Our testing showed that it kept working fine when we ran it under the tap (which we do not recommend).

The battery is rated for 16 hours (we got 18) and recharges via USB-C. On the questionable side, it takes 12 hours to fully charge the battery, which seems excessive.

On the Whole

The Signals is great by itself and good with its app. It’s got the right features for a variety of situations, and the first-rate base unit will hold up for the long haul. The Billows fan control isn’t up to the standard of the Fireboard, but it’ll work for your smoking needs too. The Signals is the best Wi-Fi thermometer to have at the grill.

2. Fireboard 2 — Best for BBQ

Probes

The Fireboard 2 (and the original Fireboard) supports six probes, though the basic set comes with three. Two are food probes; the other is an ambient probe with included grill clip. The probes are 100K thermistors for fast response on a temperature range of 0°‒572°. The Fireboard also supports 10K thermistors for low-temperature applications (-58°‒248°) or RTD PT-100 probes for wide temperature ranges (-58°‒716°) at a slower response time. Each channel can have its probe type configured in the app if you’re doing something that requires multiple probe types. Fireboard claims the included probes are accurate to with 0.7°, and our testing against a calibrated thermometer shows they’re even better.

LCD Display

The on-board display covers the whole front face of the Fireboard 2 — a big improvement over the tiny display on the original Fireboard. It has multiple view modes, allowing you to see one channel’s current temperature, a graph of one channel’s temperature over time, all six current temperatures, or a hybrid view with one graph and six readouts.

There aren’t any alerts here: for that you need to go to the phone app. That phone app is the number one reason to get the Fireboard 2. It syncs as easy as pressing “Add Fireboard” in the app.

Connectivity

It connects with both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for use on the road and at home. The app shows you the readings from all the channels, with the easy option to label each channel and set alerts for high or low temperatures. Those alerts can come in as notifications in the app, emails, or SMS messages. You can also view your current cook session as a graph, with the labels helping it make sense. All this data gets saved to the cloud, either directly from the smoker thermometer over Wi-Fi, or via your phone’s data connection on Bluetooth. One nice feature for those looking to improve their craft is the ability to annotate the graphs.

Notes in context are a great way to remember what worked and what didn’t. If you want a local copy, you can download everything as a .csv file.

Three Models

The Fireboard 2 comes in multiple versions. The basic version comes in at $189, while the Fireboard 2 Drive adds a fan control port and costs $249.

The basic version can run a fan with the Drive Fan Control Cable (for $79), so if you want to run a fan, the Drive version saves $20, and you don’t have an expensive cable to lose.

Coming in August, the Fireboard 2 Pro (no price yet) will have the fan control port, but will swap out the six 2.5 mm probe inputs for three inputs for Type K thermocouple probes. Those Type K probes can operate at extremely high temperatures (2,012°!), suitable for monitoring wood stoves or a pizza oven.

The Fireboard 2 Drive (or basic model with a Drive Fan Control Cable, if you already had one from an original Fireboard) can run any 12-Volt fan with a 2.5 mm barrel plug, including the Fireboard Drive Blower. Assign the fan control to any channel, then set the target temperature. When your ambient probe drops below that level, the Drive activates the fan proportionally to push the fire back up towards the target temperature. The Fireboard 2 also senses the big temperature change of taking the lid off and not instantly max out the fan, which is a nice extra.

Fan Drive Controller

One thing that sets the Fireboard 2 apart from other units is Drive Programs, which can change your temperature automatically over the course of your cook. Let’s say you’re smoking a pork butt, and want to power through the stall. Start with the Drive holding ambient temperature at 225°. When the pork butt thermometer reaches 150°, change the setpoint to 310°; then when the pork butt thermometer reaches 170°, change the setpoint back to 225° for the finish.

Durability

One last thing on the Fireboard 2 is that the durability is there. We set it out in the Arizona summer sun for hours and sprayed it with the hose for a while, but neither did a thing to stop it. It’s not waterproof, but it’s good enough to stand up to a spilled drink or a little rain.

