Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor review: It’s hard to justify the cost of Koubachi’s garden adviser

The Swiss company Koubachi AG hopes to use its scientific prowess to craft new innovation for the smart home. It began by targeting plants and developing a free application to help you care for your household garden. Now, they have a connected plant sensor to go along with the app. You can purchase the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor as either an indoor unit or a hardier outdoor version for $99 or $129 (£80/AU$150), respectively. Other than the price tag and some added rain resistance, both models are exactly the same. They measure moisture, light, and temperature from the soil near your plant, and use that information along with the compiled knowledge of their Plant Care Engine to tell you exactly how to make your garden flourish.

Given that the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor measures almost as many categories of data as the Parrot Flower Power and boasts a range similar to Oso Technologies’ PlantLink , I had high hopes that it would be the perfect plant guardian. It even has the most helpful database of the three, and since it’s the most expensive, the high expectations felt warranted. Unfortunately, lack of specificity when it comes to data, extremely slow recommendations, and a smaller upgrade from its free app than the price point should warrant keep the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor from reaching its full potential. Patient gardeners looking for the most hands-off care on the market should consider the Koubachi. However, there are plenty of cheaper options that require just a little more effort. For instance, the PlantLink offers comparable monitoring for only $79, and Koubachi’s own app, with just a little more time invested at setup, will freely offer care recommendations that are just as helpful as those you’d get by paying for the sensor.

Design

The Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor requires no separate hub hardware to connect to your Wi-Fi network. Both the indoor and the outdoor versions have a sleek, white head wrapped in a black stripe with a long gray tail. A single black button dots the top of its dome. Stick the tail in the soil by your plant and hold the button down to start the configuration. A light above the button glows orange, signaling that it’s ready, after which you can use Koubachi’s iOS app or any Internet-enabled device to sync your sensor with any Wi-Fi router in range. Koubachi has an Android app as well, but it can’t help you configure your sensor yet.

You can purchase either version of the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor on Amazon or on Koubachi’s website. For an extra $30, the outdoor version buffs up its rain resistance, but both can stand a splash or two as you water your plants.

The online capabilities that go along with the physical device are quite user-friendly. Koubachi uses pictures and step-by-step instructions to guide you through the initial process of getting your sensor to talk with your router. The directions are simple and Koubachi makes them easy to follow. The Koubachi database will even sense an error should something go wrong, and will walk you through troubleshooting automatically. All told, to remove the sensor from the box, insert the two included AA batteries (which Koubachi claims will last for more than a year), and sync it with my Wi-Fi, I needed about 5 minutes.

Of course, you’ll also need to tell Koubachi about the plant you’re monitoring. You can search Koubachi’s database for a match in a number of ways. On iOS apps, it has introduced a beta program called Plant Finder. This fantastic guide walks you through identifying your plant one question at a time. If you have no idea what kind of plant you’re dealing with, this is the most user-friendly plant identification software I’ve come across. Plant Finder will offer options about the shape of the leaves, the position of the stem, even the location of purchase, and you can pick from the provided pictures whenever you see a match or skip the question when you’re stumped. The database will use any responses you give it to make a guess at your plant type, and will show you pictures to help you decide if it has the right one. If not, you can keep right on going through the questions.

Plant Finder is awesome. Unfortunately, it’s not yet available for the Android app. You’ll have to search this version of the app for the common or scientific name of your plant. The website provides a little more guidance, as you have stem and leaf criteria to help you narrow the options if you want to scroll through pictures.

All versions of the database, even Android’s, best the competition when it comes to how helpful they are at finding your plant. However, Koubachi’s number of plants to pick from comes in dead last by a wide margin compared with the databases of Parrot and Oso Technologies. Koubachi has around 800 plants to pick from, whereas Parrot and Oso have thousands.

With Plant Finder, Koubachi almost makes identifying your plant fun. I felt like a detective, using questions and pictures as clues as I drew closer and closer to finding my suspect. But if your plant is at all unusual, the database won’t have it, and you’ll be stuck with the letdown of an unsolved mystery.

Given Koubachi AG’s pedigree, this lack of depth puzzles me. It has been developing the Plant Care Engine at the heart of its database since it launched its app more than three years ago. The information it uses comes from the prestigious Swiss university, ETH Zurich. Perhaps the amount of detail it gathers for each plant it adds slows its progress, but Parrot’s database is just as detailed and much deeper.

