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The verdict. The Schlage Encode Plus at $329 takes this smart lock ledger at 78.0 of 100, and the gap is not close: the Yale Assure Lock 2 lands at 46.3, the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock at 45.3, and the Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro WiFi at $179.99 finishes last at 34.5. Schlage wins on paperwork rather than hardware. It is the only one of the four that names the standard its grade was awarded under, the only one that publishes the conditions behind its battery claim, and the only one with three years on the electronics.
Updated August 31, 2026: every price, grade claim, battery figure and warranty term re-verified against each maker’s own pages. Added the certification audit, the battery-cycle arithmetic against BHMA’s own durability test, and the CVE check. August Wi-Fi is still sold at $199.99 on August’s own store and has not been folded into Yale.
Published July 14, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026 · By Nate Colburn
Schlage Is the Only One That Names a Standard Edition
Five axes. The weights are mine, the reason for each is printed beside it, and every entry names its source. Move a weight and the tally moves; that is what the table is for.
| Axis and weight | Why it carries that weight | Schlage Encode Plus | Yale Assure Lock 2 | August Wi-Fi | Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro WiFi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Certification you can name — 30% | The grade is the only security number on the box. A grade without a standard number is a marketing word. | 70 — cites ANSI/BHMA A156.40-2015 Grade AAA and A156.36 Grade 1; the 2015 edition has since been superseded twice | 30 — three of Yale’s own pages say three different things | 40 — claims no grade, and has a structural reason: it reuses your deadbolt | 25 — claims “ANSI Commercial Grade 1 Certification” with no standard number and no lab named |
| Battery claim, and its conditions — 20% | These locks run on AA cells. A figure with no stated duty cycle is not a figure. | 75 — six months, and Schlage publishes the cycle ceiling and the Apple Home penalty | 15 — publishes no duration on any of its three product pages or in the manual | 40 — “up to 3 months” on 2 CR123, unqualified and the shortest here | 15 — 8 months on the headline, 3–6 months in its own FAQ |
| Electronics warranty — 20% | The mechanism outlives the circuit board. Lifetime mechanical coverage does not cover the part that fails. | 90 — 3 years electronics, lifetime mechanical and finish | 55 — 2 years electronics; lifetime cover ends if you move, and does not transfer | 25 — one year flat, no split published | 45 — 18 months electronics; batteries named as an excluded consumable |
| Ongoing cost — 15% | A lock that meters your own door back to you is a different product. | 90 — Schlage’s app page lists history, codes and sharing with no tier | 85 — free Yale Access app; the paid Yale subscriptions are alarms and other regions | 85 — no subscription found for lock features | 60 — ULTRALOQ + Air is called “lifetime free service” with no pricing table published |
| Published vulnerability record — 15% | A lock is now a radio. The vendor’s disclosure history is part of the product. | 70 — no CVE for the BE499 | 70 — no CVE for the Assure Lock 2 | 50 — a chipset SDK flaw names “August Smart Lock” generically, availability only | 40 — no CVE for this model, but a CVSS 8.1 unlock-code flaw on its own sibling |
| Weighted total | 78.0 | 46.3 | 45.3 | 34.5 |
Schlage’s arithmetic, shown: 0.30 × 70 = 21.0, plus 0.20 × 75 = 15.0, plus 0.20 × 90 = 18.0, plus 0.15 × 90 = 13.5, plus 0.15 × 70 = 10.5. Total 78.0.
The loser is the Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro WiFi at 34.5, and it is also the cheapest lock on this page at $179.99. That is the whole trade. Six ways to open a door, a fingerprint reader the others do not have at the price, and a maker whose own website cannot keep its battery figure or its certification straight from one page to the next.
Prices are approximate, current as of publication, and change frequently — confirm the latest price with the retailer before buying.
BHMA’s Certified Products Directory Will Not Open Without a Login
Start with what the grades actually mean, because the marketing uses two different scales interchangeably.
The commercial scale is ANSI/BHMA A156.36, Auxiliary Locks. BHMA’s own summary puts real numbers on it: “Grade 1 dead locks, for example, must pass a rigorous test through 250,000 cycles of opening and closing,” plus “a 1350 pound force on the door against the dead bolt for Grade 1,” and key-operated locks that “must open with a maximum torque of 9 lbf-in.”
The residential scale is different. ANSI/BHMA A156.40, Residential Deadbolts, grades three categories separately — Security, Durability, Finish — and awards letters, which is where AAA comes from. The current 2025 edition specifies “Seventeen aggressive tests,” one of which involves “loading the door against the deadbolt with 1,350 pounds of force,” and puts Grade A residential dead latches at “400,000 cycles of opening and closing.”