Summary

The Fireboard 2 is the best smoker thermometer for BBQ. It’s got the versatility, programmability, and durability to make anything possible. If you plan to use a fan control, it’s even better. The only downside is that it’s really tied to the app. You can’t access more than pretty basic features without it, so the Fireboard 2 is always a heavyweight choice, even when you don’t need its full power.

3. Flame Boss 500

Where the Fireboard and the Signals are thermometers that got upgraded to be thermostatic fan controllers, the Flame Boss did it the other way around. What started as a thermostatic controller with just enough thermometer capability to do its job has expanded into a full-on Wi-Fi thermometer. You can see our full review of the Flame Boss 500 and 400 comparison here.

The Flame Boss 500 comes with one meat probe and one ambient probe, but supports up to four probes. It uses RTD probes with a rated maximum temperature of 475°. The kit also includes the fan unit and mounting kit — word of warning: there’s a different version with a Kamado mounting kit, so grab the right one for your smoker.

Device

The base unit gives you the basic info you need at a glance: current temperature on all thermometer channels, plus the setpoint for the fan controller.

User Experience

You can set individual alarms on each channel, plus an interesting option to shift the fan controller into Keep Warm mode when you reach the target temperature (e.g. when Meat 1 reaches 200°, drop the pit temperature to 205°).

The bad news: just because you can set all of these things on the base station does not mean you should. Anything more advanced than setting the pit temperature is like programming a 1980s VCR. You should definitely use the app.

Application

The Flame Boss app definitely does things right.

You’ve got full controls for all the alarms (which come in as notifications) plus the fan controller. If you’ve got an internet connection, all of your cook information is stored in the cloud, with well-laid out graphs for future reference.

Connectivity

Getting the Flame Boss connected to the Wi-Fi can be a bit of an adventure. One important note: it only works on 2.4 GHz wireless. Most routers do both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, but if you’re in a crowded area, 2.4 GHz wireless might be dicey. You can punch in your password on the front panel, one character at a time, or start up the Flame Boss’s internal wireless, log into it with your phone, enter your password there, then switch Wi-Fi modes back to regular. If this all sounds complicated, well, it is.

Get it going and it works, but it’s not as easy as the Bluetooth models. The internal Wi-Fi means you can take it on the road and use it in Direct mode (minus the cloud stuff), but setup is still a little rough.

Pit Fan

As a fan controller, the Flame Boss 500 is extraordinary. Controlling a fire is hard. It’s driving an indirect control with the fan, there’s an inconsistent delay from the when the fan spins up to when the temperature changes, and the environment changes as your fuel burns out over time. Through some wizardry, the Flame Boss does it amazingly well.

It holds the tightest range of temperature we’ve seen in our testing. It has lid-open detection and sends you a notification when it kicks on and off, just in case there’s a problem with your lid and airflow.

Quality

Build quality on the Flame Boss 500 is solid, and the magnetic mount is a useful feature I wish everybody would use. A big downside to the Flame Boss is that there is no internal battery. You’ve got to either plug into an outlet, or buy the external battery pack.

Conclusion

You buy the Flame Boss 500 because you want a great pit controller and get the bonus of a good smoker thermometer system. If you’re not a computer person, stuff the manual in a six-pack and hand it to someone who is, then let the meat smoke itself.

4. BBQ Guru UltraQ

Good design for computer systems isn’t about jamming more data in front of your face. Most of the time, it’s about cooking down the data into the information you actually need, then giving you the opportunity to dig deeper. A lot of these Wi-Fi digital thermometers are systems by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts. The UltraQ is a system that tries its best to make smoking meat sensible for folks who don’t live inside a smoker.

Pit Fan

One thing BBQ Guru does well is to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions. They’ve got two sizes of fan and dozens of mounting kits for different grills and smokers. You punch in your grill model, and their system comes up with a custom package to fit your situation.

