Last updated: 26 August 2026
30-Second Verdict
The Smono No.3 wins — 7.5 to 6.3 — and the entire gap costs six pounds. The cheapest tier jump in the catalogue: £6 buys pure convection instead of preset conduction, titanium instead of stainless, glass instead of plastic, degree-by-degree control instead of three fixed steps, and a third year of warranty. The Aura keeps exactly two things — it weighs 50g less, and nobody has ever asked what it is.
Flowermate Aura: 6.3/10 | £69.00 Smono No.3: 7.5/10 | £75.00
Buy the Flowermate Aura if: - Stealth is not a preference but the actual requirement — pen pocket, handbag, someone else's living room - You want herb, concentrate and oil pods in the box for one price - Battery matters more than flavour: 6–8 sessions beats 5–6, in a body 50g lighter - You want a device you genuinely won't mourn when it goes missing
Buy the Smono No.3 if: - You want to know what your flower actually tastes like — this is pure convection at budget money - Degree-by-degree control from 160–220°C matters more than three preset colours - You'd rather clean glass and titanium than nurse a plastic mouthpiece you know is going to split - Three years of warranty on a £75 device sounds like the bargain it is
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Flowermate Aura | Smono No.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction, 3 presets (~185/195/215°C) | Pure convection, 160–220°C degree-by-degree |
| Heat-up | ~30–45 seconds | ~30–40 seconds |
| Battery | 2600mAh sealed, 6–8 sessions, Micro-USB (~3 hrs) | 1600mAh sealed, 5–6 sessions, USB-C (~120 min) |
| Bowl | ~0.3g stainless steel | ~0.2g titanium |
| Mouthpiece | Plastic | Borosilicate glass |
| Weight | ~90g | ~140g |
| Warranty | 2 years | 3 years |
| Price | £69.00 | £75.00 |
The Hook
Every supermarket runs at least two tiers of the same product, and the difference between them is almost never the price you'd expect it to be.
The value range is the bottom shelf. Plain packaging, no photography, the font chosen by nobody. It exists to hit a number and it's completely honest about that — nobody buys value-range anything under the illusion of quality. It goes in the trolley without a decision being made.
The mid range is one shelf up: standard own-label, not the fancy tier with the black packaging, just the ordinary version the supermarket puts its name on. And here's the thing everyone who cooks already knows — value to mid range is the biggest quality jump on the aisle and the smallest price jump. Mid to premium is enormous in money and marginal on the plate. Bottom shelf to the one above it is pennies, and the whole difference between "this will do" and "this is fine, actually."
The Flowermate Aura is the value range. The Smono No.3 is the mid range. The gap between them is six pounds.
The Aura's own review called it a BIC pen and the Smono's called it an Aeropress; both hold up, set them aside. What matters here is that two devices six quid apart on the same aisle are not the same category of thing. The difference is a heating method — conduction through stainless and plastic on one side, pure convection through titanium and glass on the other, for the price of a pint and a packet of crisps.
The Aura's review already said it out loud — if you have six more pounds, the Smono 3 is a significantly better vaporiser — and this article is mostly the long version of that sentence. But the Aura keeps one thing the Smono can't take off it, and it's the reason it's still in this house.
We stock the Flowermate Aura at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Smono No.3, and it's the widest gap on the card. 8.0/10 versus 5.0/10.
The Smono No.3 pulls hot air through the herb without it touching a hot wall. Titanium chamber, borosilicate mouthpiece, nothing in the path adding a flavour of its own. At 180°C its review found terps arriving individually — limonene, then myrcene, then the background notes conduction smears into one impression — with even extraction across the first five draws and no stirring required. 195°C is the sweet spot: enough heat for density, enough restraint for the terps. The honest ceiling is 210°C, above which the heater can't sustain density and you're drawing warm air. Stay under it and this is, per its own review, the best flavour experience under £100.
