30-Second Verdict
The XMAX Ace wins — 7.2 to 7.0 — and costs £19 less. The Auxo Celsius makes better vapour, is better made, and is the more interesting object by a distance. It also runs out of battery in twenty-seven minutes. One is a spec sheet you'll admire. The other quietly deletes the worst part of your evening, every evening, for eighty quid.
Auxo Celsius: 7.0/10 | £98.00 XMAX Ace: 7.2/10 | £79.00
Buy the Auxo Celsius if: - Flavour at this money is the point — triple heating and a zirconia path deliver it - You need onset now: 6 seconds to heat, terps within ten of pressing the button - You want dual-use, herb and concentrate, from one chamber swap - A 10-year warranty from a young brand reads as confidence rather than optimism
Buy the XMAX Ace if: - Cleaning is the friction that stops you vaping — the button removes half the "after" - You want a removable 18650: ~10 sessions, 75 minutes continuous, swap and carry on - You'd rather own something boring for a year than brilliant for twenty-seven minutes - You're honest about being lazy, and you'd like your hardware to be honest too
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Auxo Celsius | XMAX Ace | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction + convection + infrared | Conduction |
| Heat-up | ~6–30s (Celsius 2.0) | ~20s |
| Battery | 1100mAh sealed — 27 min / 9 sessions | Removable 18650 2600mAh — 75 min / ~10 sessions |
| Charging | USB-C (90–120 min) | MicroUSB (2–3 hrs) |
| Bowl | 0.3g herb / 0.05g concentrate | ~0.35g black ceramic |
| Weight | 157.8g | 340g |
| Warranty | 10 years (device) | 1 year |
| Price | £98.00 | £79.00 |
The Hook
Everyone has a bread maker story, and it is always the same story.
You bought it because the idea was undeniable. Fresh bread. Timer. Wake up to the smell of it. Eleven programmes, a gluten-free setting, a display — and the first loaf is properly good, good enough that you photograph it. Then you discover it needs four hours you never have, the paddle bakes into the bottom of every loaf, and the app that runs the sourdough programme has two-point-something stars. Eighteen months later it's on top of the cupboard with the pasta machine, and you buy bread.
Nobody has a dishwasher story, because a dishwasher isn't a story. It's ugly, heavier than it looks, and it doesn't do the whole job — you still rinse, you still do the pans. What it does is remove the one chore that stops the evening ending. You wouldn't photograph it. You also wouldn't move into a house without one.
The Auxo Celsius is the bread maker. The XMAX Ace is the dishwasher. One is the more impressive machine. The other is the one still doing its job in year three.
I called the Celsius a Ring doorbell camera in its own review, and the Ace got the Lidl middle aisle treatment in its. Set both aside. What matters here is that these are two sub-£100 portables with opposite theories of what a budget device should spend its money on. Auxo spent it on technology. XMAX spent it on a spring.
One of them scores higher. It's the spring.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Auxo Celsius. 7.5/10 versus 7.0/10, and it's the clearest technical win on the card.
The Celsius's triple heating is not marketing waffle, and I said so in its review at length: conduction through the steel walls, convection through the herb, infrared adding radiant energy deeper into the material. The result is even extraction — uniformly brown ABV rather than a scorched middle and a raw rim — and the 360° zirconia mouthpiece hands it over cooler than the chamber temperature has any right to allow. At 180°C you can name the terpenes. Not a sentence I get to write often at £98.
Its problem is airflow. Those tiny square perforations restrict density until you're getting flavour without volume — breathing through a coffee stirrer next to the Mighty+'s garden hose, as the review put it. You taste everything. You see almost nothing.
The Ace is plain conduction into a black ceramic chamber, with one asterisk that has to come first: the display reads 20–25°C high. Set 210°C and you're at roughly 190°C. It's documented across owners, and Dave clocked it inside a session before anyone told him. Once the offset is internalised — a week, no more — the vapour is clean with no metal taste, and the swivel zirconia mouthpiece does real cooling work. But there's rubber in the mouthpiece lid, and it puts a faint warmth into the flavour that isn't a terpene.