Installing one of these package is as painless as possible, not to mention the significantly reduced probability of wrecking your grill.

Probes

The basic kit comes with one meat probe and one pit probe; the system supports four probes total. The probes are thermocouples, and the company rates them at a pretty awful ±5° in normal cooking ranges. We found them to be better than that, but not brilliant. The probes are advertised as dishwasher-safe, which is a surprising plus.

Device / Display

The base unit is great for displaying information. There’s a big LED ring on the outside. It’s blue when the pit temperature is low, red in cooking range, pulsing on the edges when the fan runs, and flashing red when the pit temperature is too high.

This is the critical piece of information, and you can see it from across the street. Get close, and there’s an LCD display that can show any or all of the temperature channels, with the color-coded crossbar of the Q indicating what channel you’re seeing.

You can set the pit temperature and alarms for each channel on the device, but a clock radio has better controls. How did they get the display so good, and the controls so bad?

Before moving on to the app, I’ll note that the UltraQ comes with a really nice mounting bracket. It makes the display easy to see and offers multiple mounting options for easy positioning.

Application / Connectivity

The UltraQ connects to its app via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. You get the usual array of digital thermometer data plus easy settings for alarms and pit temperature. If you’ve got Wi-Fi setup, your data syncs automatically to the cloud for easy social sharing using sharemycook.com.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to assign names to the probes, so the graphs don’t make as much sense as they should.

The app is definitely the way to go for control, but it doesn’t have the thought put into it that the on-board display had.

Pit Fan

The fan control is the other main reason to grab the UltraQ. Their two fans (the Pit Viper and Pit Bull) do their job well, and have a damper for adjusting the overall airflow or shutting it off altogether at the end of your cook.

One very nice feature BBQ Guru has designed is Ramp Mode, which feathers down the pit temperature as your food temperature moves towards its alarm setpoint. This gets you a fine level of control over the end of your cook and protection against overcooking. UltraQ has lid detection too, so you don’t have to sweat checking on your food.

Quality

Build quality on the UltraQ is solid. I especially appreciate the dishwasher-safe probes and the excellent mount. The base unit is water resistant, but not waterproof, and it doesn’t love the sun.

You need external power for this one, so plan to smoke near an outlet or spring for an external battery pack.

Conclusion

In summary, the UltraQ has brilliant parts and OK parts.

I love the base unit’s display, I love the variety of mounting kits available for the fan, and I love the Ramp Mode for smoothly finishing a cook, but I don’t love the controls or the app.

5. Inkbird IBBQ-4T

Setup

Setup on the Inkbird was reasonably straightforward. I downloaded the app, set up an account, and fired up the base station. It connected immediately, then asked for my Wi-Fi password in the app. I see in the manual that there’s a whole procedure for dealing with problems on connection, but it went extremely smooth for me.

One oddity is that the app asks for more permissions than most. Digging a little deeper, it looks like this app runs a larger system of home automation devices and asks for everything that any of them needs. Another important note: the Inkbird can only connect to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi with WPA/WPA2-PSK encryption.

Device

Base Unit

The base unit is very simple: four covered probe ports, one covered charging port, and one button. The screen shows the current temperature on all four probes. Press the button once to turn on a backlight temporarily for easy reading. There’s a battery gauge, but be warned: it’s pretty rudimentary. At below 20% battery, it says LOW, above it shows as Full.

There is no way to set any alerts on the base station — everything is in the app. An alarm does sound on the base station when a timer or temperature alert goes off, but it’s pretty quiet. With the unit outside, I could barely hear it over relatively quiet music, even with the door open. You can mute the base station alarm in the app.

Probes

The Inkbird comes with four angled probes. They are color-coded so you can match the probe to the plug, which is nice. There are colors in the app that match the probe colors in the package, but they don’t automatically assign. You’d have to plug the right probe into the right socket to get those to match, and there’s no indication anywhere as to which color should go where. One thing that’s nice about the Inkbird is that the probes snap in hard to make a positive lock. There’s no worry here about connectors slipping.