The Aura is conduction into stainless, out through plastic, at three fixed temperatures. Preset 1 (~185°C) gives thin but detectable vapour with muted terps — the general character of a strain rather than its individual notes — plus a faint synthetic warmth its review described as the sort of thing you notice once and then try to forget. Preset 2 (~195°C) is the functional zone: visible vapour, reasonable extraction, adequate effects. Preset 3 (~215°C) is extraction mode — two draws, chamber cleared, flavour gone. The 0.3g bowl is bigger than the Smono's 0.2g, but conduction wants a mid-session stir and convection doesn't, and the smaller chamber extracts more from less anyway.
That's not a close-run category. That's a device that resolves individual terpenes against a device that tells you roughly what jar you're in.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
A flag before the tasting notes: this is the one pair on the site where the strain control doesn't line up. The Aura was run on Papaya and Noidecs T10:C10, the Smono No.3 on Apple Fritter and Noidecs T20 Sativa Lemon Skunk. No shared jar. What they do share is a shape — one sweet street strain each, one Noidecs medical cultivar each — so this is two lap charts from two different circuits, read for what they say about the machines rather than the plants. Better to say that up front than pretend otherwise.
The sweet one. Both got a sugar-forward hybrid; both got somewhere, by completely different routes. Papaya through the Aura at preset 2 came out as sweetness that deepens — linalool adding a lavender calm under the fruit, the earthy indica undertone arriving, four draws with building body effect. Its review's honest framing: Papaya's heavy myrcene is forgiving enough to shine through basic conduction, and the sweetness does the useful work of masking what the plastic mouthpiece contributes. A real result, and plainly the strain carrying the device. Apple Fritter through the Smono went the other way — apple sweetness pure and unmistakable at 175°C with limonene lifting it, vanilla cream at 185°C as the Animal Cookies parentage asserts itself, cinnamon spice at 200°C. Three named stages of a pastry, in order. The Aura tells you the flower is sweet; the Smono tells you which pudding it is. The practical advice falls out of it: the Aura wants sweet, terpene-heavy strains, because delicate citrus and floral profiles don't survive the trip. Which is the value range's whole deal — it works if you shop for it.
The medical one. Both reviews ran a Noidecs cultivar and reached the same conclusion from opposite ends. The T10:C10 through the Aura at preset 1 gave clean CBD activation — pinene first, subtle through plastic but present, two draws, no psychoactivity — and at preset 2 the balanced extraction its review called the medical use case the device was built for whether Flowermate knew it or not. The Aura's limitations matter far less when you're managing symptoms than when you're chasing terps. The Smono's Lemon Skunk at 170°C is that argument inverted: limonene sharp enough to read as citrus peel, terpinolene shimmering underneath, and the claim that it was brighter and more distinct than through any conduction device at any price — which, if true, is a claim about the Aura too. For a patient targeting terp-specific activation, degree-by-degree control isn't a hobbyist feature; it's the difference between choosing a temperature and hoping a preset lands near one. The Aura's ten-degree gap between presets 1 and 2 is where that hope lives.
The call: the Smono No.3 is a flavour device at £75. The Aura is a delivery device at £69. Both descriptions are meant literally and neither is an insult — but only one of them lets you find out what you bought.
Design & Build
Winner: Smono No.3, 6.0/10 to 5.0/10 — and neither of them is winning any prizes.
Both are built down to a price and both are honest about where they cut. The Smono's cut is on the outside: budget plastic housing that flexes when squeezed and creaks if you grip it while drawing, a device its own review says looks embarrassing next to a DaVinci. But the chamber is titanium and the mouthpiece is genuine borosilicate — the money went into the parts your vapour touches. Exterior B&M, interior John Lewis, as the review put it.
The Aura's cut is in exactly the wrong place. The metal body is better than £69 buys: slim, clean, no obvious branding, survives pocket carry. And then the heated component you put in your mouth is plastic, and it cracks. Not might. Its review is unambiguous — the single most documented issue with the device, forum reports from weeks to months, Jake's lasted a week. Budget £5–10 a time, ongoing, for the life of the device. There's a herb-pod gasket that loosens after 3–6 months too; you feel the wobble before the seal goes.
