30-Second Verdict
The V3 Pro wins — 8.0 to 7.2 — and the price gap is ninety-nine pence. That is not a budget decision. Nothing about this pairing is a budget decision. One of these devices makes better vapour and asks you to do the work; the other does half the work for you and hands you vapour that's merely fine. Same manufacturer, same shelf, same money, opposite philosophies.
XMAX Ace: 7.2/10 | £79.00 XMAX V3 Pro: 8.0/10 | £79.99
Buy the XMAX Ace if: - You want the self-cleaning button — push, the bowl empties, no brush, no scraping - Post-session faff is the thing that actually stops you having a session - You want conduction simplicity: load it, press it, draw normally, no technique homework - Ten sessions per 18650 and a 20-second heat-up matter more to you than terpene resolution
Buy the XMAX V3 Pro if: - You want the better vapour — 100% convection, and the first three draws of a bowl prove it - USB-C with pass-through, in 2026, is a floor rather than a bonus - You'll actually pack a 150 × 27mm slab into a jeans pocket and take it places - You'd rather have a device that tells you the truth about its own temperature
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| XMAX Ace | XMAX V3 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction (ceramic chamber) | 100% convection |
| Heat-up | ~20 seconds | ~15s to 180°C (spec); ~30s to a usable 200°C |
| Battery | Removable 18650, ~10 sessions / 75 min | Removable 18650, 6–8 bowls, pass-through |
| Charging | MicroUSB, 2–3 hours | USB-C, 2–2.5 hours on a 2A charger |
| Bowl | ~0.35g | 0.2–0.3g capacity (I pack ~0.1g) |
| Size / weight | 99 × 43 × 24mm, 340g | 150 × 27 × 24mm, weight not published |
| Warranty | 1 year | Electronic base only, no published term |
| Price | £79.00 | £79.99 |
The Hook
There are two honest positions on hoovering, and I have held both in the same house.
The first is the robot. It lives under the hall radiator, it goes out on a schedule, and it does a genuinely decent job of the middle of every room. It will never get the corner behind the bin. It will never do the stairs. But it runs on Tuesday whether or not you feel like existing on Tuesday, and the floor you come home to is a floor somebody hoovered, which is more than you can say for the floor you were planning to do at the weekend.
The second is a proper upright. Corded, heavy, loud, and unarguably better — it lifts grit out of the carpet the robot skated over, it does the stairs with the right attachment, it gets the corner. It also requires that a human being decide, out loud, that now is the moment. Which is the entire problem with uprights, and always has been.
The XMAX Ace is the robot vacuum. The XMAX V3 Pro is the good upright. Both are the eighty-quid version of doing the job. They are not doing the same job.
The Ace's own review called it the Lidl middle aisle find; the V3 Pro's review gave it the Decathlon treatment. Set both of those aside — they're about what each device is next to its own price bracket. What matters here is that these two come out of the same factory, sit ninety-nine pence apart, and split the difference between "better vapour" and "less friction" so cleanly that you could use the pair as a personality test.
One of them scores higher. It's the upright. Here's why I keep reaching for the robot anyway.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: V3 Pro. 8.0/10 versus 7.0/10, and this is the category the whole comparison hangs off.
The V3 Pro is 100% convection — hot air pulled through the load rather than a hot wall cooking it — and on the opening draws of a bowl you can taste that plainly. What complicates it is the chamber: small, metal, and in session mode it soaks up enough heat between draws to start behaving like an oven anyway. So you get proper convection separation early and progressively more blending as the bowl goes on. Flavour first, density later, in that order, at every setting. It also demands 7–10 second committed pulls with partial vent coverage, and its review is blunt about what happens if you don't know that: week one feels like you've been sent a dud.