I tested the probes for accuracy against the Thermoworks Calibrated Reference Thermometer by suspending both probes in the water with the High-Tech Science Gantry. The verdict: great! The Inkbird reads within 1° of the reference value, maybe a little bit better. The probes register pretty quickly too — not instant-read, but faster than some competitors.

The App

Utility

The Inkbird app can run a large number of automation products, so there’s an outside layer of the app for running multiple devices and making them talk to each other. I don’t have any other products, so I can’t speak to the quality of the automation side.

Jumping into the BBQ portion of the app shows a pretty standard view of all four probes with current temperature, temperature alerts, and timers. You also get the real battery status on the base unit. The settings menu offers the opportunity to calibrate each individual probe, adjust the backlight delay on the base unit, mute the base unit, and change localization settings.

Alarms & Timers

Each of the four probes can run a countdown timer with individually selectable sounds. One interesting feature I haven’t seen on other devices is a box to set a message on each timer. This way, when the timer goes off, you can tell your future self what to do with that information (flip the meat, check the potatoes, etc). The timer goes off on both the base unit and the app.

Each probe can also have temperature alerts. There is a wide variety of presets for different meats and grilling situations. You can start with a preset and adjust it, or create your own. Meat presets have only a maximum temperature alert, while chamber presets have maximum and minimum temperature alerts. The temperature alerts come through the app at a reasonable volume and include a message that explains what alert is going off.

Visualization

Here’s where things fall down a little for the Inkbird. You can view a graph of any individual probe or all four together. Each day is a new session, and you can’t change that. This is less than useful for overnight cooks, or for if you test out the device before starting to cook.

The view is a real problem. It jumps around automatically to the current time (or midnight if you’re looking at the past), so you can’t set it down without it changing on you. The view is locked to portrait mode, so the temperature range on the graph is gigantic compared to the time range. You can’t zoom either, so you’re stuck with a temperature range from -100°‒900° and a time range of 75 minutes. That’s the opposite of good. All the data is crammed into a tiny vertical range, and you’ve got to scroll to see it.

You can export the data from anyone probe as a CSV file, but you have to do each probe individually. You can also export a picture of the bad graph of all four probes, but it’s no better than taking a screenshot.

Build Quality

This thing feels like an absolute rock. With the rubber covers over all the port connectors, it should be pretty resistant to water. Charging is via a USB-C connector, and battery life seems solid. Four hours of use have dropped the battery meter by 5%.

Conclusion

The Inkbird is basically very good. It’s accurate, easy to set up, and easy to use. My complaints are pretty limited. The alarms are too quiet, and the data visualization is lousy, but that’s it. There’s no option for a thermostatic pit controller, so it’s limited in that direction, but if you don’t need that, the Inkbird IBBQ-4T is a solid value for the price.

6. Tappecue Touch

Here’s one for the person who puts the Geek in Smoking Meat Geeks. The Touch is the newest version of the original Wi-Fi smoker thermometer and keeps getting better. With the new Cruise Control fan and controller, it now offers thermostatic control.

Probes

The Touch comes in a variety of packages with two to six thermistor probes, measuring -40°‒572°. It has four ports, but supports up to 8 inputs with splitters or with an interesting dual probe that senses both at the tip for meat and at the curve of the shaft for ambient temperature. Probes are rated to within 1°, which jibes with our testing.

Base Unit

The base unit now features a touch screen display showing all of your temperatures on a color-coded screen.

You’ve got the stylus-based touch screen for control locally, but the screen is a bit finicky, and is best used to punch in your Wi-Fi network and password so you can hand off control to the app. If you’re away from home, you can use the Tappecue’s internal router to connect directly to your phone in Offline Mode.