One is ugly where it doesn't matter. The other is fragile where it does. That's the whole section, and it's why a six-point beats a five.
Battery & Charging
Winner: Flowermate Aura — one of its only two wins. 7.0/10 versus 5.0/10.
The Aura carries 2600mAh in a 90-gram pen body, which is genuinely impressive packaging: the Smono is 1600mAh at 140g. Real-world that's 6–8 sessions at preset 2 against the Smono's 5–6, and the Smono's review is candid that a heavy user drains it before lunch.
Then the Aura throws most of it away on the socket. Micro-USB, in 2026, three hours to full — a port the industry abandoned years ago, which means keeping a dedicated cable in a drawer and guarding it. The Smono does USB-C in about two hours, with the cable you already own eleven of.
More capacity, worse charging, on a device you carry precisely because you're out of the house. Take the win, Aura, but it's a scruffy one.
Ease of Use
Winner: Smono No.3, 8.0/10 to 7.0/10 — which is not the result you'd predict from the interfaces.
The Aura is as simple as a device gets: five clicks on, five off, three more to cycle presets, three-colour LED, five-minute auto-shutoff so you can't leave it running. No learning curve, because there's nothing to learn. The cost is no fine control — if preset 1 is weak and preset 2 is hot, you live in the ten degrees between them with no way in. Beginners won't know what they're missing; anyone who's used a temperature dial feels the walls immediately.
The Smono is plus and minus buttons, a small display, and 160–220°C in single-degree steps. More capability presented more plainly, and its convection is forgiving in a way convection often isn't — the 0.2g bowl is too small to overpack, no stirring, no chamber decision to get wrong. Load, set, draw.
The Mum test settles it, because it was run on both. The Smono: pass — "Plus and minus? Even I can do that, love." The Aura: mixed. She pressed the button five times without being told, then hit the LEDs — "Which colour am I supposed to want?" Fewer options is not the same as clearer options, which is the value range's packaging problem exactly: it saves money on telling you what's inside.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: Smono No.3, 7.0/10 to 5.0/10.
The Smono's titanium chamber brushes out in seconds and resists staining better than stainless or ceramic; the glass mouthpiece goes in ISO and comes out spotless. Its only real chore is the internal airpath — pipe cleaner weekly, full disassembly monthly. Small bowl, less resin, minimal maintenance.
The Aura's pod system keeps its chamber tidier than a direct-load design, and the stainless brushes out fine. The mouthpiece ruins it. Plastic wants gentle, lukewarm ISO — too hot or too long and you accelerate the degradation you're already expecting; too little and resin narrows the airpath. Every clean carries a small risk of causing the crack. Its review is blunt about the lived experience: cleaning it more often and more carefully than glass would ever require, always aware of what's coming.
Cleaning glass is a chore. Cleaning the Aura's mouthpiece is a chore with a countdown on it.
Portability
Winner: Flowermate Aura — and this is the one that isn't close. 9.0/10 versus 7.0/10.
Ninety grams, pen-shaped, fits anywhere a biro fits: shirt pocket, jacket, jeans, the pen slot in a handbag. Its review called it the most discrete named-brand vaporiser tested on this site and nothing since has argued with that. From two metres it reads as an e-cigarette; from five, a pen. Sarah's been using it at her mum's house for months and nobody has ever asked.
The Smono is ~140g, compact, pocketable, moderate on stealth — not pen-shaped, not Mighty-sized, sitting in the middle where nothing gets solved. And the glass mouthpiece that wins it the flavour category is what makes loose pocket carry a bad idea.
Fifty grams and a shape. That's the Aura's entire remaining case, and for some buyers it's the whole purchase.
Value for Money
Winner: Smono No.3, comfortably. 9.0/10 versus 6.0/10 — and the price gap is £6 in the wrong direction for the Aura.
