30-Second Verdict
The Smono 4 Pro wins — 7.6 to 7.2 — and it costs £6 more. The Ace wins three categories, the Smono wins three, they draw on build, and the Smono still takes it, because the categories it wins are the ones about the vapour. One of these makes the whole business of vaping easier. The other makes the vapour better. Six pounds decides nothing; what you want out of an evening decides everything.
XMAX Ace: 7.2/10 | £79.00 Smono 4 Pro: 7.6/10 | £85.00
Buy the XMAX Ace if: - You want the self-cleaning button — push, the bowl empties, no brush, no scraping - A removable 18650 matters: swap the cell, keep going, £5 resets the clock - You want session and on-demand, plus haptics that tell you where you are without looking - Cleanup friction is the thing that actually stops you having a session
Buy the Smono 4 Pro if: - You want hybrid heating — conduction density with convection's terp clarity, at £85 - Battery is the thing you're tired of thinking about: 3000mAh, 8–12 sessions, USB-C, ninety minutes - You want a display whose numbers are the numbers - Three years of warranty on an £85 device sounds like the sort of thing you'd like
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| XMAX Ace | Smono 4 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction (black ceramic) | Hybrid conduction + convection (ceramic zirconia) |
| Heat-up | ~20 seconds | ~25 seconds |
| Battery | Removable 18650, 2600mAh, ~10 sessions | Sealed 3000mAh, 8–12 sessions |
| Charging | MicroUSB, 2–3 hours | USB-C, ~90 minutes |
| Bowl | ~0.35g | ~0.25g |
| Weight | 340g | ~145g |
| Warranty | 1 year | 3 years |
| Price | £79.00 | £85.00 |
The Hook
There are two takeaways on my street, roughly ninety seconds apart, and they have solved the same problem in opposite directions.
The first one has an app. It has a touchscreen by the door, so you never have to speak to anybody. It has a tracker that tells you your order is four minutes away, and a screen behind the counter that flashes your number, and a little bell that goes when it's ready. Everything about it is designed to remove the human bits from the transaction — the queueing, the ordering, the waiting-and-not-knowing, the awkward small talk about the weather. It's efficient in a way that genuinely improves your Tuesday. The tracker is also about twenty minutes optimistic, always, in the same direction. You learn to add twenty. Everyone who orders there has learned to add twenty. Nobody has told the app.
The second one has a hand-written board, a card machine that lives on the counter, and a bloke who looks up when the door goes and says "the usual?" before you've got your coat off. There's no tracker. There's no app. There is a chair by the radiator and a stack of menus nobody uses. And the food is better — not spectacularly, not a different sport, but noticeably, consistently, in a way you stop being able to un-notice. You have to go in. You have to wait. You have to say hello.
The XMAX Ace is the one with the app. The Smono 4 Pro is the one where they know your order.
The Ace got the Lidl middle aisle treatment in its own review, and the Smono 4 Pro got compared to Aldi wine in its own — both fair, both still true, and neither one is the argument here. The argument here is that these two £80-ish devices have spent their budget on opposite halves of the experience. One spent it on removing your effort. The other spent it on the vapour. Both worked.
One of them scores higher. It's the counter. Here's why the kiosk still has a queue.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Smono 4 Pro. 7.5/10 against 7.0/10, and the reason is architecture, not tuning.
The Smono 4 Pro runs hybrid heating at £85 — conduction warms the herb, convection pulls hot air through it — and that combination is the single most consequential spec in this comparison. At 180°C the convection is already pulling terps while the conduction supplies density. At 190–195°C it peaks: four or five draws with real character, extraction spread evenly enough across the bowl that its review reports no stirring required. The ceramic zirconia chamber contributes nothing to the taste, which is the point of it, and the glass mouthpiece keeps the path from chamber to lips clean.
The Ace is pure conduction into a black ceramic chamber, and it's decent — no metal taste, no hot-plastic edge, honest and functional rather than exciting. Two things hold it back. First, the rubber in the mouthpiece lid puts a faint warmth into the flavour that isn't the flower; its review named that plainly and it hasn't stopped being true. Second, and much bigger: the display reads 20–25°C high. Set 210°C and you're at roughly 190°C. That is documented, consistent, and correctable — but you're correcting it in your head, every session, for the life of the device.
The bowl sizes point the same way from opposite ends. The Ace's ~0.35g is generous for a budget conduction chamber and wants a mid-session stir; a partial push of the self-clean plate agitates the herb without ejecting it, which is a genuinely clever use of a mechanism designed for something else. The Smono's ~0.25g is smaller, denser, and doesn't ask to be stirred at all.