Application

The app is bare-bones but effective, with the usual displays and alerts.

There’s a nice library of meat types built-in so you can set up the right set of alerts automatically. The graphs are good, with a nice notes feature. At the end of a session, the Tappecue will email you a file with your temperature information. There is a cloud service for storing your session records, but they charge for more than a trial set of sessions.

Pit Fan

The Tappecue Cruise Control is a thermostatic fan add-on. They have two CFM options coming it at either 10 or 20 CFMs. In a nod to the very modular and expandable nature of the Tappecue, you can run four of these at once if you wanted to. Control is adequate, but pretty bare bones. There’s no lid detection, so you need to stop the fan manually before opening the lid.

Design

The Tappecue has an internal battery rated for 25 hours of operation. Overall, build quality is spotty. The main control unit is solidly built and water-resistant, but the details are off. The splitters are fiddly, and make the readouts go wild if you move them the wrong way. The Cruise manual tells you that you might need to razor out some of the gasket to make the splitter fit. That manual and the one for the base unit are, uh, questionable. At best.

Capabilities

One thing that makes the Tappecue unique, and a good choice for someone who wants to really dig into this sort of thing is the public API. If you like programming and barbecue, prepare to go hog-wild. There are users on the forums that have done some pretty amazing things with the Tappecue, so if that’s your thing, dig in. To see our complete review of the Tappecue Touch click here.

Summary

On the whole, the Tappecue is an idiosyncratic labor of love. It’s for the folks who want to really dig in and do it their way.

WI-FI Thermometer Buyer’s Guide

Why the bi-metal thermometer that came with your grill sucks.

Bi-metal thermometers and gauges that come with your grill or smoker can’t be trusted.

The coil method they use is not nearly as accurate as more advanced digital thermometers, and the thermometers are usually built to poor quality standards. As a result, these kinds of bi-metal dial thermometers unreliable and prone to very inaccurate temperature readings, often off by up to 50 degrees! They’re also quite slow, taking 30 seconds to a minute to read the final temperature.

Hopefully, you were only planning on using these gauges for monitoring the ambient temperature of the grill. Even if they were accurate, they aren’t designed for using on meat – which is why they sit in the lid of the grill, way too high up to actually tell you even the ambient temperature of the grill.

So why even bother with them?

“It’s so hard to get that perfect bark on a brisket with a bi-metal dial gauge because they’re rarely ever accurate. I’ve tested many of them and find that they are usually of by at least 15°F and seen them off by as many as 50°F straight from the factory.”

How Many Probes Do You Need?

This number will also likely be based on what you’re cooking, but how many temperatures probes your meat thermometer comes is an essential consideration in choosing one. A good Wi-Fi BBQ thermometer should be accurate, and should feature at least two probes, though more is better. Smoking a piece of meat likely requires at least two probes, so you can monitor both the internal temperature of the meat, and the ambient temperature of the grill. If doing multiple pieces, you will want multiple probes. If you’re just grilling steaks or chicken, you can likely get away with just one probe or an instant read thermometer – same for baking and other kitchen tasks.

Simplicity & Durability

There should be alerts for high and low temperatures for each channel, and those alerts should be definable to both the base station and your phone. Temperatures and alerts should be easy to read and set from either the base station or the phone.

Wireless setup should be easy, and not require punching in a lot of data into a few buttons. The data produced from the thermometer should be easily accessible and annotatable. The device should be able to operate without a Wi-Fi network if needed.

A fan control unit should effectively control temperature to a narrow band. The controller should recognize highly unusual problems like the lid being open and throw up an alert instead of just slamming the fan to maximum.

A Wi-Fi thermometer should be able to stand up to the ordinary vicissitudes of barbecue life: rain, heat, cold, falls, and more. There are enough wires around with the probes, so an internal battery is preferred.

If you’re looking for something a little cheaper and like the idea of wireless cooking, check out the results from our wireless probe thermometer testing.