30-Second Verdict
It's a draw — 7.2 apiece — and the two scores got there from opposite directions. The XMAX Ace has the better scorecard and was docked for a display that lies by twenty degrees. The XMAX Starry 4 has the weaker scorecard and was lifted for a battery and a build that simply refuse to die. Same manufacturer, near enough the same money, same number. What decides it is which job you want done: the Ace empties its own bowl; the Starry 4 is the one that's still working when everything else isn't.
XMAX Ace: 7.2/10
XMAX Starry 4: 7.2/10
Buy the XMAX Ace if:
- You want the self-cleaning button — push, click, the bowl empties, no brush
- Cleanup friction is the reason you skip sessions (pain days, ADHD days, tired days)
- You want about ten sessions per 18650, a 20-second heat-up and an on-demand mode
- You can live with a display that reads 20–25°C high and a MicroUSB port in 2026
Buy the XMAX Starry 4 if:
- You want USB-C and the better battery score (8.0 against 7.5)
- You want a device less than half the Ace's weight — ~138g against 340g
- You want conduction's heavier evening body-load, with 4, 6 and 10-minute session timers and an airflow slider
- You want a backup with no moving parts that still works after six months in a drawer
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| XMAX Ace | XMAX Starry 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction (black ceramic chamber) | Pure conduction (ceramic oven, zirconia cooling chamber in the mouthpiece) |
| Heat-up | ~20 seconds | 25–35 seconds in testing |
| Modes | Session + on-demand | Session only; 4 / 6 / 10-minute timers |
| Temperature | 100–240°C + 255°C boost, 1°C steps; display reads 20–25°C high | 100–240°C (unofficial); display accuracy not measured |
| Battery | Removable 18650, 2600mAh, ~10 sessions / 75 min | Removable 18650 (2550mAh retail cell, 3200mAh on the POTV version), 5–7 bowls |
| Charging | MicroUSB, 2–3 hours; pass-through unknown | USB-C, 2–2.5 hours on a 2A charger; pass-through (weaker while plugged in) |
| Bowl | ~0.35g | ~0.2–0.25g (unofficial) |
| Size / weight | 99 × 43 × 24mm, 340g | ~114 × 38 × 22mm, ~138g (unofficial) |
| Party trick | Spring-loaded self-cleaning bowl ejection | Adjustable airflow slider |
| Warranty | 1 year | 1 year per a third-party reviewer; unconfirmed on TopGreen's own site |
| Price | Check current price | Check current price |
The Hook
You only really learn about people by living with them, and the fastest version of that education is university halls.
There were two of them on my corridor. The first kept his room immaculate. Bed made — actually made, hospital corners — desk clear, mugs washed and put away the same hour they were used. He was never ill, never skint, never locked out, never once the reason anybody's night went wrong. Knock at any hour of any term and he was in, door on the latch, and he'd lend you a tin opener. Everyone respected him. Nobody ever went in there.
The second one's room was a crime scene. But he did the washing up. Not his washing up — the washing up. He'd come into the kitchen at eleven at night, find the sink full of four people's pans, and just do them. Unasked. Never mentioned it. Never once said "so who's going to do these, then." And I want to be clear about what that's worth, because it took me until about February to understand it properly: a tidy room is a state you maintain for yourself. A clean sink is a favour you do everyone else. One of those is a virtue. The other is a kindness, and the two are not the same currency.
The Starry 4 is the tidy one. The XMAX Ace is the one who does the washing up.
I called the Ace a Lidl middle aisle find in its review, and the Starry 4 a filter coffee machine in its own. Both still stand, and I'm not re-running either. What matters for this pairing is narrower and more domestic: two conduction vaporisers from the same manufacturer, near enough the same money, scoring exactly the same number, and the entire difference between them is which kind of housemate you want. The one whose own affairs are always in order. Or the one who does the job you've been avoiding.
They score 7.2 apiece. That's not a cop-out. That's the finding.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: draw. 7.0/10 apiece — two conduction ovens, two different reasons for stopping at seven.
The Ace's 7 came with a warning attached: the display reads 20–25°C high. Set 210°C, vape at roughly 190°C. Once you've internalised the offset — about a week of daily use, in my experience — the black ceramic chamber gives clean conduction with no metal taste, and the swivel zirconia mouthpiece cools it usefully. What holds it at a 7 is the rubber in the mouthpiece lid, which puts a faint warmth into the flavour that comes from the seal rather than the plant, and the simple fact that every flavour judgement you make on the Ace is made through a compass that's twenty degrees out.