The Ace is conduction into a black ceramic chamber, and to its credit there's no metallic edge to it — the ceramic is clean and the swivelling zirconia mouthpiece does real cooling work. Two things hold it at a 7. The first is the rubber in the mouthpiece lid, which adds a faint warmth to the taste that comes from the seal rather than the plant. The second is bigger: the temperature display reads 20–25°C high, documented across owners, so a set 210°C is an actual ~190°C. That's survivable once you know — the fix is mental arithmetic and the temperature guide still applies, you're just reading it through an offset — but it means every flavour judgement you make on the Ace is made through a compass that's twenty degrees out.
The honest summary: the V3 Pro is a flavour device for three draws and a delivery device after that. The Ace is a delivery device throughout, and a perfectly pleasant one. If you're buying vapour, this is not close.
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 V3 Pro ran the control pair — Jack Herer and Wedding Cake, same jars, same grinder, 0.1g on the scales. 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: the top notes are fragile and you find out in the first three seconds. On the V3 Pro at 180°C, draw one was cleaner than £79.99 has any business being — pine needles, lemon peel, a cooling menthol edge at the back. Draw two held most of it. By draw three the chamber had soaked up enough heat to start acting like an oven and the citrus had thinned into general green herb; draw four was dry herbs and the memory of draw one. Four draws, two of them properly good, and the review counted them honestly. The Ace's nearest equivalent is Forbidden Fruit's limonene-and-pinene structure, and there the story has a twist: set to 190°C — an actual ~170°C — the tropical, mango-sweet lift came through for three draws with real clarity, precisely because the device was running cooler than it claimed. Low-boiling terps survived a temperature that would have cooked them off. The offset is a feature if you know about it and a flaw if you don't, which is the Ace's review's line and the fairest sentence anyone has written about this device.
So: on volatile top notes, the V3 Pro gets two excellent draws and then loses them to its own chamber. The Ace gets three decent ones and can't tell you what temperature produced them. Neither of those is mastery. The difference is that the V3 Pro's failure is thermal physics and the Ace's is a firmware honesty problem.
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's the strain that flatters devices rather than exposing them. The V3 Pro takes full advantage: vanilla and sweet cream thick from the first draw at 180°C, then butter and baked cake and warm dough at 195°C with pepper arriving late in the fourth draw. Eight dense draws before the top stage. And the review's own limit applies — what you're handed is warm sweet cream as one satisfying thing rather than vanilla, butter and dough as three separate ones. Rich, not resolved. 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 the bottom end, then the diesel-glue complexity and caryophyllene warmth arriving at set 200°C. Sweet flowers forgive both machines, which is the point of the family.
What Strawberry Glue did do — and this is the observation the control pair would never have produced — is stress-test the party trick. After the session the self-cleaning button ejected the AVB cleanly, even from resinous flower. The screens, however, were gunked after two sessions. The button empties herb; it does not remove resin.
The call: compared like-for-like on family, the V3 Pro resolves more of the strain and holds it for fewer draws; the Ace resolves less and doesn't punish you for it. Neither device separates a dessert strain into its components — you need a glass path and a lot more money for that. But only one of them lets you trust the number on the screen while you try.
Design & Build
Winner: V3 Pro. 7.0/10 versus 6.5/10 — a narrow win on the card and a strange one in the hand.
The V3 Pro feels like £79.99 and doesn't pretend otherwise: efficient plastic over an aluminium shell that has survived being dropped onto tiles and onto pavement, a tiny readable OLED, clicky buttons, a solid USB-C port. It is a tool that looks like a tool. Its own review is candid that the magnetic mouthpiece is a consumable rather than a component, and that the max screen frays after 20–30 cleaning cycles — you're buying a Casio, not a Rolex.
The Ace is where the money went somewhere visible and somewhere daft at once. The carbon fibre isn't carbon fibre; it's a textured plastic housing with a carbon-fibre-pattern finish, and at 340g it is heavier than it looks and heavier than it should be. But the weight is honest weight — it's the spring-loaded self-cleaning assembly, which is genuine engineering and satisfying in the way a retractable pen is satisfying. Push, click, herb falls out. The swivel zirconia mouthpiece that folds flat against the body is the other real design win here, and the V3 Pro has nothing like either.
