An automatic cat feeder just may change your life. No more screeching at 4 am. Plus, it can give some peace of mind while you're away from your fur baby. As seen with the rise of automatic litter boxes and pet tracking, technology has made it so we can closely monitor our pets without having to do a lot of the manual labor normally involved.

Automatic dry-food dispensers like our top pick, the Petlibro Granary ($160), were invented nearly a century ago, but today most automatic cat feeders utilize Wi-Fi and are connected to an app on your phone that allows you to make a schedule or feed on demand from afar, all while monitoring your pet’s eating habits. Automatic wet-food dispensers—our top pick in this category is the Petlibro Polar Smart Wet Feeder ($130)—are relatively new, often using ice packs or mini-refrigeration cooling systems to ensure the food stays as fresh as possible.

Automatic feeders are also helpful for pet parents who want to monitor their pets' health, have specialized schedules, or want to foster healthier eating habits (a customizable automatic cat feeder can help with the endless gorging-vomiting cycle many cats struggle with). Nearly all of the automatic cat feeders on this list are marketed toward cats, but some can be used with smaller dogs, and I’ve noted these below.

Best Dry Feeder

Petlibro Granary Smart Camera Feeder

Although this isn’t the most expensive automatic feeder on this list, it’s reliable, tech-savvy, and highly customizable. It's controlled via an app and dispenses food from its 5-liter capacity based on the feeding schedule you create. It has a 1080p HD camera with night vision so you can watch and hear your pet eat even when far away, and you can communicate with them via speaker. Through the Petlibro app (for Android and iOs), you set up a feeding schedule (up to six meals a day) or feed snacks with your desired amount, from one-twelfth of a cup to four cups. The app is easy to use with extremely customizable feeding plans with meals that you label individually. Our runner-up pick below, the Petkit YumShare Dual-Hopper Automatic Feeder with Camera is similar in many ways, but the app is a little more intuitive, reliable, and user-friendly on this one so that's why it's remained the reigning champ.

Can be used with cats or small dogs.

Best Wet Feeder

Petlibro Polar Wet Food Feeder

This updated Petlibro Polar Wet Food Feeder solves pretty much every gripe I had with other automatic feeders aimed at storing wet food—it’s essentially a mini-fridge guaranteed to keep food fresh, and it’s connected to an app where you can schedule and customize feedings, along with a feeding log. Food is given in three stainless steel wide, shallow bowls—less chance for whisker fatigue with wide bowls or feline acne with bacteria-harboring plastic. When it’s time to feed, the cover slides back from the hole and reveals the food beneath.

The refrigeration uses thermoelectric cooling and stays at 50 degrees Fahrenheit or below, and cooling is paused 30 minutes before scheduled feeding time to make sure it’s at ideal temperature. The bowls are now numbered, so you can easily correlate feedings to specific bowls in-app. Through the app, you can alter schedules, manually feed on demand, and control how long it's opened—there's even a sensor to make sure it doesn’t close while your kitty is feeding. This is the best automatic wet feeder on the market in my opinion—I even bought a second one for my other cat.

Can be used with cats or small dogs.

Note: For certain Amazon locations, this feeder is marked as a “Frequently Returned Item.” I haven't experienced any issues with reliability or performance, and it's worked well for the past six-plus months of testing.

A Dual Automatic Dry Feeder With a Camera

Petkit YumShare Dual-Hopper Automatic Feeder With Camera

This automatic feeder has an HD camera with a 140-degree viewing angle, infrared night vision, two-way audio with customizable meal calls, and a dual hopper, which allows you to store and dispense two different types of food (5 liters total), depending on your pets' needs. Through the connected app, you can customize and set feeding schedules from the two separate tanks, give snacks, and watch the feeder from your phone. Plus, the camera uses AI to automatically analyze the remaining food in the bowl, and the feeder will stop dispensing to prevent overfeeding.

I love that the dual hopper can store different types of dry kibble and freeze-dried food, and dispense separately—a great bonus for pets with differing dietary needs. The crystal-clear video feed allows you to monitor your pets anytime, the app compiles highlights from pets' visits you can review, and you can even download and share footage. Although this pick is similar to our top pick, the connected Petkit app isn't as reliable or easy to use as Petlibro's app.

Can be used with cats or dogs.

An Affordable Feeder to Monitor Pets' Habits

Pawsync Smart Pet Feeder

I was super pleasantly surprised by this relatively affordable automatic feeder. It has a scale in the bottom of the stainless steel bowl, which makes sure your pet is getting the exact right amount of food. It'll even alter how much it dispenses based on how much is left in the bowl, ensuring your pet isn't overeating. The feeder has anti-jam technology, low food detection sensors, and a backup battery in case of power failure.

