These are the gadgets that make my home smart. If you clicked on this, you're probably wondering what I use because you've begun looking into smart home products and you're so overwhelmed you haven't bought anything yet, or you've already bought a few devices and now you're wondering how to get them to work together or be accessible in the same place.

The smart home market is highly convoluted right now, with several different communications standards being thrown around, many competing product lines with or without hubs that do or don't integrate with an already existing hub, etc., but there is one standard that cuts through the weeds, though at a cost: Apple HomeKit.

Apple HomeKit is very reliable in the sense that if you see the HomeKit logo on a product it means you can pick it off the shelf, bring it home, open it up, and it will work out of the box directly with your Apple Home app without any other peripherals, and it will probably stay working for a long time. The downside is the products available with the HomeKit logo on the box are few and far between, due to Apple's strict requirements for connectivity, reliability, and security to don the HomeKit badge. As a result, many manufacturers forego the considerably more expensive HomeKit certification and settle for Alexa/Google Home/Samsung Smartthings logos on their boxes.

So, in a word, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, go for HomeKit whenever possible (and financially feasible). For everything else, there's Alexa. And before you say "How dare you recommend Amazon!!", just remember that 90% of products that work with Alexa are also compatible with Google Home as well, so choose whatever corporate God you worship and have at it, but in my experience if you want wider functionality Alexa's skills are highly appreciated (when they work).

Without further ado, here's what I've amassed so far: