What Is Eero Plus, and Is It Worth It?

Publish date: 2024-08-02

Key Takeaways

Eero systems are some of the best mesh routers around, but one common complaint with them has been Eero Plus. It adds more features to Eero routers, but it's a monthly (or yearly) subscription. In this guide, we'll go over what Eero Plus does and if you actually need it.

What Is Eero Plus?

Amazon sells a few different Eero models, but all of them are designed to cover your home in fast and reliable Wi-Fi, with the ability to add more stations as needed. The setup process and most features work without any additional subscriptions or purchases, including device management, adding more administrators, turning on a guest network, and scheduling network cut-offs. You can definitely use an Eero Wi-Fi network without ever looking at Eero Plus, though the Eero app might occasionally bug you to sign up for it.

Eero Plus is a subscription from Amazon that costs $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year, which is 16% off the monthly price (as of December 2023). It adds additional network management features to your Eero system, some of which are related to filtering content, and others can change your actual internet connection.

What You Get With Eero Plus

First, there's Historical Data, which will save your network usage information for forever, including how much data is being used by each device (or profiles, if you set those up) on your network. You can see data for the current week for free in your Activity tab in the Eero app, but any older data requires Eero Plus.

Eero Plus also includes Ad Blocking, which blocks some advertising networks and tracking systems at a network level across all devices on your Wi-Fi. If you've used Pi-Hole, AdGuard DNS, or NextDNS, it's a similar experience. The Ad Blocking feature can be useful, but it won't work for all ads (like those on Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube), and some sites and services will block access if the feature is enabled. Eero allows you to turn off the feature for specific sites or profiles, or you can just turn the feature off completely and keep using everything else included in Eero Plus.

There's also Advanced Security, which Eero says "helps keep your family safe from accidentally visiting known sites that could lead to phishing attacks and viruses." Most modern web browsers and operating systems already block known malicious websites, usually with Google Safe Browsing (used by Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others) and by checking for typos in the address bar. It might be the least useful component of Eero Plus, but mostly because your device (probably) already has the same protections.

DDNS (Dynamic DNS) is another feature in Eero Plus, which gives you a recognizable and permanent hostname for external access to your network, instead of a dynamic IP address from your ISP that might change. For example, if you have a file server at home and you want to access it remotely, you could just type or bookmark "123.eero.online" instead of the IP address that can change randomly. However, you still need to set up port forwarding on individual devices, and your Eero can't be running in Double NAT or Bridge mode. The usual problems with running a home server also still apply.

Eero Plus has a few features designed to limit internet access on a per-device or per-profile basis. The first is Content Filtering, which allows you to block entire categories of sites for a certain device or profile. There's also Block & Allow Sites for limiting access to specific individual sites that you can add or remove at any time. Keep in mind, any VPN can bypass these restrictions.

There's also Wi-Fi Scheduling, which can completely block internet access for specific devices or the entire network. You can set a schedule based on the day of the week and a specific time frame. The shutoff will only affect your home's Wi-Fi network, so any plans for offline time won't do much for phones and any other devices with cellular connections.

Internet Backup is another feature in Eero Plus, allowing you to set up a nearby mobile hotspot or Wi-Fi network to function as a backup when your wired internet goes down. Basically, your Eero acts as a gateway to a backup network (maintaining connections with everything using your Eero's network), and then switches back to the main internet when it becomes available again. You still need a separate hotspot for the Eero to use, which will likely have its own monthly bill, so this might be the worst feature to lock behind a paywall. Thanks, Amazon.

Finally, Eero Plus includes access to a few external subscription services. As of December 2023, this includes the 1Password Families Plan password manager with support for multiple users, Malwarebytes antivirus software for up to three devices, and Guardian VPN for up to five devices. 1Password is our top choice for the best password manager, so that's a nice addition.

Do You Need Eero Plus?

Eero Plus is probably not worth the money for most people. There are cheaper or free alternatives for most of the features available in Eero Plus, such as the free Duck DNS service instead of Eero DDNS, AdGuard DNS or NextDNS instead of the Ad Blocking and Content Filtering features, and so on. There might be some value in having a solution fully integrated with the Eero app, especially if you're sharing administrator access with someone (like a family member) and you want them to have easy access to everything, but it's still not the best value around.

The included Malwarebytes and Guardian VPN subscriptions aren't that useful, but the 1Password family subscription is a strong selling point. That subscription costs $60 per year on its own, which is slightly over half the price of an Eero Plus yearly subscription. If you were planning on signing up for a premium password manager anyway, or if you're switching from an existing password manager, you wouldn't be paying that much more for the rest of Eero Plus.

Eero Plus might make more sense if there was a cheaper option without the subscription bundles, but that's unfortunately not available. Unless there's a feature you know you will use, you can safely ignore Eero Plus.

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