Flavour ceiling: Celsius, comfortably. A dial you can trust: neither, though the Ace's dishonesty is at least a fixed constant — add twenty and it stops lying. The temperature guide is worth ten minutes before either of these arrives.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
A flag first, because I'd rather tell you than have you spot it: this is the one pairing where the strain control doesn't line up. Neither device was reviewed on the standard Jack Herer and Wedding Cake jars — the Celsius ran Slurricane and Adven EMT-3 Cali, the Ace ran Forbidden Fruit and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue. So this compares like for like where the kind of flower matches: a dense street indica each, a medical jar each. A fair comparison of behaviour, not a controlled one of flavour. Everything else on the card is directly comparable.
The dense indica. The Celsius took Slurricane — Do-Si-Dos × Purple Punch, tight trichomes, thick resin, the density test — with the evenness that is the whole argument for triple heating: grape candy arriving whole at 175°C with no hot spots, diesel and caryophyllene stepping forward at 195°C, and by 215°C an ABV uniformly brown edge to edge. Nine draws of quality across three sessions — and three sessions is the high-temperature battery. The Ace took Forbidden Fruit — Cherry Pie × Tangie, tropical mango and grapefruit over pine — and produced the more interesting accident of the two: because the display lies low, setting 190°C put the oven at roughly 170°C, exactly where Forbidden Fruit's low-boiling terps want to be. The offset flattered the flower. The Celsius extracts evenly by design; the Ace extracted beautifully by mistake — a mistake you can only repeat once you know it exists.
The medical jar. Here the two stop being rivals and start being different professions. The Celsius on Adven EMT-3 Cali at a deliberate 0.2g half-bowl is the best argument the device has: citrus inside ten seconds of the button, three clean daytime draws, a 3-minute timer that maps onto medical dosing rather than fighting it, and half-bowls stretching the battery to six or seven sessions. The Ace on Strawberry Glue is the opposite kind of information — sweet at a real 165°C, glue and diesel at a real 180°C, full extraction by a real 200°C — and then the honest bit. Push the button after GG4-lineage flower and the bulk of the ABV drops out cleanly, but the screens are gunked after two sessions. The button empties the herb. It does not touch the resin. Half a job, done brilliantly, which is the dishwasher's entire pitch and always has been.
The call: the Celsius produces the better mouthful, the Ace the better week. Neither is a flavour device in the sense the £250 shelf means it — but at low corrected temperatures the Celsius's zirconia path does something the Ace's rubber-lidded one can't. If taste is all you care about, buy the dearer one, and buy a cable to leave it plugged into.
Design & Build
Winner: Auxo Celsius. 8.0/10 versus 6.5/10 — the biggest single gap in the comparison.
The Celsius is properly made. Aluminium alloy, no rattles, no flex, a satisfying magnetic mouthpiece connection, a well-machined stainless oven, and a 360° rotatable zirconia mouthpiece that's genuinely clever engineering. Two caveats from the review still stand: aluminium conducts heat out as well as in, so after two consecutive sessions you're holding it gingerly, and the magnetic rotation point is picking up scuff marks that suggest it wasn't designed for thousands of twist-load-draw cycles.
The Ace is a plastic housing with a carbon-fibre-pattern sticker on it, weighing 340g — more than twice the Celsius, for a smaller device. That weight isn't premium materials; it's the spring assembly. Which is worth being fair about, because the self-cleaning mechanism is real engineering: a spring-loaded plate that ejects the bowl on a button push, satisfying the way a retractable pen is satisfying. Whether it survives two years of sticky resin and heat is the open question — the review said to ask again in six months. That review was June. Ask me in December.
The Celsius is the better-built object. The Ace contains the better idea. Materials to Auxo; the one part that moves to XMAX.
Battery & Charging
Winner: XMAX Ace, and this is where the match is decided. 7.5/10 versus 4.0/10 — a three-and-a-half point gap, the widest either device produces in any direction.
I stopped being diplomatic about this in the Celsius review and I'm not starting now. 1100mAh in a 158-gram device is a decision I cannot defend: nine 3-minute sessions, twenty-seven minutes of total vape time, six or seven sessions at high temperatures, and 90–120 minutes on the cable to get them back. An hour and a half of charging for twenty-seven minutes of use is a ratio nobody would accept from an electric toothbrush.