The Starry 4's 7 is a different shape. It's pure conduction, the oven walls cook your material whether you're drawing or not, and its review is plain about the result: the first two pulls of any bowl are genuinely good, and by pull three you're tasting the oven as much as the flower. What earns it the 7 is that it does the fundamentals properly — even extraction, no hot spots, no scorched edges, AVB an even brown — and that sustained heat gives a heavier, more sedative body-load, a session that lands like a slow joint rather than a sharp hit. The airflow slider helps at the margins: closed, it holds the bright end of a strain roughly one draw longer. What keeps it off an 8 is resolution — complex profiles arrive as one warm note rather than four separable ones — plus a zinc shell that makes the back half of a long session less comfortable than it should be.
So: level on the number, and level for honest reasons. The Ace gives you cleaner-tasting vapour through a display you can't trust. The Starry 4 gives you a display with no documented offset and a flavour that blends by the third draw. Neither is a flavour device. Both are delivery devices, and perfectly pleasant ones.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Here's where I have to be straight with you, because the site's whole method depends on it. The Starry 4 ran the control pair — Jack Herer and Wedding Cake, same jars, same grinder, 0.22g into the oven. The Ace did not. Its review was run on Forbidden Fruit and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue, both medical-access samples, and I'm not going to invent control data to make a tidier table. What I can do is compare by terpene family, because the families line up better than you'd expect.
The bright-top-note family — Jack Herer, and Forbidden Fruit standing in for it. Jack is terpinolene-led with pinene and caryophyllene behind, and it's the strain that catches devices out. On the Starry 4 at 180°C, slider closed, draw one was pine needles, properly bright, with lemon peel just behind; draw two held it; by draw three the oven was winning and the citrus had thinned; draw four was green herb with the top taken off. Pepper turned up at 190°C and stayed the most legible thing in the bowl; 205°C was earth, leather and roast. Two good draws out of eleven, with the closed slider buying most of a third. Forbidden Fruit is the Ace's nearest equivalent — limonene and pinene over cherry — and there the Ace's flaw turned into a favour: set to 190°C, an actual ~170°C, the tropical lift came through for three draws with real clarity, precisely because the device was running cooler than it claimed. The offset is a feature if you know about it and a flaw if you don't, which is the Ace review's line and still the fairest one.
So on volatile top notes it's two-and-a-bit bright draws against three, and neither machine keeps them. The Starry 4 loses them to its own always-hot walls. The Ace keeps them a draw longer and can't tell you what temperature did it.
The sweet-dessert family — Wedding Cake, and Strawberry Glue standing in for it. Wedding Cake is caryophyllene-first with limonene and myrcene, dessert over peppery earth, and it flatters devices rather than exposing them. On the Starry 4 it was the best stretch of the whole review: vanilla and sweet cream thick from draw one at 180°C, butter and dough at 190°C with pepper arriving around draw three, caramelising sugar by 205°C. Rich, generous — and delivered as one warm thing rather than three separable ones. Put the two control strains side by side at 205°C and they were still recognisably different plants, Jack in leather and roast, Wedding Cake in caramelised sugar, so the oven doesn't turn everything brown; it just won't resolve. Strawberry Glue shares the sweet-over-earth architecture with a resinous GG4 twist, and on the Ace it behaved the same way: strawberry sweetness clean and gentle at a set 185°C, the diesel-glue complexity arriving at a set 200°C, full earthy extraction by 220°C. Sweet flowers forgive both machines, which is the point of the family.
What Strawberry Glue did do — and the control pair would never have shown this — is stress-test the party trick. The self-cleaning button ejected the AVB cleanly, even from GG4-lineage flower. The screens, however, needed doing by hand after two sessions. The washing-up flatmate does the pans. He does not descale the kettle.
The call: a draw by family, which is what two 7.0 vapour scores ought to look like. The Ace holds a fragile top note fractionally longer; the Starry 4 does the dessert end with more body and the heavier evening effect its review is built around. Neither separates a complex strain into its parts — you need a convection heater for that, and in this family it's the V3 Pro.
Design & Build
Winner: draw. 6.5/10 apiece — and they lose their points in completely different places.