Now the audit. Schlage’s support article states the Encode Plus holds ANSI/BHMA A156.40-2015 Grade AAA and A156.36 Grade 1. That is the most specific claim of the four, and it carries an edition year — 2015, which A156.40 has since replaced twice, in 2020 and again in 2025. Ultraloq claims “ANSI Commercial Grade 1 Certification” and names no standard number at all. Yale’s main Assure Lock 2 page publishes no grade, its Touch page claims “Grade 2 BHMA/ANSI rated,” and its Plus page settles for “tested to industry-leading BHMA standards.” August publishes nothing, which is defensible: it replaces your interior thumb-turn and leaves the graded deadbolt in your door exactly as it was.
I tried to check all four against BHMA’s certified products directory. The directory exists, it lists Schlage, Yale and U-tec among its certified manufacturers, and its live search subdomain redirects to a sign-in wall. I could not corroborate a single one of these four grade claims against a certification record. Treat every grade on this page as manufacturer-stated. BHMA itself draws the distinction between products it has certified through third-party testing and products whose makers merely say they “meet standards” — and Yale’s “tested to” phrasing and Ultraloq’s numberless “certification” both sit on the wrong side of that line.
Yale Does Not Publish a Battery Life for the Assure Lock 2
Four locks, four battery claims, and the fine print is where the differences live.
| Lock | Cells | The claim | Conditions the maker attaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schlage Encode Plus | 4 AA | “up to six months of battery life with typical use” | “Less than 10-15 lock unlock cycles a day is acceptable.” Alkaline recommended, lithium discouraged. Paired to both Schlage Home and Apple Home, “This dual communication significantly increases battery consumption.” |
| Yale Assure Lock 2 | 4 AA | No figure published | Not on the standard page, the Touch page, the Plus page, or in the installation manual |
| August Wi-Fi | 2 CR123 | “up to 3 months” | None stated. No cycles-per-day, no Wi-Fi-off alternative |
| Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro WiFi | 8 AA | “Up to 8 months” on alkaline, “Up to 1 year” on lithium | See below. Ultraloq’s own pages give three incompatible answers. |
Schlage comes out of this well by being candid rather than by being generous. Six months is not the longest number on the page. It is the only one attached to a duty cycle you can check yourself against your own front door, and Schlage volunteers that running Apple Home alongside its own cloud costs you battery. That is a maker arguing against its own feature list.
Yale’s silence is the finding. Three product pages and an installation manual, all naming four AA alkaline cells, none naming a duration.
Ultraloq’s Own Support Page Contradicts Its Own Headline
On the U-Bolt Series page, the headline reads “Up to 8 months with Wi-Fi connection and Alkaline batteries.” Further down that same page, in the FAQ, the answer reads “U-Bolt WiFi: 3-6 months.” One page, two answers, a factor of about two apart.
Ultraloq’s support site offers a third framing, in accesses rather than months: “up to 6000 times access,” and separately “the battery life is up to 1 year on average use of 20 times access per day.” Do that division. 6,000 divided by 20 is 300 days. Ten months, not twelve. The support page’s own cycle count does not reach the support page’s own headline.
Your Batteries Will Not Reach BHMA’s 250,000-Cycle Test
Here is a piece of arithmetic worth the paragraph. Take Schlage’s own published condition — six months at 10 to 15 lock-unlock cycles a day — and count it out. Six months is about 182 days. At 10 cycles a day that is 1,820 cycles per set of batteries; at 15, it is 2,730.
BHMA’s Grade 1 deadlock durability test runs 250,000 cycles. Divide: 250,000 divided by 2,730 is 92 sets of batteries, and 250,000 divided by 1,820 is 138 sets. At four AA cells apiece, reaching the mechanical durability figure printed on the box takes somewhere between 368 and 552 batteries.
That is not a criticism of Schlage. It is the shape of the whole category. The bolt is certified to a standard that assumes a mechanical lifetime measured in hundreds of thousands of throws, and the electronics driving it are specified in units of a few thousand. Whichever of these four you buy, the deadbolt is the part that will still be working.
The Cyber Trust Mark Has Not Labelled a Single Smart Lock
If you have read that a US government cybersecurity label is coming to connected devices, it is real and it is stalled.
The programme sits in FCC PS Docket No. 23-239. A January 2026 FCC public notice records that “UL Solutions withdrew as Lead Administrator effective December 19, 2025,” and opens a fresh filing window for replacements between January 7 and January 28, 2026. Eleven Cybersecurity Label Administrators are conditionally approved, and a companion notice states that conditional approval does not let them certify products to use the label yet.
So: no lead administrator as of the most recent FCC notices I could find, no labels being issued, and no product of any kind carrying the mark. I found no statement from Schlage, Yale, August or U-tec about participating. Do not let a retailer sell you a lock on this label. It does not exist yet.