The Ace answers with the least glamorous solution available: a removable 18650. 2600mAh, roughly ten sessions, 75 minutes continuous, and when it's flat you put another cell in. Its charging is genuinely worse — MicroUSB in 2026, from a manufacturer whose own V3 Pro has USB-C — and it still wins by a mile, because you're never waiting on it.
Sealed and clever versus swappable and dull. The dull one lets you finish the evening.
Ease of Use
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8.5/10 versus 7.0/10.
The Celsius without its app is fine: four presets, one button, six seconds to heat. With the app is where it falls over. Pro Mode — custom heating curves, session timers from 40 seconds to 3 minutes, live monitoring — is genuinely powerful and sits behind software that doesn't consistently work: pairing fails across multiple phones, the app crashes after firmware updates, settings reset themselves, Play Store average 2.8 stars. So most owners are stuck with the fixed 3-minute session, and when you want one more minute you spend another whole block of a battery that had nine.
The Ace's routine is grind, load, vape, push button, done. Haptics tell you when it's ready, when the session's ending, when boost is on. 1-degree control across 100–240°C, two session modes, twenty seconds to temperature. The one thing you carry in your head is the twenty-degree offset — automatic inside a week for you, never automatic for anyone you hand it to.
Mum test, for the record: the Celsius failed outright in its review. The Ace was a borderline pass, largely on the strength of the button.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8.0/10 versus 7.5/10 — the closest category on the card, and the one people will buy on anyway.
The Celsius is standard: brush after a session, ISO the screens and mouthpiece every five to seven, deep-clean the zirconia path fortnightly, and go carefully with ISO near the magnetic rotation joint. Use the concentrate chamber and that's a second, stickier job on top.
The Ace's button is the difference, and the difference is smaller than the marketing and bigger than the score. Push, click, ABV in the tin, two seconds, no brush. Screens still clog every three to five sessions and want a five-minute ISO soak. It postpones the deep clean rather than abolishing it. But the chore it deletes is the daily one — and on a bad pain day, or an ADHD evening where a multi-step ritual is the thing standing between you and a session, that isn't a gimmick. It's the reason the device gets used at all.
Portability
Winner: XMAX Ace. 7.5/10 versus 7.0/10 — and yes, the heavier device won.
The numbers say this shouldn't happen. The Celsius is 157.8g at 114 × 45 × 33mm; the Ace is 340g at 99 × 43 × 24mm — smaller and more than twice as heavy, and you know it's in your pocket.
The Celsius loses on two things a spec sheet won't show. It runs hot: after a session the aluminium wants five to ten minutes before it goes near a pocket, so the device that's easiest to carry is the one you can't yet pick up. And its portability is theoretical anyway — twenty-seven minutes doesn't take you far from a cable. A 10-year warranty implies a device that travels for a decade. The battery implies one that travels to the next room.
Value for Money
Winner: XMAX Ace, decisively. 8.0/10 versus 6.0/10, with a £19 price gap pulling the same way.
At £79 the Ace's feature list reads like a £150 device: removable 18650, ceramic chamber, 1-degree control, two session modes, haptics, swivel zirconia mouthpiece, and a self-cleaning mechanism no device at any price offers. Its own review named the elephant and I'll name it again: the XMAX V3 Pro is £79.99, one pound more, with hybrid heating and USB-C, and it is the better vaporiser. The Ace is the easier routine.
The Celsius at £98 is the more interesting gamble and the worse purchase. At full RRP it competed with the Mighty+ and lost on everything except heat-up; at £98 the triple heating, zirconia path and 10-year cover become a tempting amount of technology per pound. Then the battery arrives and stays. Its own family undercuts it too: the Auxo Calent is £78 with a 2900mAh battery — nearly triple — that lasts a full day.
Score Comparison
| Category | Auxo Celsius | XMAX Ace |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Design & Build | 8/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 4/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 7.5/10 | 8/10 |
| Portability | 7/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Value for Money | 6/10 | 8/10 |
| Overall | 7.0/10 | 7.2/10 |
Five categories to two, and the two the Celsius takes — vapour and build — are the two you notice in week one. The five the Ace takes are the ones you notice for the rest of the year.