The Smono No.3's spec list at £75 reads like a pricing error: pure convection, titanium chamber, glass mouthpiece, degree-by-degree control, USB-C, three-year warranty. Its own review calls it the best value in portable vaping pound-for-pound, and I'm not going to pretend to a more interesting opinion.
The Aura at £69 is fair on paper — triple-use pods, 2600mAh, two-year warranty — and its review said so before doing the maths that matters: £5–10 a mouthpiece, every few months, ongoing. A year in, the Aura isn't the cheaper device; it's the device with a consumables bill. The classic value-range trap: cheaper at the till and dearer by the weekend.
Score Comparison
| Category | Flowermate Aura | Smono No.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 5.0/10 | 8.0/10 |
| Design & Build | 5.0/10 | 6.0/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 7.0/10 | 5.0/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7.0/10 | 8.0/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 5.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Portability | 9.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Value for Money | 6.0/10 | 9.0/10 |
| Overall | 6.3/10 | 7.5/10 |
Five categories to two, and the two the Aura wins have nothing to do with vapour. Read down the Aura's column and three of seven are fives. That's the shape of a tier gap: the mid range isn't brilliant at anything, it's just never actually bad.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Flowermate Aura if invisibility is the requirement, not the preference. Something that lives in a pen pocket and never invites a question — someone else's house, a coat at the cinema, a bag opened in front of people. Herb, concentrate and oil pods in one £69 box. Three choices and no reading. You're buying a situation-specific tool rather than a vaporiser, and its review's summary of the slot it fills — the emergency biro in the junk drawer you're glad is there — is the right expectation to arrive with. Budget for mouthpieces.
Buy the Smono No.3 if you want to taste the thing you paid for. The right answer for flavour chasers on a genuine budget, for microdosers, and for medical patients who want terpene-specific temperatures rather than preset approximations. Also the right answer for most people asking "what's a good first proper vaporiser under £100."
The wrong buyer for the Smono is anyone who genuinely needs all-day battery or pen-form stealth — it delivers neither and never claimed to. The wrong buyer for the Aura is anyone who could have spent the extra six pounds and simply didn't know.
How I Actually Choose
I keep rotation data, because ADHD. The Aura's share is small and completely predictable — it comes off the shelf when the situation decides, not the session. Sarah's parents' house. The cinema, which I'm not defending. Preset 2, 0.25g, three or four draws inside the five-minute shutoff, back in the pocket before anyone's looked up.
The Smono gets used the way its review describes: 185°C, 0.2g, four or five draws, when I want convection flavour without a learning curve or a chamber decision. It's what I hand people who've only ever used conduction and don't believe there's a difference. It's also — and this is the sentence the Aura can't answer — the one I'd still reach for if the other didn't exist. The reverse isn't true.
Jake has started buying Aura mouthpieces two at a time. He calls it "the printer ink model." Given his first one lasted a week, I can't argue with the strategy, only with the device that made it necessary.
And the awkward bit the Aura's review already owns: it's the device I recommend least and the one Sarah uses most. She has never once asked what temperature it's on. She has asked, more than once, whether the Smono fits in the pen pocket. It doesn't. That's the whole comparison, in a handbag.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody stands in an aisle and argues that the value range is secretly better. They buy it because it's the cheapest thing that will do, and everyone in the queue understands the transaction perfectly.
What people forget is how small the step up is. One shelf. On this aisle it's six pounds, and six pounds buys an entirely different heating method, titanium instead of stainless, glass instead of plastic, sixty degrees of single-degree control instead of three fixed steps, USB-C instead of a cable from 2014, and a third year of warranty. There is no other six-pound gap on this site that changes this much, and 7.5 against 6.3 is the mildest way of saying it.
But the Aura keeps the one thing that isn't for sale on the shelf above: at ninety grams and pen-shaped, it's the only device here that wins by not being noticed. If your requirement is genuinely that nobody in the room finds out, no score table is relevant to you, and it shouldn't be.