Every CVE I Found Names a Sibling, Not These Four
I searched the National Vulnerability Database for all four brands. No published CVE names the Schlage BE499 Encode Plus, the Yale Assure Lock 2, the current August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, or the Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro.
Their relatives are another matter. CVE-2022-46480, scored 8.1 High, describes “Incorrect Session Management and Credential Re-use in the Bluetooth LE stack of the Ultraloq UL3 2nd Gen Smart Lock Firmware 02.27.0012” that “allows an attacker to sniff the unlock code and unlock the device whilst within Bluetooth range.” That is a different Ultraloq model, and it is a genuine open-the-door flaw. CVE-2019-17518 is a Dialog Semiconductor Bluetooth SDK bug that NVD notes “affects, for example, August Smart Lock,” with availability-only impact — a crash, not an entry. Schlage’s entry, CVE-2020-9059, is a battery-drain issue on the Z-Wave BE468, a different radio in a different lock. Yale’s two are a Bluetooth key app and a keyless RFID tag, neither of them the Assure Lock 2.
A clean record is weak evidence. It may mean the model is sound; it may mean no researcher has looked. I scored it as vendor history rather than model safety, which is why Ultraloq loses points here for a lock it does not sell you.
August Does Not Split Its Warranty, and Neither Does Its Price
Four locks, four different answers to what happens when the electronics quit. Here is who each one is wrong for.
Schlage Encode Plus, $329. Limited lifetime mechanical and finish, limited three years on the electronics. It is the most expensive of the four and no longer Schlage’s flagship — the Sense Pro now sits above it from $399. Worth knowing before you pay top of range for a lock the maker has already positioned as second tier. Skip this if a fingerprint reader is what you actually wanted; the Encode Plus does not have one at any price.
Yale Assure Lock 2, $189.99 to $309.99 depending on configuration. The warranty is where this one gets interesting, and not in a good way. Yale’s lifetime mechanical and finish cover lasts only “as long as the original end user purchaser continuously resides at the original installation location,” electronics run two years, and the terms state in capitals that the warranty “SHALL NOT APPLY TO SUBSEQUENT OWNERS.” Non-consumer installations drop to three years on the mechanical side. Skip this if the lock is going on a short-term rental or a property you plan to sell, because both of those cases fall outside the cover you thought you were buying.
August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, $199.99, or $229.99 bundled with the keypad. Still sold on August’s own store, which now carries “a Yale Company” in its footer and sells Yale hardware alongside its own. One year of warranty, flat, with no split between electronics and mechanical — though with no exterior hardware to warrant, that is less of a gap than it reads. It is also the only one here that leaves your existing deadbolt and your existing keys alone. Skip this if your existing deadbolt is the cheap builder-grade one that came with the house, because August inherits whatever security that bolt has and adds none.
Ultraloq U-Bolt Pro WiFi, $179.99. Eighteen months on the electronics, lifetime on the mechanism, and an exclusion list that names “consumable parts, including batteries.” A plain Bluetooth-only U-Bolt Pro is no longer listed on U-tec’s own collection page; the Wi-Fi version is what is sold now. Skip this if you want to be able to look up the grade on the box, because right now that trail ends at a marketing sentence.
A note on recalls, since it should be checked and rarely is: a search of CPSC’s published recalls turned up nothing for Schlage, Yale, August or U-tec. The lock recalls that do surface belong to Best Lock, Stanley Security Solutions and dormakaba, all commercial hardware, all entrapment hazards, none related to these four.
Yale Does Not Beat August by Enough to Settle It
Yale 46.3, August 45.3. One point. That is not a result, it is a rounding difference, so here is the tie-breaker.
My own money goes to August, and the reason is that the two locks fail differently. Yale’s weakness is that it will not commit — no battery figure anywhere, three grades across three pages, and a lifetime warranty that quietly ends when you move house. August’s weakness is that it is honest and modest: three months of battery, one year of cover, and no pretence about hardware it does not supply. Given a one-point gap, I would rather own the limitation I can see.
The caveat that outranks all of it comes from Consumer Reports, which swings a 100-pound steel battering ram at locked doors eight times and reports that the cause of failure “is more often than not the short screws used to attach the strike plate to the doorframe.” Replacing the strike plate with a reinforced one, CR says, “costs as little as $10” and “improves the lock’s resistance to kicking by magnitudes.” Four locks separated by 43 points on my ledger, and a $10 steel plate moves the number that matters more than the choice between them does. Buy the plate whichever lock you pick.
If you are wiring up the rest of the door, we have gone at the neighbouring purchases the same way: video doorbells that store footage locally instead of charging monthly, camera subscriptions priced as the product they really are, and the smart plug that actually holds up. The rest sits in smart home.
If you can pull a BHMA certification record for any of these four models, send it. I will print it and adjust the top axis.