Peak vapour: Smono, comfortably. Vapour you can hit at 11pm without thinking: Ace. The half-point on the card is smaller than the gap in the glass.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
An honest note before anything else: neither of these devices was run on the site's control jars. Jack Herer and Wedding Cake are the constant across every review here, and this pairing is one of the exceptions — the Ace was tested on Forbidden Fruit and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue, the Smono 4 Pro on Animal Mints and Tilray PT01 T22. There is no jar overlap. So this is not a controlled side-by-side, it's a comparison by terpene family, and I'd rather say that than invent a lap chart neither device ran.
The Jack Herer family — fragile, terpinolene-and-pinene top notes. Only one of these devices has a result here, and it's the Smono. The Tilray PT01 is terpinolene-dominant, which is the awkward terpene: delicate, heat-shy, and usually the first thing a budget device flattens. At 170°C the 4 Pro brought the floral, incense-like terpinolene through intact — better preservation than I'd expected from anything under £150 — with pinene arriving clean at 185°C and the profile flattening if pushed past 195°C. That is exactly the behaviour a Jack Herer test is designed to expose, and the 4 Pro passed the version of it that it ran. The Ace has no terpinolene data at all. Its closest relative is Forbidden Fruit's pinene finish, which arrives late and low, at a set 230°C (actual ~210°C) — an earthy closing note, not a fragile opening one. On the fragile-sativa question the Smono has an answer and the Ace has a blank, and the blank is made worse by the offset: a device you have to mentally recalibrate by twenty degrees is a poor instrument for a terpene that starts degrading inside a ten-degree window. Its own review's fix — set twenty higher, it becomes second nature in a week — is a real fix. It is not the same thing as knowing the number.
The Wedding Cake family — caryophyllene and limonene over sweet dough and pepper. Here both devices have something, and the comparison is a resolution test. The Ace's Strawberry Glue ran in two clear acts: strawberry sweetness, gentle and clean, at a set 185°C (actual ~165°C), then the GG4 diesel-and-glue complexity arriving at a set 200°C (actual ~180°C), with the caryophyllene warmth under it, and full earthy extraction by a set 220°C. Sweet, then fuel. Two nameable things. The Smono's Animal Mints ran in three: mint at 175°C, cookie at 190°C, diesel at 205°C, each layer separable, each draw at 190°C slightly different from the last. That's the hybrid heater doing exactly what hybrid heating is for — the convection lifting the volatile top layer clear before the conduction drives the base out — and it's the clearest single demonstration of the £6 in the whole comparison. The Ace compresses; the Smono sequences.
And then Strawberry Glue did the Ace a different kind of favour, by breaking its party trick. GG4 genetics are sticky. The self-clean plate ejected the bulk of the AVB cleanly, but the screens gunked after two sessions and needed doing by hand. The button empties herb, not resin — which the Ace's own review said in as many words, and which is worth repeating here because it's the only place the Ace's headline feature has a documented limit.
The call: the Smono 4 Pro resolves more of the plant, and it's not close on the fragile end where neither the Ace's conduction nor its arithmetic can help. The Ace clears up better afterwards. Nobody has ever chosen a takeaway for how easy the containers are to rinse, but I understand the people who do.
Design & Build
Score draw: 6.5/10 apiece, for completely different reasons.
The Ace's carbon fibre is a sticker on a plastic housing — that needs saying every time it comes up, because the photographs are persuasive and the material isn't. At 340g it's heavy, and the weight isn't premium mass, it's the spring-loaded self-clean assembly and the housing needed to contain it. But that assembly is genuine engineering: a plate at the base of the chamber that ejects the bowl on a button push, satisfying in the retractable-pen sense, still clicking cleanly after a month of daily use in its review. The swivel zirconia mouthpiece is the other real design win — flat against the body in a pocket, out 90° for use, no snag points. The open question is durability: springs and sticky resin have never been natural allies, and the review's own answer was "ask me again in six months," which lands in December.
The Smono is 145g of plastic with an OLED in it, and its housing scratches and flexes if you look at it wrong. Its interior materials — ceramic zirconia, glass — are the good part, and the review's own framing is right: hold it next to a Crafty+ and the insides are comparable while the outsides aren't. Early production runs had a loose mouthpiece; later ones fixed it; check the wobble on arrival. Tom's lasted eight months before his loosened, and he still rates the eight months.
