The 3 Best Wireless Grill Thermometers of 2024, Tested & Reviewed

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.

We tested 19 wireless grill thermometers over six months to find the most accurate picks.

In This Article

Food & Wine/Will Dickey

During my time in restaurant kitchens, I spent countless tedious, sleepless hours watching over smoking, grilling, or slow-roasting projects. I now bemoan even the thought of monitoring a temperature for hours. Thankfully, the best wireless grill thermometers offer some freedom from the tyranny of the standard meat thermometer, allowing you to walk away, take on other tasks, or maybe even nap during an all-night cook.

Before the popularity of wireless thermometers, checking in on your long-cooking food meant opening the cooker every so often to check your progress with a probe thermometer. Opening the lid releases precious heat, slowing the cooking time and making temperatures uneven. A wireless grill thermometer alleviates the problem, taking constant readings from inside a closed oven, grill, or smoker. These thermometers provide a clear picture of what’s happening in terms of both food temperature and ambient temperature.

I should explain that "wireless" thermometers are usually not entirely free of wires. The probes often connect to a base unit with a cord, but the base connects wirelessly to an app or remote screen, via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This lets you monitor your cook and set temperature and time alarms without standing over the grill or smoker.

We took 19 top-selling models to our lab to test for accuracy, wireless range, and more. Six months later, we continued to test them at home to see how well everything stood up to regular use. Here are our picks for the best wireless grill thermometers.

This highly accurate thermometer was able to maintain its connection well over long distances.

It's complicated to program and can't connect to Wi-Fi without a separate purchase.

The ThermoWorks Smoke came out ahead in our tests for accuracy, with less than half a degree variance in our fixed-temperature testing. The same brand's Thermapen ONE is our favorite wired meat thermometer, and it didn't come as a big surprise that the wireless version was great, too.

If you're not a fan of apps, you might love the Smoke. Rather than connecting to a phone, it's a two-piece model with a dedicated remote receiver to display temperatures and sound alarms. The base unit is wired to two probes, so you can monitor meat and fire separately. The dedicated remote gives this system great range: It maintained a connection at 350 feet in a wooded area in testing, something few others were able to do.

In six months of at-home testing, we've used the Smoke to smoke a turkey, but we used it in the oven as much as on the grill. Its loud temperature alarms can sound at the base or the receiver. We have noticed that the remote lags behind the base in updating the temperature, though only by a few seconds. It also lost connection once when the receiver was just five feet from the base, but that hasn't happened again. The most annoying problem is that you have to program everything from the base unit and have to go back out to the grill if you want to adjust anything.

If you do want Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability to control the Smoke on your phone, you can buy a Smoke Gateway and set that up easily. However, the Gateway costs as much as the thermometer itself, effectively doubling the price.

Probes: 2 | Temperature Range: -58 to 572°F | Connectivity: Included receiver (Wi-Fi available with separate gateway)

This four-probe unit and its app are accurate and intuitive to use, at a great price.

The Bluetooth connectivity is iffy from indoors to outdoors.

The ThermoPro TP25 has four separate probes that plug into its base unit, letting you monitor everything all at once: You can run multiple pits and multiple grills with a single low-priced set. We saw no more than 2 degrees of variation when testing for accuracy, which was average — and better than multiple much-pricier models.

The ThermoPro app is easy to use with built-in presets: You tell it what you're cooking, and it estimates the time needed, then alerts you when the food is done. (You can also set custom target temperatures, though it took us a little time to figure out how.) The app has lots of great features and you'll likely want to use it more than the base, which displays temperatures from all four sensors but not much else.

The TP25 had a good Bluetooth range outside (the brand claims up to 500 feet), but it had trouble with walls and doors and tended to lose its connection with the base outside and phone inside. That said, we've been pleased with the TP25 during our long-term tests. It has worked consistently well over six months, which adds to its already great value.