If you don’t find your plant, Koubachi will offer alternatives to pick from that have similar criteria, but you’ll want to use an outside resource to make sure the care advice you’re getting for this alternate plant is similar to what your actual plant needs. Koubachi’s price point is high, but its database is free, so your best bet is to check if it has your plant before you make your purchase.

To ease the cost, you can scale Koubachi’s system by using the same sensor on multiple plants, but if you want live monitoring in multiple places, Koubachi lacks a way to cheaply add units. The PlantLink, by Oso Technologies, makes scaling your system with additional Links easy. Initially, at $79, it costs almost as much as Koubachi’s $99 indoor version, since you have to purchase a Basestation to connect your Links. However, you can purchase additional Links for $35 and add them to the same system. Here, Koubachi’s standalone nature works against it. Thus, if you want to monitor a variety of plants simultaneously, Koubachi’s price necessitates that you look elsewhere.

The appearance of the device also sticks out more than the competitors. Parrot’s aesthetic is the most appealing. Its branchlike shape can fit into almost any garden decor. PlantLink’s small, white sensor is easy to hide. The Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor looks like a one-eyed robot. It’s distracting, and because it needs to be placed outside of the shade of the branches of your plant so it can accurately judge light conditions, the Koubachi sensor is impossible to hide. Make sure you take a close look at the pictures before you make your purchase. If you decide on the Koubachi, every time you look at your plant, you’ll see this cyclops of a sensor looking back.

Usability

Once the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor is keeping its watchful eye on your garden, it will begin gathering information on soil moisture, ambient temperature, and ambient light. It sends that information to the cloud, where Koubachi’s Plant Care Engine interprets the readings and gives you advice to best care for your specific plant.

The recommendations are specific without being precise. After Koubachi’s cloud processes the readings from your sensor, you’ll be told you need to water your plant, or that your plant has enough water. You might be told to find a sunnier spot or a warmer spot for it. The Plant Care Engine will even give you advice about fertilizer and misting, simply based on its knowledge of your plant.

Koubachi will also tell you exactly how to water, in great detail. For my plant, I needed to use room temperature water and add enough so that it dripped through to the saucer. After 15 minutes, I removed the excess from the saucer. I found Koubachi’s recommendations to be the easiest to follow of the smart sensors I’ve tested.

However, the sensor doesn’t provide precise data. It won’t tell you how much sunlight or water your plant needs. That said, nothing on the market will, and Koubachi gives you enough information so that you can easily figure it out. The watering recommendations give a fairly good idea of how much to water and when to stop.

For sunlight and temperature, you can compare the advice to the information on your plant in Koubachi’s database. The sensor told me my cactus had too much shade. I could see on the graph that over the course of the week, my cactus only had partial shade during the sunniest times of the day. Unfortunately, the graph itself won’t show the ideal range by comparison, but at least it uses the same language as the database. Since the database revealed that my cactus preferred full sunlight, I was able to figure out exactly what “a sunnier spot” meant for my plant. Knowing your plant’s preferences as far as temperature range and sunlight makes it easy to use the recommendations and the collected information to figure out exactly what you need to do to care for your plant.

You can also see live data by pressing the button on the sensor. This handy feature lets you see immediate readings for moisture, sunlight, and temperature. Thus, the Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor does take exact measurements, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t let you see them on the long-term charts as well.

If you’re studying the conditions of your garden over time, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Koubachi’s storage is only temporary, you can’t see exact points on the collected data graphs, they don’t show up on the apps, and there’s no way to download them and collect the data yourself.

Koubachi has promised this increased precision in its upcoming “pro” version. Given that the Parrot Flower Power already tracks and stores data well, Koubachi has some catching up to do, and no price info is available yet for this upgraded model.

Features

Though it’s not the device for dataphiles or citizen scientists, Koubachi’s easy-to-understand recommendations across all important plant care categories make it a great all-in-one garden guardian for those who need help keeping their plants alive long-term.

Again, it tracks moisture, sunlight, and temperature, and makes recommendations for each of those as well as fertilizer and misting. Additionally, a single sensor can give advice for multiple plants. Leave it with a plant long enough, and it will learn the moisture cycle and continue giving you advice after you’ve moved your sensor to another spot. In this way, it is possible to cheaply scale the Koubachi system, but it takes a while.