The Ace's build is its weakest card and its review didn't flinch: the carbon fibre isn't carbon fibre, it's a textured plastic housing with a carbon-fibre-pattern finish, and at 340g it is genuinely heavy for a 99 × 43 × 24mm device. The weight isn't premium materials, it's the spring assembly and the moving plate. The swivel zirconia mouthpiece is a real design win — flat against the body in a pocket, out 90° to use — and the self-cleaning mechanism is proper engineering rather than a gimmick. But it's engineering wearing a sticker, and it has the one liability the Starry 4 doesn't carry: moving parts. Spring mechanisms and sticky resin have never been natural allies. A month in, mine still clicked cleanly. That's the honest extent of what I know.
The Starry 4's 6.5 is a heat problem. The zinc alloy shell soaks up warmth from the oven, and by minute four at 190°C and above you're rotating your grip to avoid the hottest spots — not dangerous, noticeable every session. The mouthpiece housing around the zirconia cooling chamber is budget-grade plastic that feels like it will tire with repeated ISO cleaning, though the magnetic closure is good and stays shut in a pocket, and the battery door is far sturdier than the Starry 3's. What it has instead of flair is survival: six months in an office drawer, no charge, no firmware, no app, pulled out half-charged and working on the first press. That's the tidy room. Nothing out of place, nothing to apologise for, and nothing anyone tells a story about afterwards.
Battery & Charging
Winner: XMAX Starry 4. 8.0/10 versus 7.5/10 — and it's the port, not the cell.
Both take a removable 18650, which is the single best thing about buying either. When the cell fades you swap in a cheap Samsung 25R or Sony VTC6 in thirty seconds and you're back to full, instead of binning the device. Neither will die of chemistry.
On raw endurance the Ace is actually ahead: about ten sessions and 75 minutes continuous from its 2600mAh cell, against the Starry 4's 5–7 bowls at 185–195°C with six-minute sessions. Cell capacity on the Starry 4 varies by SKU — 2550mAh in the retail model, 3200mAh in the POTV version, which adds one to two bowls a charge. So why does the Starry 4 take the category?
MicroUSB. In 2026. From the same manufacturer that puts USB-C on the Starry 4. The Ace takes 2–3 hours to fill over a cable you carry for nothing else, with no published pass-through spec. The Starry 4 does 2–2.5 hours on a 2A charger over the cable already in your bag, and supports pass-through, though it's noticeably weaker while plugged in. Add the drawer test — half a charge still there after six months untouched — and you have the tidy flatmate's bank balance: never impressive, never overdrawn. The Ace's answer is "buy an external 18650 charger", which is a good answer and also an admission.
Ease of Use
Winner: XMAX Ace, and it isn't close. 8.5/10 versus 7.0/10.
This is the washing up. This is the entire argument.
The normal vaporiser routine is grind, load, vape, wait for it to cool, brush the chamber, tap out the AVB, brush again. The Ace's routine is grind, load, vape, push button, done. The herb falls out. It is satisfying in exactly the way a retractable pen is satisfying, and the accumulated time it saves over a year is the device's actual product. The friction in vaping was never the vaping. On top of that: a 20-second heat-up, haptic feedback when it's ready, when the session's ending and when boost kicks in, 1°C control, and both session and on-demand modes.
The Starry 4 is simple in concept with what its review calls a small technique tax. Five clicks to power on, up and down for temperature, 25–35 seconds to the vibration, then a session that auto-shuts on your chosen 4, 6 or 10-minute timer. It wants sipping like a joint, not ripping like a bong — fast pulls give you hot, harsh vapour. Pack pressure matters: firm and even, or the oven channels. And after four minutes you're managing the shell heat with your hand. None of it is difficult. It just isn't free. The tidy flatmate's room is spotless because he tidies it. Every day. Himself.
One caveat runs the other way, and it's a real one: the Ace's display lies by 20–25°C, and a device that asks for mental arithmetic before every session is not, strictly, easy to use. The offset became automatic for me within a week. It won't for everyone.
Also, don't use the Ace's 255°C boost. It combusts. Stay under a set 240°C.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: XMAX Ace, by the widest margin on the card. 8.0/10 versus 6.5/10.
One push, the bowl empties. No brush, no scraping, no post-session ritual. For low-to-moderate-resin flower the Ace's chamber stays remarkably clean. But — and its review was scrupulous about this — the button does half a job brilliantly. It empties the herb; it doesn't touch the screens, the airpath or the mouthpiece. The realistic schedule is: button after every bowl (two seconds), screens every five sessions (five minutes with an ISO soak), mouthpiece weekly, airpath and mechanism monthly. With genuinely resinous flower, the screens come round after two sessions.
