Keyless entry locks: the five types and which door needs which

Search for a keyless entry lock and the results page hands back five genuinely different products as though they were interchangeable. A forty dollar pushbutton unit with no battery compartment at all sits two rows above a three hundred dollar deadbolt that wants a Wi-Fi network, a phone, an account and a firmware update. Both are sold as keyless entry. Neither is a substitute for the other.

Sorting them out is mostly a question about your door and your household rather than about which model reviews best. Once you know which of the five categories you belong in, the shortlist inside it is short and the price gaps stop looking arbitrary.

What the phrase actually covers

Keyless entry is a category label, not a product type. It promises only that the door has some way of opening that is not a cut metal key. Underneath that promise sit five designs with almost nothing else in common.

• Mechanical pushbutton locks. Buttons, a clutch and a stack of tumblers, with no power of any kind.
• Electronic keypad deadbolts. A battery-powered keypad and a small motor, with no radio and no app behind it.
• Connected smart deadbolts. The same hardware plus a radio, so a phone, a hub or a voice assistant can see the lock.
• Interior retrofit units. A motor in a housing that clamps over the thumbturn you already have and leaves the outside of the door untouched.
• Biometric locks. A fingerprint reader bolted onto one of the categories above, almost never the only way in.

Three questions separate them. Does it need power. Does it need a network. Does it replace the whole lock or only the part of it you can reach from inside. Nearly every other difference, including the price, follows from those three answers.

The price ranges below are broad US retail figures for the category rather than for any one model, and they move with the finish, the trim and whatever the market is doing that month. Treat them as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

Mechanical pushbutton locks

These are the locks on pool gates, plant rooms and the back doors of small commercial buildings. Five or six large buttons in a heavy casting, a lever or knob below, and inside a mechanical clutch that only engages the latch when the right combination has been pressed. There is no circuit board anywhere in the assembly.

What you get for that simplicity is a lock that does not care about temperature, humidity, power cuts or firmware. Nothing needs replacing at two in the morning. What you give up is everything that depends on electronics: one code serves the whole household, there is no record of who came in, and changing the code usually means taking the lock off the door and reordering the internal chips or pins against the chart in the manual. Some designs allow a code change at the door with a control key, which is worth checking before you buy if the code will change often.

Budget imports start around forty dollars. The heavy commercial-grade units that these locks are known for run from roughly one hundred and fifty up past three hundred, and the difference is castings and cycle life rather than features.

Electronic keypad deadbolts

For a great many front doors this is where the search should end. A standard tubular deadbolt, a keypad on the exterior escutcheon, a motor and a battery tray behind the interior one, usually four AA alkaline cells. Schlage and Kwikset both build long-running versions of this design, and so do a dozen smaller brands.

It will hold somewhere between ten and thirty separate user codes depending on the model, lock itself after a set delay, and let you delete the dog walker’s code without touching anyone else’s. Most keep a keyed cylinder as a backup. There is no app, no account, no network to drop out and nothing to update. Manufacturers commonly quote around a year of battery life under normal residential use, which is roughly what owners report as long as auto-lock is not cycling the bolt a dozen times a day.

The compromise is that everything happens at the door. You cannot check from the office whether anyone locked up, you cannot hand out a code from a train, and adding a code means standing on the step with the programming code from a manual you may no longer own. Expect roughly eighty to one hundred and eighty dollars.

Connected smart deadbolts

Physically this is the keypad deadbolt again with a radio added, and that radio is where both the money and the complications come from. Bluetooth alone means your phone has to be within a few yards of the door. Wi-Fi built into the lock gives you access from anywhere and takes a visible bite out of battery life. Thread and Matter, Z-Wave and Zigbee all need something else in the house to talk to, which is a hub, a border router or a bridge depending on the standard.

What the radio buys is real enough. You get an activity log with names attached, codes that begin and expire on a schedule, remote locking when you cannot remember whether you did, and the lock appearing alongside your other devices, which is the reason people end up asking whether a model works with a particular voice assistant. That last one is worth checking against the manufacturer’s own compatibility page before you buy, because the box often names an ecosystem that the specific model in your hand reaches only through an extra bridge.

What it costs, beyond money, is a maintenance surface. There is an account, an app, occasional firmware, and one more device to reconnect when the router is replaced. Schlage, Yale and Kwikset dominate the full-replacement end of this category; Level is the notable example of the same idea hidden inside the door so the outside looks like ordinary hardware. Reckon on one hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty dollars, more for the hidden-in-door designs.

Interior retrofit units

A retrofit unit is a motor in a plastic or aluminum housing that clamps over the thumbturn of the deadbolt already in your door. August built the category and SwitchBot sells a cheaper interpretation of it. The exterior cylinder stays where it is, your existing keys keep working, and the whole job is a couple of screws and a bracket.

That makes it the obvious answer for renters, for anyone who likes the hardware they have, and for households where one person will never give up a physical key. It also means there is no keypad outside unless you buy one as a separate accessory and stick it to the door frame.

The catch is fit. These units only accept certain thumbturn shapes and need clearance around the interior rose, so a lock that suits the door in the photograph may foul the trim on yours. Take the four measurements in our retrofit smart lock fit check before ordering rather than after. Budget one hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars, plus the keypad if you want one.

