What you give up on a cheap stick
1. Wi-Fi radio.This is the one that matters. The Fire TV Stick HD and 4K Select publish plain Wi-Fi; the 4K Plus publishes Wi-Fi 6; the 4K Max publishes Wi-Fi 6E, which adds the 6GHz band. In a crowded apartment building, or on a TV two rooms from the router, a better radio is the difference between a clean picture and a buffering one. If your streaming already stutters, spend the extra here rather than anywhere else — or fix the network instead, which is usually the real problem.
2. No Ethernet port.No streaming stick at any price has one. If your Wi-Fi is the bottleneck and you want the television wired, you need a box rather than a stick — the Roku Ultra, Fire TV Cube, Google TV Streamer and Apple TV all have Ethernet, and our comparison chart shows which is which.
3. HDR formats. The cheapest 4K sticks publish 4K without the full HDR set. The Roku Streaming Stick 4K publishes both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, the Streaming Stick Plus publishes HDR10+ and does not claim Dolby Vision. On a budget television that often cannot display Dolby Vision anyway, this is the easiest spec on the page to ignore.
4. A nicer remote.Cheap sticks ship with a plain remote and replaceable batteries. The backlit, rechargeable options are sold separately — see Roku remotes— and are usually a worse use of money than upgrading the stick itself.
Which cheap stick for which television
A 1080p television
Buy the Fire TV Stick HD and stop reading. A 4K device cannot make a 1080p panel show 4K, so the extra money buys nothing you can see. This is the cheapest legitimate purchase on the site and it is the right one for a bedroom set, a kitchen television or a camper.
A 4K television, several rooms from the router
Buy the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus or 4K Max for the radio. A cheap stick on a weak signal is the single most common cause of “this thing is slow” complaints, and the fault usually lies with the Wi-Fi rather than the device. It is worth reading the free Wi-Fi fixes before you buy, because moving the router may be a better upgrade than either stick.
A 4K television, and a household that shares it
Buy a Roku — the Streaming Stick Plus if price leads, the Streaming Stick 4K if you can stretch. Roku’s home screen is a grid of apps in which nothing gets promoted over anything else, which is the version of this that non-technical members of a household find easiest to use. Amazon’s home screen is a storefront for Amazon’s own video, which is cheaper and busier.
Buying two or three at once
Mix them. One decent stick on the main television, the cheapest model on the spare sets. Nobody in a guest room notices the difference between Dolby Vision and HDR10+, and a 4K Select or a Stick HD costs a fraction of the main-room device. Our streaming stick ranking takes that approach across the whole line-up.
Buying one as a gift
Three things make this an easy gift, and one thing to watch.
It needs nothing but an HDMI port and Wi-Fi, so it works with essentially any television made in the last fifteen years. It has no subscription, so you are not handing someone a recurring bill. And it is set up by plugging it in and following on-screen prompts, with no tools, no mounting and no cables run through a wall — which is why every stick here is rated Plug-in on our Setup scale.
The thing to watch: it will ask for an account during setup, and it will ask for the household Wi-Fi password. If the gift is for someone who would find that daunting, plan to do the first five minutes with them. And if their television is old enough to have no HDMI socket at all, a stick is not the answer — see streaming on a non-smart TV.
How little internet this actually needs
Less than the marketing implies, which is good news on a cheap setup. The FCC publishes per-activity minimums: 3 to 4 Mbps for standard-definition video, 5 to 8 Mbps for HD, 25 Mbps for Ultra HD 4K, and 1 Mbps for social media. A household streaming one HD show and one 4K film at once needs well under 50 Mbps of real capacity. If a cheap stick buffers on a 300 Mbps plan, the plan is not the problem and a more expensive stick will not fix it — the coverage in that room is the problem.