The Starry 4 is conduction with no ejection mechanism, and conduction ovens dirty faster than convection chambers because the material sits against hot walls the whole session. After 5–10 bowls there's residue on the screen and a thin film in the vapour path; after 20 the screen is clogged and draw resistance is up enough to notice. The clean itself is straightforward — mouthpiece off, screen out with a paperclip, cap, cooling chamber and silicone seal into ISO for twenty minutes, oven wiped with a cotton bud — ten minutes of active work plus the soak. Go gently with the plastic housing; forcing it is how you crack it.
Here's the bit worth being honest about: on total minutes at the sink across a year, the gap is smaller than the scores suggest, because the screens are the real work and the Ace's screens come round more often than the Starry 4's deep clean does. What the Ace removes is the daily friction — the small nightly obstacle between you and a session, the one that on a bad pain day or a bad executive-function day is the difference between having a bowl and going to bed without one. That's not a spec-sheet advantage. It's an accessibility one, and it's why this category matters more than its weighting suggests.
Portability
Winner: draw. 7.5/10 apiece — and on paper it shouldn't be.
The Starry 4 weighs ~138g. The Ace weighs 340g. That's the widest physical gap between these two devices, and both reviews still land on the same number, because weight isn't the whole of carrying something.
The Ace is compact at 99 × 43 × 24mm and heavy enough that you always know it's in your pocket. The swivel mouthpiece tucks flat so nothing snags, and the finish is grippy without collecting lint. Stealth is moderate: it doesn't read as a vape across a room, but it doesn't read as anything else either.
The Starry 4 is longer at ~114 × 38 × 22mm, front-pocket friendly rather than invisible, and its review is clear about what it gives back: it looks like a vape, the always-cooking oven leaves more residual smell than a convection device, and the shell stays warm for a couple of minutes after a session. What earns it the 7.5 is that a spare 18650 in the other pocket makes it effectively unlimited away from a plug — and the same trick works on the Ace. Lighter in the hand, warmer in the pocket. Level.
Value for Money
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8.0/10 versus 7.0/10.
The Ace's case is a feature list read without the price attached: removable 18650, ceramic chamber, self-cleaning mechanism, haptics, 1°C control, two session modes, swivel zirconia mouthpiece. Read that list cold and you'd guess it cost a good deal more than it does. And it has the one feature nobody else has at any price.
The Starry 4's case is different in kind: no headline trick, nothing that makes a mate say "do that again." What it buys is a removable 18650, USB-C, a working airflow slider, three session timers, vapour that's genuinely good with dessert genetics, and drawer reliability that pricier devices can't match — a five-year device rather than a two-year one, because the only part that wears out is the part you can replace cheaply. Its review gave it a 7 rather than a 6 precisely so as not to confuse "has a better sibling" with "is bad".
And that sibling is the elephant for both. The XMAX V3 Pro sits on the same shelf at near enough the same money, with a 100% convection heater and USB-C, and both of these reviews say so out loud. Price doesn't separate the Ace and the Starry 4. The V3 Pro does, and I've written that comparison up separately in XMAX Ace vs V3 Pro.
Score Comparison
| Category | XMAX Ace | XMAX Starry 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Design & Build | 6.5/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 7.5/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 8.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 8/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Portability | 7.5/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Value for Money | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Overall | 7.2/10 | 7.2/10 |
Three categories to the Ace, one to the Starry 4, three level. On the card, the Ace is the better device, and its category average is 7.6 against the Starry 4's 7.1. The overalls are level anyway, and both reviews explain why. The Ace was adjusted down to 7.2 because a display that reads 20–25°C high undermines trust in every precision claim the device makes. The Starry 4 was adjusted up to 7.2 because a removable cell and a build that survives six months of neglect are worth more in year three than they look on a spec sheet. One flatmate lost marks for reliability. The other earned them for it. (For how these numbers are arrived at, the methodology page has the full weighting.)
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the XMAX Ace if the chore is the obstacle. You've owned a vaporiser before and found it gathering dust because the cleaning felt like a project. You have pain days, or ADHD, or just long weeks, and "push a button and the bowl empties" is not a novelty to you — it's the difference between using the thing and not. You want a swappable cell and an on-demand mode, you'll happily buy an external charger to route around the MicroUSB, and you can do twenty degrees of mental arithmetic without resenting it. Ideally you also find a satisfying mechanical click genuinely pleasurable, because you're going to press it a lot.
Buy the XMAX Starry 4 if you want the one that's always there. USB-C, the better battery score, less than half the weight, no mechanism to seize and no known display offset. It's a session device with a slow, heavy, sedative conduction character that its own review calls a bedtime ritual device — and a backup that will still be working in year five on its second cell. If your evening ends on the sofa rather than at a desk, that's a feature, not a compromise.