One thing the table hides. The Ace's 7.2 is a deduction — its categories average 7.6 and I marked it down for a display that undermines the device's own precision claims — while the Celsius's 7.0 sits above its own card. So two-tenths understates the gap. Scoring is explained on the methodology page if you want to check my arithmetic.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Auxo Celsius if the first two minutes are the whole use case. You want cannabinoids fast — six seconds to heat, terps inside ten, relief starting inside two — then you put it down. That's a real profile: acute pain, medical micro-dosing at half-bowl loads, the fixed timer working for an ADHD brain because the decision to stop has been made for you. Add the flavour, the dual-use chamber and a decade of cover and there's a person for whom this is the right £98. That person owns a second device.
Buy the XMAX Ace if you want a vaporiser rather than a demonstration. It's the answer for the person whose real barrier is cleaning, for anyone who wants swappable cells at this money, for a simplicity-first first-timer, and for the reader who saw "twenty-seven minutes" above and stopped considering the other one. Two warnings from its own review: the display lies by twenty degrees, and the 255°C boost is combustion territory — stay under a set 240°C unless you enjoy charcoal.
The wrong buyer for the Celsius is anyone buying their only device. The wrong buyer for the Ace is the flavour chaser, and there's a whole shelf above £200 waiting for them.
How I Actually Choose
The rotation data doesn't lie, and I keep rotation data, because ADHD.
The Celsius had three weeks as my emergency pain device and earned the shortlist on heat-up alone — when a flare arrives, sixty seconds of warm-up is sixty too many, and nothing else I own answers in six. It also earned the drawer. It lives on the bedside table beside a USB-C cable now: always charging, occasionally brilliant.
The Ace gets reached for on the tired evenings — pain up, fatigue in, executive function gone, the point at which brushing a chamber feels like a mountain. Push, click, done, and a session happened that otherwise wouldn't have. I still recommend the V3 Pro in almost every conversation I have, and I still keep picking up the Ace. I've stopped pretending those two facts are in tension.
Jake, who has never met a specification he didn't want explained to him, watched me plug the Celsius in for the second time in one afternoon and asked what the warranty was. Ten years, I said. He did the sum out loud: "So that's ten years of charging it."
He's not wrong. That's the comparison.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody has ever bragged about a dishwasher. Nobody has ever thrown away a bread maker they used.
The Celsius is the better machine on paper and in the hand: triple heating that genuinely works, a zirconia path that preserves terps at a price where nothing preserves terps, a beautifully finished aluminium body, a warranty measured in decades. Then it dies at session four, the app crashes at firmware update two, and the aluminium gets uncomfortable at bowl three — and impressive stops being the word. Frustrating takes over, exactly as it did in its own review.
The Ace is uglier, heavier, charges through a port that should have been retired in 2018, and lies about temperature by twenty degrees. It also empties its own bowl, takes a fresh cell in five seconds, and asks nothing of you on the evenings when you've nothing to give. That's why it wins 7.2 to 7.0 while costing £19 less — and why it wins by more than two-tenths.
Buy the technology if the technology is the point and you've somewhere to plug it in. Buy the spring if you want to still be using it in a year.
The bread maker makes a better loaf. The dishwasher gets used every single night.
FAQ
Auxo Celsius vs XMAX Ace — which should I buy? The XMAX Ace for most people: it scores higher (7.2 vs 7.0), costs £19 less (£79.00 vs £98.00), runs ten sessions on a swappable 18650 instead of nine fixed 3-minute ones on a sealed cell, and empties its own bowl. Buy the Celsius only if fast onset and low-temperature flavour are specifically what you're paying for.
Is the Celsius battery really that bad? Yes. 1100mAh, twenty-seven minutes, nine 3-minute sessions — six or seven at high temperatures — and 90 to 120 minutes to recharge. It's sealed, so there's no cell to swap. It's the most important number in that review and the reason this comparison ends the way it does.