Probes: 4 | Temperature Range: 14 to 572°F | Connectivity: Bluetooth

This truly smart thermometer delivers accurate results and works seamlessly with its app.

It's expensive and entirely app-dependent.

The Meater is part functional and part statement piece, thanks to its minimalist probe design and stylish bamboo base unit. It ranked near the top of our tests for temperature accuracy and connection range. It's a truly wireless meat thermometer, whose probe uses Bluetooth to connect to the base, which can then connect to the app via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The probe is two thermometers in one, measuring both the internal temperature of the food and the ambient temperature to make a surprisingly accurate early estimate of how long cooking will take.

The Meater app stood out in testing for its clean interface and many features. There are dozens of presets for different types and cuts of meat, each of them adjustable to your preferred level of doneness. You can also create custom presets and alarms, and save and take notes on every cook. It even accounts for carryover cooking, telling you when to take the meat off the heat and when to start slicing a few minutes later.

Meater recommends keeping the receiver within 5 feet of the probe, though our connection held for about 100 feet outdoors and 30 feet indoors. (The app sounds an alarm if the base disconnects to make sure you bring it back in range.) Make sure you take your phone off silent mode, however: The receiver itself doesn’t have a screen or speaker, and all the alarms and information come only from the app. The base is also battery-powered and needs a new AAA every few uses.

For the more serious griller or pitmaster, we'd recommend an upgrade to the Meater Block, which has four probes, a touchscreen in the base, and a rechargeable battery. The major downside with either model is that it's expensive. Meater makes high-end wireless grill thermometers, and they charge accordingly.

Probes: 1 | Temperature Range: Up to 212°F (internal), up to 1,000°F (external) | Connectivity: Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

The ThermoWorks Smoke Remote BBQ Alarm Thermometer is a simple, accurate wireless grill thermometer with two probes and excellent range at a reasonable price point. It checks all the boxes.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

We tested 19 wireless grill thermometers in our Lab for this roundup. We first got each thermometer turned on and connected wirelessly, noting any difficulties with setup. We navigated the settings and options available in the various brands' apps and rated how intuitive each one was to use. We also measured the maximum volume of each model's internal alarms using a decibel meter. After making more general notes, we put the thermometers through a series of tests.

After we concluded our initial tests, we revealed the thermometers' retail prices to consider value. At the time of testing, they ranged from $17 to $125, with an average of $62.

We also continued to test the wireless grill thermometers at home, incorporating them into our normal cooking and grilling routines. We checked in after one, three, and six months to note any issues we found, damage we incurred, or useful features we discovered.

Thermometers with Wi-Fi connectivity provide a more stable connection than Bluetooth, and you won’t have to fear going so far from the probe that your connection drops, according to Carey Bringle, owner and pitmaster at Peg Leg Porker in Nashville, Tennessee. “Bluetooth can be a pain to reconnect when you lose signal,” he says.

He also urges cooks to understand their grilling and buy with that in mind. If you’re cooking at home, have little interference, or don’t plan on leaving the grill’s side, signal strength and wireless range aren’t as much of a consideration. If, however, you need to move around your home and do other things while your food spends hours on the grill, you’ll need something with a better range.

With his penchant for whole-hog barbecue, Bringle uses four probes at once: one to monitor his pit temperature and the other three in the pig's shoulder, loin, and ham, respectively. It might seem excessive for a home cook, but more probes make a wireless meat thermometer more versatile: Consider cooking steaks to four different levels of doneness for each family member.

At the very least, Bringle suggests having two probes, so you can monitor food and grill temperature. The external thermometer on the lid of most grills is not very accurate to begin with, and few people take the time to recalibrate their after years of use. For best results, use a clip that holds the grill probe elevated off the grate and away from the walls.