The wrong buyer for the Ace is anyone who chases flavour, wants the number on the screen to be the number in the oven, or would be quietly furious about a MicroUSB port. The wrong buyer for the Starry 4 is anyone whose real problem is that they don't clean their vaporiser — the Starry 4 has no answer to that, and conduction means it needs cleaning more often, not less. It's also the wrong tool for daytime microdosing: session-only, six-minute sessions, and a sedative character its review calls "wrong tool" for ADHD focus.
And the wrong buyer for both — I have to keep saying it — is anyone who'd be equally happy with the V3 Pro, which is most people, which is why I recommend the V3 Pro in almost every conversation and still keep reaching for the Ace.
How I Actually Choose
I keep rotation data, because ADHD, and these two sit in it in very different places.
The Starry 4 lives in my office desk drawer, ninety per cent of the time, and that's not a metaphor. It's third in the queue behind the V3 Pro and the Mighty+ — it comes out when the first two are elsewhere, when something needs a firmware update, when something else is flat. When it does come out, the session is always the same: evening, sofa, 190°C, six-minute timer, slider at halfway, 0.2g of something indica-leaning. It's the tidy flatmate exactly. I never sought out his company. He was simply always in, and when I knocked he answered.
The Ace's entry in the data is stranger. It doesn't correlate with mood, or strain, or time of day. It correlates with tiredness. Its share of my sessions climbs on the evenings when everything else feels like too many steps. Which is the halls thing precisely. I didn't seek out the washing-up bloke's company either. But on the nights when the kitchen was a disaster and I had an essay due and no clean pan, he was the one who mattered, and the man with the immaculate room was upstairs with his door shut, being immaculate.
Tom, meanwhile, has met the Ace. He rang me about something else entirely and spent most of the call clicking the self-clean button, dry, empty, over and over, the way you'd click a biro in a meeting. "I'm not even vaping," he said. "I just like the click." Which is charming, and also the exact stress test the mechanism's long-term durability question was written about, and Tom's relationship with electronics has a documented history. If the Ace's spring assembly fails inside six months, we will all know whose fault it was, and it won't be XMAX's.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
I'm still in touch with the washing-up one. I'm not in touch with the tidy one, and I couldn't tell you a single thing about him beyond the room.
That's not a moral. The tidy one was, by most measurable standards, the better flatmate: quieter, steadier, never a problem, always in. But scoring cards measure what people are like to live near, and what I actually remember is a bloke doing four other people's pans at eleven at night without being asked, because it needed doing and he was there.
Two vaporisers. Same manufacturer, near enough the same money, same 7.2. The Starry 4 is the more self-sufficient object: lighter, the right port, the better battery, nothing mechanical to go wrong, and still working after six months in a drawer. The Ace is a plastic body with a sticker on it, a display that lies by twenty degrees, and a charging port from a previous decade — and it is the only vaporiser on this site that does the one job everybody hates.
If you want the device that never gives you a reason to complain, buy the Starry 4. If you want the device that removes a reason to give up, buy the Ace.
There's your draw. Just one more bowl — and then push the button, because you won't have to do anything else.
FAQ
XMAX Ace vs XMAX Starry 4 — which should I buy?
It's a genuine tie on overall score: 7.2 apiece. Buy the Ace if cleaning friction is what stops you using a vaporiser — the self-cleaning button is the only one of its kind at any price. Buy the Starry 4 if you want USB-C, a lighter device, the better battery score and a no-mechanism backup that keeps working. If you're buying one budget vape for flavour, both reviews point you to the V3 Pro instead.
If they both score 7.2, which one wins more categories?
The Ace — ease of use (8.5 vs 7.0), cleaning (8.0 vs 6.5) and value (8.0 vs 7.0). The Starry 4 wins battery and charging (8.0 vs 7.5). Vapour, design and portability are level. The overalls meet in the middle because the Ace was marked down for its inaccurate temperature display and the Starry 4 was marked up for its long-term reliability.
Does the Ace's self-cleaning button actually work?
Yes, for emptying herb. Push it, the spring-loaded plate ejects the AVB, done in two seconds. It does not clean the screens, the airpath or the mouthpiece; with resinous flower the screens still want an ISO soak every few sessions. It does half the job, and it does that half brilliantly.
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. Add 20°C to whatever you'd normally use and it becomes automatic within a week. If a display that lies to you is a dealbreaker, that alone points you to the Starry 4.
