Best Smart Plugs & Power Strips for Working From Home

A smart plug looks like a $15 novelty for turning a lamp on with your voice, but for a WFH desk it earns its keep through two unsexy jobs: scheduling and energy monitoring. Scheduling kills the 'forgot to turn off the second monitor again' guilt and the white-noise machine that ran for 14 hours straight. Energy monitoring exposes the phantom load you are paying for around the clock - a docking station, an always-on speaker, a printer, the second display in standby - and most desks are quietly idling at 25-80W of draw 24/7. The right plug for a desk depends on three choices. First is the protocol. Matter, ratified in 2023 and shipping in volume from 2024 onward, is the standard worth holding out for: it lets one plug work natively across Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and SmartThings without proprietary hubs or per-ecosystem reconfiguration when you change phones. Wi-Fi-only Alexa plugs are cheaper but lock you to one ecosystem. Thread-based plugs (Eve Energy is the canonical example) need a Thread border router, which most newer Apple TV 4K, HomePod mini, Echo 4th gen, and Nest Hub 2nd gen units already provide. Second is energy monitoring. Not every plug includes it, and a plug without it cannot show you the phantom load that justifies the purchase. Look for plugs that report instantaneous wattage and historical kWh, not just runtime. The Kasa KP125M, Tapo P115/P110M, Eve Energy, and Meross Matter Smart Plug all include real metering. The Tapo P125M, Amazon Smart Plug, and most budget multipacks do not. Third is form factor. A single Matter plug runs $15-30 and controls one device. A smart power strip with individually controllable outlets (the Kasa HS300 is the standard) gives you scheduling and per-outlet energy monitoring across an entire desk plus surge protection in a single package. For a six-device desk (monitor, dock, lamp, speaker, printer, charger) the strip is the cleaner answer. Capacity matters: every plug on this list is rated 15A / 1800W in the US, more than enough for any desk device including a space heater. Two specific scenarios to plan around. If you have a docking station that wakes the whole desk on press, put the dock on a smart plug and schedule a hard-off at midnight - even MacBook docks pull 5-12W in standby. If you live with a surge-prone region (lightning, frequent outages), prioritize the smart power strip route since most single smart plugs do not include real surge protection. Finally, skip the no-name $5-per-plug multipacks on Amazon. They run on cloud-only firmware that depends on a vendor server that may disappear in two years, and several have shipped with security holes that exposed local networks. Stick to TP-Link Kasa, TP-Link Tapo, Amazon, Eve, or Meross.