The open question is durability, and I said so in the review: spring mechanisms and sticky resin have never been natural allies. A month in, the Ace's mechanism still clicked cleanly. That's the honest extent of what I know.
Battery & Charging
Winner: V3 Pro. 8.5/10 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. Both are functionally immortal: when the cell fades you spend six quid and thirty seconds instead of doing an RMA or binning the device. The V3 Pro's review makes that case at length — Dave's has been daily-driven for two years on one battery swap, one mouthpiece and regular screens, roughly £110 all in.
On raw endurance the Ace is actually ahead: ~10 sessions and 75 minutes of continuous use from its 2600mAh cell, against the V3 Pro's 6–8 bowls at 185–195°C (4–5 if you hammer it at 205°C with six-minute sessions). So why does the V3 Pro win the category by a point?
MicroUSB. In 2026. From the same manufacturer that put USB-C on the ninety-nine-pence-dearer device. It's 2–3 hours to full and it means carrying a cable you carry for nothing else, and there's no published pass-through spec to soften it. The V3 Pro does 2–2.5 hours on a 2A charger, supports pass-through so you can vape while plugged in, and charges off the cable already in your bag. 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. 8.5/10 versus 7.5/10, and this is the Ace's best category by a distance.
The V3 Pro is simple but not effortless. Three buttons, an OLED, triple-click to swap between session and on-demand, and a genuine learning curve on draw technique: 7–10 second committed pulls with partial vent coverage, or you get thin wispy vapour and conclude you've been robbed. That lesson takes about a fortnight. Its temperature range of 100–220°C is optimistic at both ends — below 170°C there's nothing useful, above 210°C you're roasting.
The Ace asks almost nothing. Conduction means a normal draw works. Heat-up is ~20 seconds. Haptic feedback buzzes when it's ready, when the session's ending, and when boost fires. Session and on-demand both present. And then there's the workflow, which is the actual argument: grind, load, vape, push button, done. The friction in vaping was never the vaping — it was the before and the after, and the Ace deletes half the after.
Two caveats keep it off a 9. The offset means every temperature you set is a sum you have to do. And the 255°C boost will combust — stay under a set 240°C unless you enjoy charcoal.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: XMAX Ace. 8.0/10 versus 7.0/10 — the category the Ace was built to win.
One push ejects the AVB after every bowl. No brush, no scraping, no tapping it out over the bin. For low-to-moderate-resin flower the chamber stays remarkably clean, and the running maintenance drops to: screens every five sessions with an ISO soak, mouthpiece weekly, deep clean of the airpath and mechanism monthly.
But it is, as the review put it, half a job done brilliantly. The button empties the bowl; it does not touch the screens, the airpath or the mouthpiece. Run something as resinous as GG4-lineage flower and you're at the sink after two sessions regardless.
The V3 Pro's routine isn't onerous either — individual parts are genuinely easy to clean, and its review notes they're easier than a Mighty+ cooling unit's eight o-rings. It's the frequency that costs it: screens out every 20 bowls, ISO soaks, and never soak the magnetic cap or it cracks. Running costs of roughly £20–30 a year in screens, mouthpieces and seals. The V3 Pro is a maintained device. The Ace is a device that maintains a bit of itself.
Portability
Winner: V3 Pro. 8.5/10 versus 7.5/10.
The V3 Pro is tall at 150mm but properly slim at 27mm, which is exactly the shape a front jeans pocket wants — it doesn't dig in, it lives in a jacket or a rucksack without complaint, and it's cheap enough to take to a festival and actually use rather than guard.
The Ace's dimensions read pocketable — 99 × 43 × 24mm, shorter than the V3 Pro — but 340g is a lot for a portable, and you know it's there. The swivel mouthpiece genuinely helps: folded flat, the profile is smooth and there's nothing to snag. Stealth on both is moderate at best. Neither disappears; the Ace just weighs more while not disappearing.
