Tapo P100 Smart Plug Review: The £7-Per-Plug Smart Home On-Ramp

What Is the Tapo P100 Smart Plug?

The TP-Link Tapo P100 is a Wi-Fi smart plug that makes any ordinary socket voice-controllable, app-schedulable and energy-monitorable. This 4-pack sells for £27.19 — under £7 per plug — which is why it has accumulated nearly 18,000 Amazon UK reviews at a 4.7-star average. It requires no hub, no bridge and no existing smart home: just a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, the free Tapo app and a spare socket.

Smart plugs sit at the entry point of home automation for a reason: they transform existing dumb appliances into smart devices in ninety seconds, without replacing anything. Lamps become voice-controlled lights; the kettle starts on a morning schedule; a forgotten fan shuts off from your phone at the office.

Design and Build Quality

The P100's defining physical feature is its compactness: a square body barely larger than the plug face, designed specifically so it doesn't obstruct the second socket in a double outlet. Most smart plugs fail this test and block an adjacent socket. The status LED on the front is bright enough to see across a room and can be disabled in the app for bedroom use.

Build quality is solid mid-range: the casing feels dense and the socket faces are correctly rated at 2300W/10A for UK outlets. There's no physical button for manual override — a deliberate trade for compactness — so you manage everything through the app or voice.

Performance

Setup on all four plugs took eleven minutes including app download: plug in, scan the QR code on the bottom, name it, done. Connection dropped on none of them at 15 metres through two internal walls — the expected 2.4GHz range on a standard home router.

Daily control via Alexa is seamless after linking the Tapo account in the Alexa app: 'Alexa, turn on the lamp' reliably returns a response in under a second. Schedules run to the minute, the away-mode random-toggle works exactly as described, and the energy monitoring is the surprise: seeing that the TV on standby costs £14 a year, and the old dehumidifier costs £0.80 a day, is useful information the app shows clearly.

The 2.4GHz-only limitation becomes relevant only if your router is configured 5GHz-only or combined-band with an incompatible setup — a small minority of routers. The Tapo app is separate from TP-Link's older Kasa ecosystem, which is mildly annoying if you already have Kasa devices, but fully functional on its own.

Key Features

Hub-free Wi-Fi: no bridge box, no monthly fee, works with any home router — the feature that makes it the category default. Energy monitoring: real-time and historical per-socket power data, surprisingly useful for understanding what costs what. Alexa, Google Home, Matter: every major voice and smart home platform covered. Double-socket-friendly size: the engineering detail that earns it over half-a-dozen bigger rivals.

Who Should Buy the Tapo P100 4-Pack?

Buy it if you: want to start smart home automation without committing to an ecosystem; have lamps, a kettle, fans or heaters you want scheduled or voice-controlled; want to see energy usage per device before deciding what to upgrade.

Skip it if you: need USB charging sockets (the P115 adds these); run a 5GHz-only network — confirm compatibility first; or want a smart plug that retains manual override, where models with a physical button suit better.

Verdict

At under £7 a plug from a major networking brand, with this review count and rating, the P100 4-pack is the rational smart home starting point. It does the job reliably, reports your energy usage, and stays out of the way of the adjacent socket. Start here.

Rating: 4.7/5 — The default smart plug recommendation.