Winner: nobody. The Ace has the better idea. The Smono has the better hands-on-it half-hour, because 340g in a jacket pocket is a thing you notice and 145g isn't.
Battery & Charging
Winner: Smono 4 Pro, and it's the widest gap on the card. 9/10 against 7.5/10.
3000mAh, sealed, USB-C, ninety minutes to full, 8–12 sessions per charge. That is more capacity than devices at three times the money carry, and the practical effect is that the battery stops being a thing you have opinions about. You will get bored before it does.
The Ace counters with philosophy rather than capacity: a removable 18650, 2600mAh, about ten sessions and seventy-five minutes continuous. The cell comes out, so a spare in a pocket doubles your runtime and a £5 replacement resets the clock when the chemistry fades in three years' time. That's a real argument and I've made it in favour of other devices. It's undermined here by the charging: MicroUSB in 2026, at two to three hours a fill, from the same manufacturer that puts USB-C on the V3 Pro. The honest workaround is to charge cells externally in a dedicated 18650 charger and never plug the device in at all — which works, and which also means buying a charger and spare cells to fix a problem the Smono doesn't have.
Longevity: Ace. Everything you'll notice this year: Smono, by a distance.
Ease of Use
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8.5/10 against 8.0/10 — and this is the category where the app-versus-counter split is most literal.
The Ace's whole design philosophy is friction removal. Twenty-second heat-up, haptic feedback for ready and session-end and boost, 1°C control across 100–240°C, session and on-demand modes in one body, and the self-cleaning button collapsing the post-session ritual into a push. Grind, load, vape, push, done. Its review made the point that the friction of vaping isn't the vaping, it's the before and after, and the Ace deletes half the after. On a bad pain day or a flat-executive-function evening, that's the difference between having a session and going without. That isn't a gimmick; it's an accessibility feature that happened to arrive in a budget device.
The Smono answers with a different kind of simplicity: an OLED, degree-by-degree adjustment, a 25-second heat-up, an automatic session start at target temperature and a five-minute shutoff. No modes to cycle. No app. Set 190, get 190, see 190.
Which brings us to the tax the Ace charges. Jake picked mine up mid-session, saw 210 on the display, and asked why I was running it twenty degrees above the temperature I'd spent an evening telling him was the flavour spot. I explained the offset. He put it down and said: "So you've learnt a wrong menu off by heart." That's it, precisely. The Ace is easier to use and harder to trust, and I've internalised the correction so thoroughly I no longer notice I'm doing it — which is how a wrong menu survives.
Both are easy. Only one of them is easy and accurate. The card gives it to the Ace on workflow; the Smono keeps the numbers.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8/10 against 7/10, and the winning margin is entirely one button.
Push, the AVB falls out, move on. Two seconds after every bowl, no brush, no tapping, no scraping — and for low-to-moderate-resin flower the chamber stays remarkably clean between deep cleans. It doesn't do everything: the screens want five minutes with ISO every five sessions, the mouthpiece a weekly soak, the airpath and mechanism a monthly go. The self-clean postpones the deep clean rather than abolishing it. Half a job, done brilliantly.
The Smono's ceramic zirconia genuinely resists staining better than metal, and the glass mouthpiece pops off and soaks clean, so its routine is light — a brush every three or four sessions, a fortnightly pipe cleaner, a monthly strip-down. Its weak point is the airpath, which isn't easily accessible for deep cleaning, and its 7/10 is fair for that.
Neither device is hard work. But one of them removed a step from every single session, permanently, and that compounds.
Portability
Winner: XMAX Ace, on the card — 7.5/10 against 7/10 — and I disagree with my own scores here.
The Ace is compact at 99 × 43 × 24mm with the swivel mouthpiece keeping the profile snag-free, and it doesn't read as a vaporiser across a room. It also weighs 340g, most of which is the self-cleaning mechanism, and you know it's in your pocket the whole time it's in your pocket.
The Smono is 145g and slim — less than half the weight — with the glass mouthpiece as its fragility tax and an OLED that lights up in the dark unless you cup it. Its review scores it 7/10 for being neither the tiniest nor the stealthiest.
On the published numbers the Ace takes it. In a jacket on a walk into town, 195 grams is 195 grams, and I reach for the Smono. Read this category as a draw and weigh it yourself with both in your hands.
Value for Money
Winner: Smono 4 Pro, and this is where the match is decided. 9.5/10 against 8/10, with a £6 price gap running the other way.