For flavour, control and every pound you spend — one shelf up. For the pen pocket — bottom shelf, and don't overthink it. If you can only have one and no situation is forcing your hand, spend the six quid.
FAQ
Flowermate Aura vs Smono No.3 — which should I buy? The Smono No.3 for almost everyone: it scores 7.5 to the Aura's 6.3 and costs six pounds more (£75.00 vs £69.00). That six pounds buys pure convection, a titanium chamber, a glass mouthpiece, degree-by-degree temperature control, USB-C and a three-year warranty. Buy the Aura only if pen-form stealth is a hard requirement.
Is the Aura's flavour really that much worse? Yes, and both reviews say so independently. Conduction into stainless, out through plastic, at three fixed presets gives you the general character of a strain rather than its individual notes, plus a faint synthetic warmth from the mouthpiece. The Smono resolves terps one at a time through titanium and glass. It's a five against an eight for a reason.
Which battery lasts longer? The Aura: 2600mAh, 6–8 sessions at preset 2, in a body 50g lighter. The Smono manages 5–6 on 1600mAh. But the Aura charges over Micro-USB in about three hours and the Smono over USB-C in about two — capacity to the Aura, convenience to the Smono.
Does the Aura's mouthpiece really crack? It's the most documented issue with the device. Forum reports range from weeks to months; replacements run £5–10. Treat it gently, clean with lukewarm ISO rather than hot, don't overtighten, and budget for spares as an ongoing cost.
Which is easier to clean? The Smono. Titanium brushes out in seconds, glass soaks spotless, only the internal airpath needs a weekly pipe cleaner. The Aura's pod system helps, but the plastic mouthpiece needs careful cleaning that never stops feeling like a risk.
I only have £75 total. Anything else I should know? Two honest caveats on the Smono. The battery is its weak point — 5–6 sessions, sealed, so a full day out is a gamble. And it's a Fenix Mini rebadge with a Smono badge and a longer warranty, disclosed openly in the review and arguably in your favour. For what degree-by-degree control actually buys you, start with the temperature guide.
Are these scores comparable if the reviews used different strains? Partly. Every category is judged the same way — see the methodology — but this pair is the exception where the flower didn't line up: Papaya and Noidecs T10:C10 for the Aura, Apple Fritter and Noidecs T20 Lemon Skunk for the Smono. The heating-method gap is wide enough that the result isn't in doubt, but I'd rather flag it than let you assume a control that wasn't there.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M. has been reviewing vaporisers and vaping daily for the best part of a decade. He works in IT, has ADHD, and uses cannabis for chronic pain management. He lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah, who continues to use the cheaper of these two devices daily and has never once asked what temperature it's on.
Dennis would like it noted that he buys the mid-range own-label in almost every aisle, has strong views about which two products are worth going a shelf higher for, and is aware that this is also his entire approach to recommending vaporisers.
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: - Flowermate Aura Review: The BIC Pen of Vaporisers → - Smono No.3 Review: The Aeropress of Vaporisers →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I score every device →
Get Them at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Flowermate Aura — £69.00 Buy the Flowermate Aura → Worth grabbing with it: spare mouthpieces. Not optional, not eventually — plan for them from day one.
Smono No.3 — £75.00 Not currently listed in our shop, so there's no product link here. The review stands; the stock doesn't. Worth an email if you want to know when that changes.
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 one strain-control exception, flagged in the article. Flowermate Aura — Papaya, indica-dominant hybrid (Citral #13 × Ice #2), ~20–25% THC, myrcene/linalool/caryophyllene; and Noidecs T10:C10, balanced medical (~10% THC / 10% CBD), myrcene/caryophyllene/pinene. Smono No.3 — Apple Fritter, balanced hybrid (Sour Apple × Animal Cookies), ~22–28% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene/humulene; and Noidecs T20 Sativa Lemon Skunk, sativa medical (~20% THC), limonene/terpinolene/myrcene. All legal medical-grade samples. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing in this comparison 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.