Aqara Smart Lock U300 review: A lever lock for the smart home

Best Prices Today: Aqara Smart Lock U300

The Aqara Smart Lock U300 is a reminder that not all smart locks are deadbolts. The U300 is a lever-style lock that works with a spring latch. While spring latches aren’t considered as secure as deadbolts, not every door is bored for a deadbolt—think side doors, garage entries, or even interior rooms to which you want to control access. It’s also possible that a homeowner would prefer to leave their dumb deadbolt intact and replace the handle and latch element of the equation instead.

Though you wouldn’t want to use them together, the Aqara U300 matches the overall aesthetic of the Aqara Smart Lock U200 I reviewed in August, 2024. Like that deadbolt, the U300 is an all-black and quite a hefty device that comes in at a total weight of more than 3.5 pounds. Aqara doesn’t publish BHMA or ANSI ratings for the lock (don’t miss our in-depth explanation of the ANSI and BHMA standards).

You can open the Aqara Smart Lock U300 with a PIN, a fingerprint, a physical key, or an NFC card or Apple Home Key, not to mention via Aqara’s mobile app.

Installation and setup

Installation isn’t overly difficult or dramatically different from installing a smart deadbolt, but I encountered an immediate roadblock in the process because no printed manual was included in the package—nor were installation instructions provided in the Aqara app. I ultimately dug up this digital manual on Aqara’s website, which was fortunate, because there are a few small twists to the installation process here, including the need to correctly align and install the spindle that connects the two levers to the latch. Mounting posts must also be installed on the exterior escutcheon, which is where the pair of mounting bolts that hold the two halves of the lock together attach.

The remainder of the process is straightforward. A slim plate affixes to the inside of the door, and the mounting bolts attach this to the exterior escutcheon. Four small screws are then used to secure the interior escutcheon to the plate. (The lever handle can also be removed and aligned for either left- or right-hand door opening.)

The lock is powered by four AA batteries (included), which are curiously positioned both above and below the interior lock’s lever. They’re easy to access thanks to a plastic plate that covers the interior escutcheon. This plate pops off easily for battery replacements and to access various configuration buttons and setup information stickers inside. Aqara claims a 10-month life span on a quartet of fresh cells.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart locks.

The exterior escutcheon offers numerous means of ingress, including a numeric touchpad, a fingerprint reader, physical key, and NFC—including both NFC cards and Apple Home Key—not to mention the use of a mobile app. Two USB-C ports, one on either side of the exterior escutcheon, can be used to provide emergency power if the AA batteries die. The physical keyhole is hidden beneath the fingerprint reader and it’s not that easy to get to, which makes it feel like it’s designed for emergency access only; if you plan to use a physical key regularly, this probably isn’t the best choice.

Once physically installed, the lock is solid and doesn’t list. Then it’s on to electronic setup, where things get a little bit trickier.

The Aqara U300 supports numerous wireless protocols, including Bluetooth and Matter over Thread. Setup isn’t the most seamless, in part because the documentation isn’t all that well-written, but the short of it is that first you need to set up the U300 in the Aqara app (via a Bluetooth connection and a scan of one QR code), then you can add the U300 to another Matter ecosystem, such as Apple HomeKit, by pressing a button under the cover of the interior escutcheon and scanning a different QR code—which is inconveniently located right next to the Aqara QR code.

It took me a day of trial and error to get all of this to work—even the straightforward Bluetooth setup—but, with some persistence and patience, I was able to get the system running on both the Aqara and Apple Home apps without further issue.

Day-to-day use

There are aspects of working with the U300 that are great. The app is easy enough to work with, although the odd “Hold to Unlock” button feels buried at the bottom of the screen, beneath the much larger One-Time Password, User Management, and Logs buttons above it. But yes, a quick hold on that smallish button does quickly open the lock.

User management is better than you get with most smart locks, as it’s easy to see at a glance whether a user has a PIN, fingerprint, or NFC access assigned—even how many fingerprints or PINs are assigned to them. The lock supports a total of 75 PINs, 50 fingerprints, and 10 NFC records, and can support 10 Matter users. Within those limits, each user can be assigned two PINs, five fingerprints, and two NFC devices.

Users are organized into three camps: admins, general users, or temporary users. Temporary users only have access to PINs and their access can be restricted by times and dates, while both admins and general users have full-time access. Admins, meanwhile, can change lock settings; otherwise, they’re treated the same as general users.

One-time password access is procedurally generated and can be used even if you’re not connected to the lock. These codes are only good for a maximum of 20 minutes before they expire, so they’re most appropriate for contractors or other types of service workers to whom you want to grant access to your home to do a job when you can’t be there.

Because the lock has no deadbolt, it’s operationally different than most smart locks. Once a successful PIN, print, or tap of the app unlocks the door, you have only about eight seconds to open it, after which the door automatically locks again. The lever can always be rotated whether the door is unlocked or not. But without an authorized password, the lever doesn’t engage the spring latch, so rotating it does nothing.

If you miss your window on turning the lever, you must do it all over again. There’s no way to change this behavior aside from turning on Passage Mode by tapping a button on top of the interior escutcheon, but this disables the lock altogether for anywhere from 10 minutes to forever, depending on a user setting in the app. Passage Mode can be turned off by tapping the button again.

I found this lock to be quite finicky in daily use. The fingerprint reader required very careful placement of digits—and it worked better with thumbs than fingertips—or it was likely to fail to recognize the user. The U300 gives you 10 failed attempts before triggering a lockout of 1 to 30 minutes (user-configurable), and while I never had 10 failed scans in a row, I’d still advise erring on the shorter side of that time lock.

The touchpad is even more finicky, with hair-trigger action that had me accidentally double-tapping digits on multiple occasions. Yes, it’s easy to re-enter a PIN when you mess up, but residents with even mildly shaky hands will find this extremely frustrating—especially if they have to be ready to quickly get the door open after getting the go-ahead.

Other than this issue, the only other problem I had with the lock was related to logging. While the U200 offered robust logging, the U300’s logging system didn’t work at all. The manufacturer informed me that the lock must be connected to an Aqara M3 hub for logging to operate, and it was, but after a week of troubleshooting the logs were still blank. I was left to wonder if this wasn’t part of a bigger bug, because every time I opened the Aqara app’s logs section, it often defaulted to a date a month prior instead of the current date.

Should you buy the Aqara Smart Lock U300?

The Aqara U300 has a lot going for it and may be fine for the most casual users–and not just buyers with a strong preference for the broader Aqara smart home ecosystem. But it also has enough limitations to merit caution, particularly at its $230 asking price.

Best Prices Today: Aqara Smart Lock U300