Does the Starry 4 really get hot in the hand?
Warm enough that you rotate your grip after about four minutes at 190°C and up. It isn't dangerous, just present — it's the reason its build scored 6.5. Staying under 190°C reduces it noticeably, and the 4-minute timer sidesteps it entirely.
Which one has USB-C?
The Starry 4. The Ace charges over MicroUSB, which is hard to defend in 2026 when the same manufacturer's Starry 4 and V3 Pro both have USB-C. Buy an external 18650 charger and it stops mattering — the cell comes out of both devices anyway.
Which has the better battery?
Split decision. The Ace runs longer per cell — about 10 sessions and 75 minutes continuous, against the Starry 4's 5–7 bowls. The Starry 4 wins the category anyway on USB-C and pass-through, plus a cell that was still half-charged after six months in a drawer. Both take a removable 18650, so both are effectively immortal for the price of a spare cell.
Will the Ace's self-cleaning mechanism break?
Unknown, and it's the honest open question. It's been reliable through a month of daily testing, but spring-loaded mechanisms and sticky resin have never historically been friends. The mechanism is simultaneously the device's best feature and its most vulnerable one. The Starry 4, having no mechanism, cannot fail in this specific way.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M. has been vaping daily for the best part of a decade — since an original Mighty in 2018 — and has tested 50+ devices for this site. He works in IT, has ADHD, and uses cannabis for chronic pain management. He lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah, who has heard the self-cleaning button click approximately four hundred times and no longer looks up, and who once described the Starry 4 as "the most boring-looking one you own".
Dennis was neither the tidy one nor the one who did the washing up. He was the one who put his mug in the sink to soak and considered the matter handled. He is aware this explains a great deal about which of these two vaporisers he keeps reaching for.
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 Vaporiser That Empties Its Own Bowl →
- XMAX Starry 4 Review: The Filter Coffee Machine of Dry Herb Vaporisers →
- XMAX V3 Pro Review: The Decathlon of Dry Herb Vaporisers →
Head-to-Head Comparisons:
- XMAX Ace vs XMAX V3 Pro →
- XMAX Ace vs Smono 4 Pro →
- Auxo Celsius vs XMAX Ace →
- All Head-to-Head Comparisons →
Best-Of Guides:
New to Vaping?
- Conduction vs Convection Explained → — both of these are conduction; this is what that means for flavour
- The Temperature Guide → — essential reading if you're buying the Ace and its twenty-degree offset
How I Score:
Get Either at HerbVape.co.uk
XMAX Ace — the one who does the washing up.
Buy the XMAX Ace →
Worth grabbing with it: HerbVape Universal Cleaning Kit — the button handles the herb; you handle the screens. A spare 18650 is worth having too, because swapping a cell beats waiting on MicroUSB.
XMAX Starry 4 — the tidy one, always in.
Buy the XMAX Starry 4 →
Worth grabbing with it: XMAX Starry V3 Mouthpiece Screen — the part you'll replace most often on a conduction oven.
Just one more bowl.
Last updated: 25 September 2026.
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.
A note on the strain control: this site runs Jack Herer and Wedding Cake through every device as a fixed control — same jars, same grinder, same weights on the scales, the strain held constant so the machine is the only variable. The XMAX Starry 4 was tested on that control. The XMAX Ace was tested on Forbidden Fruit and Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue, both medical-access samples, so the strain-test section above compares the two devices by terpene family rather than pretending to a like-for-like result it doesn't have.
Strains Used: Jack Herer — sativa (Haze × Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk), ~20% THC, terpinolene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant, pine-citrus-pepper profile with fragile top notes. Wedding Cake — indica-leaning hybrid (Triangle Kush × Animal Mints, via Triangle Mints #23), ~24% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene-dominant, vanilla-cream-dough dessert profile over peppery earth. Forbidden Fruit — indica (Cherry Pie × Tangie), ~21–26% THC, myrcene/limonene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant. Grow Pharma Strawberry Glue — balanced hybrid (Strawberry Cough × Gorilla Glue #4), ~20–22% THC, myrcene/caryophyllene/limonene/pinene-dominant. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Counterfeit Warning: XMAX counterfeits are circulating in UK marketplaces. Only buy from authorised retailers. HerbVape.co.uk is an authorised XMAX/TopGreen stockist — your warranty is valid and your device is genuine.
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 — Sapphire, Cantourage and Zerenia are three of the larger ones. 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.