Does the self-cleaning button actually work? For herb, yes — push, click, the ABV drops out, no brush. For resin, no. Sticky flower still gunks the screens every three to five sessions. Half the job, done properly, and the half it does is the daily half.
Which one tastes better? The Celsius, on score (7.5 vs 7) and in practice. Triple heating extracts more evenly and the zirconia mouthpiece cools cleanly. Its airflow restricts density, though, so you get flavour without cloud. The Ace has rubber in the mouthpiece lid that adds a warmth that isn't a terpene.
What's this about the Ace's temperature being wrong? The display reads 20–25°C high — set 210°C and the oven is at roughly 190°C. Documented across multiple owners. Set twenty degrees above your target and it's second nature within a week; it's also why the Ace came down from a 7.6 category average to 7.2.
Is either one good for medical use? Both, differently. The Celsius suits acute relief and micro-dosing: six-second heat-up, half-bowl loads, a fixed session that matches dosing patterns, ten years of cover. The Ace suits sustained daily use and bad days — push-button emptying is a genuine accessibility feature when post-session effort is what's stopping you. Neither has the endurance for all-day management.
Should I just buy something else in these families? Quite possibly. The Auxo Calent is £78 with nearly triple the Celsius's battery. The XMAX V3 Pro is £79.99, a pound over the Ace, with hybrid heating and USB-C, and it's the better vaporiser. The Ace still wins on the routine.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M., 42, lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah. He's been vaping daily since 2018 and writing for HerbVape since 2023. He works in IT, has ADHD, and holds a UK medical cannabis prescription for chronic pain management. Opinions are his own — HerbVape pays him to be honest, not to sell you shite.
Dennis owns a bread maker. It is on top of the cupboard, next to a pasta machine, and it has made four loaves, all of them excellent. He would like it noted that the dishwasher has run roughly two thousand times in the same period and that nobody in the house has ever once mentioned it.
A note on spelling: 'vaporizer' is the de facto international spelling, but I've stuck with the British 'vaporiser' throughout this blog.
Questions, corrections, or a device you want tested? dennis@herbvape.co.uk
Related Content
Full Reviews: - Auxo Celsius Review: The Ring Doorbell Camera → - XMAX Ace Review: The Lidl Middle Aisle Find →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I Score Devices →
Get Either at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Auxo Celsius — £98.00 Buy the Auxo Celsius → Worth knowing first: the same brand's Auxo Calent is £78 with nearly triple the battery. Fewer features, more evenings.
XMAX Ace — £79.00 Buy the XMAX Ace → Worth knowing first: the XMAX V3 Pro is £79.99 with hybrid heating and USB-C, and it's the better vaporiser. The Ace is the easier one to live with. Either way, buy a spare 18650 — swapping cells is the whole point.
Just one more bowl.
Review Policy: I buy or borrow the devices I review. HerbVape.co.uk is my employer, but my opinions are my own — they pay me to be honest, not to sell you shite. Affiliate links and discount codes exist because running a site costs money, not because they influence scores.
Strains Used: this pairing is the site's exception — neither device was tested on the standard Jack Herer and Wedding Cake control jars. Auxo Celsius: Slurricane (indica, Do-Si-Dos × Purple Punch, ~24–28% THC, limonene/caryophyllene/myrcene/linalool) and Adven EMT-3 Cali (medical sativa, ~20% THC, myrcene/limonene/pinene). XMAX Ace: Forbidden Fruit (indica, Cherry Pie × Tangie, ~21–26% THC, myrcene/limonene/caryophyllene/pinene) and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue (balanced hybrid, ~20–22% THC, myrcene/caryophyllene/limonene/pinene). The strain-test section compares behaviour on like-for-like flower types rather than identical jars, and says so. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing here constitutes medical advice, and I am not a medical professional. Cannabis is a controlled substance in the UK; medical cannabis is legal only on prescription from a registered specialist clinic. HerbVape.co.uk sells vaporiser hardware only: we do not sell, prescribe, or recommend cannabis or cannabis products. Vaporisers are sold for use with legal dry herbs and legally prescribed medical cannabis. You must be 18 or over to buy one, and cannabis law varies by jurisdiction — check yours.
Last updated: 26 August 2026.