The Ace's value case is a feature list read without the price attached: removable 18650, ceramic chamber, haptics, 1°C control, two session modes, swivel zirconia mouthpiece, self-cleaning bowl ejection, £79. Nothing else at any price has push-button bowl ejection. If that saves you five minutes a day, the arithmetic gets silly quickly.
The Smono's value case is the shortest one on this site: hybrid heating, ceramic zirconia, glass mouthpiece, OLED, degree control, 3000mAh, USB-C, three-year warranty, £85. Its review called it the easiest value assessment of thirty-eight reviews and I'm not going to argue with it. Six pounds buys a better heating system, 400mAh more battery, a charging standard from this decade and two extra years of warranty. There is no version of that trade where the six pounds is the interesting part.
Score Comparison
| Category | XMAX Ace | Smono 4 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Design & Build | 6.5/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 7.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 8.5/10 | 8/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Portability | 7.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Value for Money | 8/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Overall | 7.2/10 | 7.6/10 |
Three each and a draw, and the Smono still wins by four tenths. That looks odd until you notice which three each side took. The Ace wins ease, cleaning and portability — the service categories. The Smono wins vapour, battery and value — the food.
One more piece of arithmetic, because it's the most interesting number in this comparison and it belongs in the open: the Ace's seven category scores average 7.6 — exactly the Smono's overall — and its review marked it down to 7.2 explicitly, for the temperature inaccuracy undermining the device's own precision claims. That's not a scoring quirk, it's the verdict in miniature. The Ace is a 7.6 device with a 0.4 deduction for lying to you about where it is.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the XMAX Ace if the after-part is what stops you. You're the person whose devices go uncleaned for a fortnight and then get an apologetic hour. You want the cell to come out. You want on-demand as well as session, you want haptics so you're not squinting at a screen, and you can live with adding twenty in your head forever. If chronic pain, fatigue or executive function are the reason a session doesn't happen some evenings, the self-cleaning button is worth more to you than half a point of vapour quality, and I'd rather you had the device you'll actually use.
Buy the Smono 4 Pro if you want the best vapour available for around eighty-five pounds — which, on this site's scores, is exactly what it is. It's the right answer for anyone stepping up from a pen who wants to hear what hybrid heating does to a layered strain, for medical users who need a display they can trust and a battery that gets through a day of dosing, and for anyone prescribed the awkward terpinolene-dominant flower that budget conduction flattens. Three years of warranty on an £85 device is the quiet part of the argument and it shouldn't be.
The wrong buyer for the Ace is the flavour chaser — its own review says so, and points them at the V3 Pro at £79.99 with hybrid heating and USB-C. The wrong buyer for the Smono is anyone who needs a spare cell in a pocket at a festival, because the 3000mAh is sealed and that's that.
How I Actually Choose
The rotation data doesn't lie, and I keep rotation data, because ADHD.
The Smono 4 Pro is the one I recommend when someone asks for a first proper vaporiser and says a number under a hundred. It's the one I hand people. 190°C, 0.2g medium grind, slightly under-full, five minutes, four or five draws, no thinking. It's the takeaway I walk to when I've decided I want a decent dinner.
The Ace comes out on the other kind of evening. Pain flaring, brain flat, the thought of a brush and an ISO soak sitting between me and a session like a locked gate. Set 210, know it's 190, push the button afterwards, go to bed. It gets used more often than its score suggests it should, and the reason is not that it's better — it's that on those nights the alternative isn't the Smono, it's nothing.
That's the whole street, really. The counter is better food. The kiosk is open when you can't face talking to anyone. I've eaten at both this month and I know exactly which one I'd keep if one of them shut.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody who has both takeaways in their phone thinks they're choosing between the same dinner twice.
The kiosk removed the human bits and got very good at it — no queue, no small talk, no washing-up, a bell that tells you when it's done. It also runs a tracker that's twenty out and has never once been told. The counter has no tracker, no app and no way of knowing you're coming, and the food is better, and the bloke knows your order. The Smono 4 Pro is the better device for most people at this money: hybrid heating, three separable flavour layers where the Ace gets two, 3000mAh, USB-C, three years of warranty, £85.
But the Ace keeps something the Smono can't take, and it should be said plainly: it is the only vaporiser at any price that empties its own bowl at the push of a button, and on the evenings when that's the difference between a session and no session, no score table on this site is relevant. If that sentence is why you're here, buy it, add twenty to everything, and enjoy it.
Six pounds apart. £5.70 after the code. The food, or the service — pick the one you'll actually get to.
