Sonos Play vs Era 100: Which speaker should you buy?

It won't take you much of my five-star review of Sonos' new speaker, the Play, to clock that there's an obvious comparison to be made between it and the older Era 100. After all, by pricing the Play at £300, Sonos has made a bold move, and the £100 price difference between these two speakers bears examination.

So, I've done just that. As the proud owner of a couple of Era 100 speakers, along with, now, a couple of Plays, I've been able to test them in detail to see how they stack up to each other. Read on to find out which of these two excellent speakers you should buy, depending on what you need from your smart speakers.

Price and availability

As covered by the cutouts above, there's a £100 difference in price between the Play and the Era 100. The Play comes in at £299 in the UK, $299 in the US and €349 in Europe.

The Era 100, meanwhile, is £199 in the UK, $199 in the US and €209 in Europe (after a price cut post-launch). A further wrinkle is added by the newly-launched Era 100 SL, which shaves away voice controls and cuts the price further to £169, $189 or €199.

The Sonos Play and Era 100 SL both launch on 31 March, meaning they're not quite here yet at the time of publishing, but the Era 100 has been out for a couple of years at this point and is widely available. It also sometimes sees discounts during sales to lower its price to where the Era 100 SL now sits.

Design and features

Especially if you have them in the same colour, like the white models I've photographed here, the Sonos Play and Era 100 look pretty similar from the right angle. They're both basically cylinders with perforated grilles covering most of their outside panel.

The Play is ever so slightly taller, though, and the Era 100 is far more circular and has a bigger footprint as a result, while the Play is more of a pill-shaped device. They both have heft and are clearly built well, though.

Sonos has differentiated the Play with some more rugged design notes to acknowledge its portability, including a rubber coating on the bottom and top, and physical buttons instead of the touch controls atop the Era 100. The Play has more buttons overall, too, since it has a power button on the back along with a Bluetooth pairing button, mute switch and USB-C port.

The Era 100 is heavier, too, for what it's worth – 2.02kg to the 1.3kg of the Play. That doesn't really matter, though, since it's also not a portable speaker. Still, the more you know, eh?

The other differentiating note is that the Play has a carrying loop on its back side, which is handy for clipping it to hooks or bags, and also has a dock that you can cradle it in when it needs a charge (or when it's just not in use portably).

Overall, though, I think there's basically nothing between these two speakers from a design perspective. They're both extremely well-made and feel great to interact with, and both are modern and pretty consistent with each other.

On the features side, though, things are different. As mentioned, the Play is a portable speaker with a dock for its default home. When carried around, it has a 24-hour battery life and can be grouped in a stereo pair with another Play (or in a wider audio group with other Sonos speakers).

It also features reverse charging for your gadgets and has Automatic Trueplay using its microphones to adapt its sound to your surroundings. These microphones also enable voice control and smart assistant integration, although this is easily disabled.

The Era 100 also has voice controls and smart assistant options, but its Trueplay is the standard type that needs manual tuning with an iPhone, since it doesn't move around. It also has no portability, although it does feature a mounting screwhole on the bottom that can help it attach to wall mounts, stands and more. It, too, can be stereo paired, and also easily used as surround sound satellites if paired with a Sonos soundbar like the Beam Gen 2 or Arc Ultra.

Both speakers have similar connectivity options in the home, using Wi-Fi to connect to your Sonos multi-room setup and offering AirPlay 2 for super-easy wireless music if you're an Apple user. They also both have Bluetooth as a backup option, although you'll likely use this much more with the Play since it's portable.

Sound quality

So, if you read the previous section in proper detail, you'll probably have noticed that these speakers are basically ploughing slightly different furrows, but are in touching distance of each other from a design and features standpoint. How's that change in the sound department, you ask?

Well, not much! I've used both of these speakers for dozens of hours, including back-and-forth testing between them, and once again the comparison between the two requires quite a lot of qualification.

If you pop both speakers on a middling-to-low volume setting and listen to the same song, you'll often struggle to hear a difference between them. That's a pretty big compliment to both, in different ways.

The Era 100 is a terrific-sounding package, so for the Play to sound similar is no bad thing. That said, the latter is substantially pricier, so it could equally be a downside – except that it comes with the upside of portability and flexibility. So, my view is more that you can't pick wrong on sound quality.

That said, when you stretch to louder volumes, which many of us probably rarely do for reasons that can be summed up by the word "neighbours", the Era 100 does pull away slightly. It's bassier, in short, and retains its richness more impressively at these levels.

That means that those who think they're going to be listening exclusively at home to their songs of choice should probably know that the Era 100 is the more rounded choice from an audio perspective. Of course, if you put any value in being able to pick up your speaker and walk around with it, that equation changes again, and the Play takes the lead.

Verdict: Which should you buy?

These two Sonos speakers have created quite a buyer's market, in my view. Filling a major gap in the lineup, the Sonos Play now feels like the best all-round speaker the company makes – with total flexibility of use and great sound quality. It meshes with your wider Sonos system beautifully but also has the advantage of genuine portability.

That said, the Era 100 is probably the speaker I'd buy if I were looking to build a Sonos system from scratch and wanted to do so without spending too much money. Heck, from the point of view I actually think the Era 100 SL is now the winning option, despite not having tested it. Superior sound quality is a real win at its price, and if you're buying it for home audio then it won't disappoint you that it's not portable.

In fact, this looks like a pretty great time to gear up with Sonos stuff, especially in light of the messaging around that app debacle, which the company's looking to put behind it. So, as mealy-mouthed as it might seem, I'd say the Sonos Play and Era 100 end up being very much different strokes for different folks, depening on your priorities.