Value for Money
Winner: V3 Pro, and it isn't close. 9.5/10 versus 8.0/10 — on a ninety-nine pence price difference.
That scoreline needs explaining, because both devices are obviously good value at eighty quid. The V3 Pro's 9.5 is the site's judgement that it delivers roughly 85% of premium-portable performance at about 30% of premium cost — genuine 8.0 vapour, a battery you can resurrect for £6, dual modes, dosing capsule compatibility, USB-C. Its review's own caveat stands: factor in £20–30 a year of consumables and the true annual cost lands nearer £50–60.
The Ace's 8.0 is a feature-per-pound score. Read the list without the price — removable 18650, ceramic chamber, self-cleaning mechanism, haptics, 1° control across 100–240°C, two session modes, swivel zirconia mouthpiece — and you'd guess £79–150. The reason it doesn't score higher is that the V3 Pro exists a pound away and does the primary job better.
Which is the whole comparison in one line: at this price the money isn't the variable, so value collapses into "which job do you actually want done".
Score Comparison
| Category | XMAX Ace | XMAX V3 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Design & Build | 6.5/10 | 7/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 7.5/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Ease of Use | 8.5/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Portability | 7.5/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Value for Money | 8/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Overall | 7.2/10 | 8.0/10 |
Five categories to two, and note where the Ace's two live: ease of use and cleaning. Those aren't performance categories. They're friction categories. The V3 Pro wins everything that describes what the device does; the Ace wins everything that describes what you have to do. (For how these numbers are arrived at, the methodology page has the full weighting.)
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the V3 Pro if you're buying a vaporiser. That sounds like a cheap line and it's meant literally: if the thing you're purchasing is vapour, this is the one, and the ninety-nine pence is not a consideration. It's the right answer for a first serious device, for anyone leaving combustion behind who wants to actually taste what they've been burning, for value hunters, for festivals, and for anyone who finds the phrase "removable 18650" reassuring rather than baffling. It asks you for a fortnight of draw technique and about half an hour a month at the sink. That's the deal, and it's a fair one.
Buy the Ace if you're buying a routine. The right buyer here is specific and I am one of them: someone for whom the post-session ritual is a genuine barrier rather than a mild annoyance. Chronic pain days, fatigue, an ADHD brain that will not engage with a multi-step maintenance job — on those evenings, push-and-done emptying is the difference between having a session and not having one. That isn't a gimmick, it's an accessibility feature, and no other device at any price has it. You're also buying the simplest device to hand to a nervous first-timer: conduction forgives, the button is self-explanatory, and the review's own Mum test came back a borderline pass on exactly those grounds.
The wrong buyer for the Ace is the flavour chaser, and the review says so in its own skip-if list. The wrong buyer for the V3 Pro is anyone who knows, honestly, that they will not clean it.
How I Actually Choose
The rotation data doesn't lie, and I keep rotation data, because ADHD.
The V3 Pro is the device I recommend to strangers more than any other thing I own — it's been that for two years and nothing has shifted it. It's not my most-used vape, because I own a shelf of more expensive ones, but it's the one I tell people to buy, and its own review is honest about that hypocrisy at length.
The Ace gets reached for on a very specific kind of evening. Pain flaring, energy gone, the thought of brushing a chamber sitting somewhere between "later" and "never". Set 210°C for an actual ~190°C, 0.3g medium grind, eight or nine minutes, a mid-session stir — which the self-clean plate does for you if you push it halfway, a trick I didn't expect to use daily and now do. Then one push, the AVB drops into the tin, and the session is genuinely over. No sink. No brush. No small resentful job waiting for me at eleven at night.
When I said this out loud, Sarah — who has views on our actual floor-cleaning arrangements — pointed out that we still get the upright out on a Sunday. "You didn't stop hoovering," she said. "You just stopped dreading Tuesdays." That is precisely the Ace, and she wasn't even talking about vaporisers. (She has, separately, watched me push that button with more delight than the moment strictly warranted, and asked about it. That exchange is in the review and I stand by my answer.)