FAQ
XMAX Ace vs Smono 4 Pro — which should I buy? The Smono 4 Pro for most people: it scores higher (7.6 vs 7.2) for only £6 more (£85.00 vs £79.00), and that £6 buys hybrid heating, a 3000mAh battery, USB-C and a three-year warranty. Buy the XMAX Ace if the self-cleaning button, a removable 18650 or on-demand mode is specifically what you're paying for.
Is the Ace's temperature display really 20°C out? Yes — 20–25°C high, documented across multiple owners. Set 210°C and you're vaping at roughly 190°C. The fix is to add twenty to every target and it becomes automatic within about a week. It's a real fix, but it's also the reason its review knocked the overall from a 7.6 category average down to 7.2. If you want the number on the screen to be the number in the chamber, that's the Smono.
Which one tastes better? The Smono 4 Pro, on the card (7.5 vs 7) and in the glass. Hybrid heating separates a layered strain into its parts — its Animal Mints test produced mint, cookie and diesel as three distinct stages — where the Ace's conduction compresses them and the rubber in its mouthpiece lid adds a faint warmth that isn't the flower. Neither is a flavour flagship; if flavour is the whole brief, the temperature guide will do more for you than either device.
Which battery is better? The Smono, comfortably: 3000mAh sealed, 8–12 sessions, USB-C, ninety minutes to full. The Ace's 2600mAh 18650 does about ten sessions and comes out for swapping, which is the better long-term story — but MicroUSB at two to three hours is a poor way to fill it, so budget for a spare cell and an external charger.
Does the self-cleaning button actually work? Yes, for herb. Push it and the AVB drops out of the chamber. It does not clean the screens, the airpath or the mouthpiece — with sticky GG4-lineage flower the screens gunked after two sessions and needed doing by hand. It postpones the deep clean; it doesn't abolish it.
Which is better for medical use? The Smono 4 Pro, on two counts: a display you can dose against without mental arithmetic, and terpene preservation at low temperatures that held delicate terpinolene intact. The Ace's counter-argument is accessibility — on high-pain, low-energy days the push-button emptying genuinely lowers the barrier to a session — and that's not nothing. Neither of these is medical advice; scoring rationale is on the methodology page.
Should I just buy the XMAX V3 Pro instead? It's a fair question and the Ace's own review raises it first: the V3 Pro is £79.99 with hybrid heating and USB-C, and it's the better vaporiser. The Ace exists for people who'd rather have the easier routine than the better heater. If you're comparing all three, the Smono at £85 still takes the vapour and the battery.
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 has pointed out that a device which empties its own bowl has not, in fact, reduced the number of devices in the flat.
Dennis would like it noted that he uses both takeaways on his street, orders from the app one when he doesn't want to speak to anybody, and has never once told them their tracker is twenty minutes out. He is aware this is also his entire approach to owning 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: - XMAX Ace Review: The Lidl Middle Aisle Find → - Smono 4 Pro Review: The Aldi Wine of Vaporisers →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I score devices →
Get Either at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
XMAX Ace — £79.00 Buy the XMAX Ace → Worth knowing: buy a spare 18650 with it — swapping cells is the whole point, and it spares you the two-to-three-hour MicroUSB charge. And if you're disciplined about cleaning, the XMAX V3 Pro at £79.99 is the better heater for a pound more.
Smono 4 Pro — £85.00 Buy the Smono 4 Pro → Worth knowing: check the mouthpiece for wobble on arrival — early production runs were loose, later ones aren't, and three years of warranty sit behind it either way.
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. Scoring rationale lives on the methodology page.
Strains Used: unusually for this site, neither of these devices was run on the standard control pair. The XMAX Ace was tested on Forbidden Fruit (indica, Cherry Pie × Tangie, ~21–26% THC, myrcene/limonene/caryophyllene/pinene) and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue (balanced hybrid, Strawberry Cough × Gorilla Glue #4, ~20–22% THC, myrcene/caryophyllene/limonene/pinene). The Smono 4 Pro was tested on Animal Mints (hybrid, Animal Cookies × SinMint Cookies, ~22–28% THC, caryophyllene-dominant with limonene, myrcene and linalool) and Tilray PT01 T22 (sativa medical, proprietary Tilray cultivar, 22% THC, <1% CBD, terpinolene-dominant). There is no jar overlap, so the strain section above compares by terpene family — the fragile terpinolene/pinene end and the caryophyllene/limonene dessert end — and says so where the evidence is one-sided. 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.