Monitoring temperature is critical for long cooking. At the very least, any wireless grill thermometer will have the ability to alert you when it reaches a target temperature, via an audible alarm or an app notification. Models with more advanced apps have presets for different types and cuts of meat that give you a recommended doneness target, and many can estimate how long a cook will take based on how the internal temperature is progressing. Other custom settings can also be helpful, from mid-cooking alerts and alarms to saving a library of previous cooks' temperature graphs to study and improve on.

When using wood or charcoal, temperature drops and spikes are common. Having a secondary probe to monitor whether the grill is outside your temperature range can save dinner from low temperatures or sudden fires.

For the actual temperature-measurement part of things, wireless meat thermometers work the same as any other probe thermometer: The probe measures the temperature around it, whether it's stuck into a piece of meat or suspended in the air over a fire.

In a wireless meat thermometer, the probe is connected to a base unit that sits next to the grill or oven, which then transmits the temperature information wirelessly. Some models with dedicated receivers use radio communication, but Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are more common, and let you connect via app on a variety of different devices.

Absolutely. Outdoor grills can reach higher temperatures than indoor ovens, so anything safe on the grill should be safe in the oven. Bringle recommends looking for braided metal cables that will withstand grill lids or oven doors closing on them. A wireless thermometer is of course great for roasting meat in the oven, but you can also use your probes to monitor bread doughs and biscuit batters to find the perfect level of doneness and never have to worry about suggested bake times again.

With an ultra-high-temperature outdoor pizza oven, however, you might need to check the maximum temperature your thermometer can handle. Pizza ovens often reach temperatures over 900°F, higher than any standard oven or grill — but some wireless grill thermometers are equipped to deal with the heat.

Yes. Unlike a standard probe thermometer, which delivers one quick reading to spot-check temperature, a wireless grill thermometer's probe is meant to remain in your steak, roast, or rack of ribs for the entire cooking process. Analyzing the speed the temperature changes helps to estimate the total cooking time and provides a more detailed view of cooking progress.

NutriChef Smart Bluetooth BBQ Thermometer ($50 at Amazon)The NutriChef is a good starter or value thermometer, with a few cons. In our initial tests, notifications only went off on the thermometer, not the phone we connected it to. (The issue was resolved when we connected it to a different phone.) Also, you may want to change the preset temperatures to avoid overcooking.

ThermoPro TP28 Wireless Meat Thermometer ($70 at Amazon)The ThermoPro TP28 is a very good, well-designed, accurate thermometer. It's similar to the TP25 above, but it has a dedicated remote receiver rather than a phone app. That makes it a little harder to use than the TP25, plus it only has two probes to the TP25's four. Since both are the same price, we prefer the other ThermoPro.

Weber Connect 3201 WiFi-Enabled Smart Grilling Hub ($130 at Walmart)The Weber Connect’s probes could be sharper to make piercing meat easier, and for the price of this model, the app could use extra features and a more intuitive design.

Cuisinart Bluetooth Easy Connect Meat Thermometer ($51 at Amazon)For an otherwise accurate and well-performing thermometer, the Cuisinart had a lot of trouble with Bluetooth connectivity. Since the app contains most of this model’s functionality, constantly dropped connections were a serious problem.

The thermometers that rated lowest in our tests did so for a variety of reasons. Some were frustratingly difficult to use, even despite limited features. Others lost signal frequently and needed to be manually reconnected. None of the thermometers was particularly inaccurate, but multiple high-priced models did no better than cheap ones in our accuracy tests.

While we were pleased with most of our original top picks over six months of long-term testing, we did remove one from the list: the ThermoPro TempSpike. We loved its simple yet full-featured app, but the probe and dock stopped syncing a few months in. We did not have the same problem with either of the other ThermoPro models above.

Greg Baker is an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and food writer with four decades of experience in the food industry. His written work appears in Food & Wine, Food Republic, and other publications. In addition to writing over 30 articles on grilling and barbecuing, he’s tested wireless thermometers, cutting boards, wood-burning and gas pizza ovens, a kamado grill, and more.