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody who owns a robot vacuum thinks they've stopped owning a hoover.
The upright is better. It always was. It lifts more out of the carpet, it does the stairs, it gets the corner behind the bin, and if you could only keep one machine in the house it would be that one without a moment's debate. The XMAX V3 Pro is the better vaporiser — 8.0 against 7.2, better vapour, better battery infrastructure, USB-C, and the best pound-for-pound value on this site — and at ninety-nine pence more, there is no financial argument against it whatsoever.
But the robot runs on the Tuesday you couldn't face it, and that turns out to matter more than the spec sheet predicted. The XMAX Ace is the only device under £100 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, it's worth more than one point of overall score. It doesn't clean the screens. It never claimed to.
The upright for the job. The robot for the days. If your budget only stretches to one — and at ninety-nine pence apart, that's about willpower rather than money — be honest with yourself about which of those you're short of.
FAQ
XMAX Ace vs XMAX V3 Pro — which should I buy? The V3 Pro for most people: it scores higher (8.0 vs 7.2), makes better vapour from a 100% convection heater, charges over USB-C with pass-through, and costs ninety-nine pence more. Buy the Ace if the self-cleaning button solves a problem you genuinely have — post-session cleanup being the thing that stops you using a vaporiser at all.
Is the ninety-nine pence gap really the whole price difference? Yes — £79.00 against £79.99 Price is not the deciding factor in this pairing and anyone telling you otherwise is padding a comparison.
Does the Ace's self-cleaning button actually work? For emptying herb, yes — one push and the AVB drops out, cleanly, even from resinous flower. It does not clean the screens, the airpath or the mouthpiece. On sticky GG4-lineage flower the screens needed manual attention after two sessions. Half a job, done brilliantly.
Is the Ace's temperature display really 20°C out? Yes, and it's documented across multiple owners: the display reads 20–25°C above the actual oven temperature, so set 210°C is roughly an actual 190°C. Set twenty degrees higher than your usual target and it becomes second nature inside a week. The V3 Pro has no equivalent quirk.
Which has the better battery? Split decision. The Ace runs longer per cell — about 10 sessions and 75 minutes continuous, against the V3 Pro's 6–8 bowls. The V3 Pro wins the category anyway on charging: USB-C with pass-through versus MicroUSB. Both take a removable 18650, so both are effectively immortal for the price of a cell.
Which is easier for a complete beginner? The Ace. Conduction means a normal draw works, the interface is obvious, and heat-up is around 20 seconds. The V3 Pro needs 7–10 second committed pulls with partial vent coverage before it makes proper clouds, and week one genuinely feels like you've bought a dud until that clicks.
Should I worry about the self-cleaning mechanism breaking? It's the fair worry. Spring-loaded parts and sticky resin have never got on, and the mechanism is both the Ace's best feature and its most vulnerable one. A month of daily use in, it still clicked cleanly. Beyond that I don't know, and I'd rather say so than guess.
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 now heard the phrase "it empties its own bowl" more times than any adult should.
Dennis owns both of these, recommends one of them constantly, and reaches for the other on the evenings that count. He has decided this is not a contradiction. It is a hall cupboard with two machines in it, and he'd thank you not to mention 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: - XMAX Ace Review: The Lidl Middle Aisle Find → - XMAX V3 Pro Review: The Decathlon of Dry Herb Vaporisers →
More Comparisons: - All Head-to-Head Comparisons →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → — worth reading twice if you're buying the Ace
How I Score: - Review Methodology →
Get Both at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
XMAX Ace — £79.00 Buy the XMAX Ace → The self-cleaning button, a swappable 18650 and a ceramic chamber, for eighty quid.
XMAX V3 Pro — £79.99 Buy the XMAX V3 Pro → The one I tell strangers to buy, and the only device on the shelf whose battery you can fix for the price of a pint.
Just one more bowl.
Last updated: 26 August 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 0.1g on the scales, the strain held constant so the machine is the only variable. The XMAX V3 Pro 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.
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.