Biometric locks

A fingerprint reader is a credential, not a category of lock. It arrives on top of a keypad deadbolt or a connected one, and the lock underneath still has a code and usually a keyway. That is deliberate on the manufacturer’s part, because capacitive sensors read a wet, cold, chalky or heavily worn fingertip poorly, and small children rarely enroll well at all.

Enrollment normally means presenting the same finger several times at slightly different angles, and most owners find it worth enrolling two fingers on each hand rather than one. When it works it is the fastest way through a door anybody has invented. When it does not, you are typing a code in the rain. That trade-off, and the equivalent one for cards and phone apps, is set out in our comparison of how each unlocking method fails. Expect a reader to add roughly forty to one hundred dollars over the same lock without one.

Security, grades and the part the box leaves out

None of these five categories is inherently stronger than the others, because the keypad has nothing to do with how the bolt behaves when someone puts a boot to the door. That comes down to bolt throw, the metal in the bolt body, and above all the strike plate and the jamb behind it. A one inch throw into a strike fixed with three inch screws that reach the framing stud resists far more than the same lock screwed into soft trim with the half inch screws in the box.

ANSI and BHMA publish grades covering cycle counts, strike force and bolt projection, and it is worth knowing that a lock’s electronics are assessed separately from its mechanical body. The grading system is explained properly in our piece on what an ANSI Grade 1 deadbolt actually buys you. The short form is that a grade bump matters less than the screws.

One thing genuinely not worth losing sleep over is the idea of somebody attacking your lock over the internet. The failures that empty households onto the porch are dull: a flat battery, a code nobody revoked when the cleaner changed, a bolt that has been binding for a month.

Matching the category to the door

A front door that already has a deadbolt

Start with an electronic keypad deadbolt and only move up to a connected one if you can name the thing you want to do remotely. If you can, buy connected. If the answer is vague, the plain keypad model will be cheaper, last longer on a set of cells and never need attention after a router swap.

A rental, or any door you may not modify

Interior retrofit, almost without exception. The exterior stays original, the landlord’s key still works, and the original thumbturn goes back on in twenty minutes at move-out. Whether your lease lets you fit even that is a separate question from whether the hardware fits, and worth reading the lease for rather than assuming.

A gate, shed or detached garage

Mechanical pushbutton. There is usually no reliable Wi-Fi at the end of the yard, the hardware sits in weather all year, and nobody wants to be swapping AA cells in a gate in January. One shared code is normally all such a door needs anyway.

A door with only a knob or a lever

Nothing in the deadbolt categories will fit a door with a single bore, so the decision moves to the body style rather than the technology. A keypad lever is a passage set with a latch, not a deadbolt, and the security difference is substantial. Read our comparison of deadbolts, levers and handlesets before ordering, because handing and backset both bite at this point.

A house other people come and go from

Cleaners, dog walkers, contractors, grown children: this is the case that justifies a connected lock on its own. Scheduled codes that expire without anybody remembering to delete them, and a log that says which code opened the door at what time, are worth the annual battery cost and the account.

Common questions

Is a keyless lock less secure than a key?

Not in the way most people mean. The bolt, the strike and the door are what an intruder meets, and those are the same components in both cases. What changes is the failure mode: a keyed lock can be picked or bumped, a coded one can be watched over your shoulder or worn into a visible pattern on four buttons.

Wiping the keypad occasionally and changing codes once a year closes most of that gap.

Do keyless entry locks need Wi-Fi?

Only the connected ones, and not all of those. Mechanical, keypad and most retrofit locks work with no network at all. Among connected models, some carry Wi-Fi in the lock body, some reach the internet through a plug-in bridge, and some talk only to a hub over Z-Wave, Zigbee or Thread.

What happens when the batteries die?

Locks warn well before they stop, usually with a chirp or a red flash on every use for days or weeks. If you ignore that entirely, the fallbacks depend on the design: most keep a keyed cylinder, several offer external contacts where a 9V battery gives enough power for one opening, and a retrofit unit leaves the exterior cylinder untouched so your key always works.

A lock with no keyway and no jump-start contacts is worth identifying before you buy it rather than on the step.

Can I keep my existing keys?

With a retrofit unit, yes, because the cylinder never leaves the door. With a full replacement, no, unless you have the new lock rekeyed to your existing key by a locksmith, which is routine work on common keyways and worth asking about if you want one key for the front and back doors.

How many codes can one lock hold?

Mechanical pushbutton locks hold exactly one. Electronic keypads typically hold ten to thirty. Connected locks run from about twenty into the hundreds, and are the only ones that let a code carry a start date and an expiry. If you are running a short-term rental, that number and its scheduling behaviour are near the top of the spec sheet to check.

The short version

Five different things are sold under one phrase, and the door decides which of them you need. A gate or an outbuilding wants the mechanical pushbutton lock with nothing in it to fail; an ordinary front door is well served by a plain electronic keypad deadbolt; a connected model earns its price only when other people come and go or you genuinely want the door reachable from elsewhere. Renters and anyone who likes their existing hardware should be looking at interior retrofit units and measuring before they order. Fingerprints are a shortcut on top of one of those, never the whole answer. Whichever you choose, spend the extra ten minutes fitting three inch screws into the strike plate, because that changes the security of the door more than moving up a category does.