From the app, you can schedule and alter feedings with an optional meal call recording, and it logs when and how much your pet has eaten. This is super helpful to better track and understand your cats' eating habits. But because I have two cats, the tracking feature isn't as reliable, as the feeder doesn't know which cat was eating when it logs. For that reason, some of the cooler aspects of monitoring feedings with this feeder work best for single-pet homes.

Can be used with cats or small dogs.

Best for Selfish Pets in a Multipet Home

Petlibro One RFID Smart Feeder

The One RFID Smart Feeder from Petlibro shows just how far automatic cat-feeding technology has come. For this feeder, the pet wears a collar with a tag in which the feeder’s lid opens only with that tag. There's a cover that retracts automatically when the pet with the collar approaches the stainless steel food bowl (which is removable for washing and is dishwasher safe). The sensor in the pad in front will be activated, and the cover will retract over the kibble when the cat leaves, ensuring that only the chosen pet with the collar can access the food. Through the app, you can create up to 10 feeding schedules whose amounts can be modified anytime, including on-demand feeding. The automatic lid is customizable too, as you can switch on the app to leave the lid in “open mode” or adjust how long the lid stays open after your pet walks away from it.

Overall, I think this is a nearly perfect device for a particular kind of pet owner. I think it works best for a cat in a dog home where the owner doesn’t want the dog getting into the cat’s food, if each pet in the home has a One RFID feeder, if one particular cat has special dietary needs, or if you have a multi-cat home with an aggressive eater. In these cases, I truly think this product would be a life-changer. (If you get a One RFID for each pet, it’s recommended that you space them at least 10 inches apart to avoid any interference.)

Can be used with cats or very small dogs.

An Easy-to-Use Automatic Dry Feeder

Whisker Feeder-Robot

This expensive, tech-y automatic feeder has buttons on the interface and an app where you control feeding schedules and food amounts, including monitoring levels to make sure there is enough (it alerts you via app and a light on top of the feeder if the food levels are low). I love how customizable meals are: You can set multiple schedules for different days of the week, and it dispenses anywhere from one-eighth of a cup to half of a cup of food. It also has gravity mode, where the feeder checks levels every six hours and dispenses food automatically if the bowl is empty.

The app is intuitive and easy to use with customizable settings, and it also tracks every time a cat is fed. Although the plastic food bowl is food-safe and BPA-free, plastic is still prone to harboring bacteria and I’d prefer stainless steel. (Whisker has a stainless steel insert for $20 or glass bowl insert for $30). I can’t really find any faults in this feeder—it has worked perfectly and just feels sleek and elevated.

Can be used with cats or small dogs.

A Wet Feeder for Multiple Cats

Closer Pets C200 2-Meal Automatic Pet Feeder

The Closer Pets automatic pet feeder is super simple, which is both its weakness and its strength. Unlike many of the high-tech cat items on this list, the C200 doesn’t require a lengthy setup or even electricity. It’s essentially two shallow plastic containers with stainless steel inserts (both dishwasher safe) and tamper-resistant lids that are locked and automatically open on a timer. The timer is an old-school egg-style timer, which just requires a AA battery rather than electricity.

Although the container has an ice pack to keep the wet food cool, after a night it had lost virtually all of its coolness. There’s a lid-link clip attachment, a small piece of plastic that links the lids to ensure they will open at the same time, which is super helpful for owners of two cats. I wish the timer was electric so I could program it to the exact time I want it open, rather than guesstimating the timing on the little marks. However, this is a simple solution to help make sure both my cats are given wet food without me having to wake up at the crack of dawn.

Can be used with cats or dogs.

Another We Tested

Oneisall Cordless WiFi Automatic Cat Feeder for $60: I had high hopes for this cordless feeder that boasts a rechargeable battery with a 100-day life and an integrated app, but it's just too unreliable. Through the app, you can program up to 10 daily meals (in 1-12 portions each), monitor pets' eating habits, and customize meal calls. Unlike other apps, you're not able to choose portion size, but instead have to multiply the number of servings. The app gave me constant problems, and would often disconnect from the feeder and be unable to reconnect to WiFi. Luckily, I was able to program meals via the screen and buttons, but it would've been a whole lot nicer if the app had worked reliably.

Do Not Recommend

Catit Pixi Smart 6-Meal Feeder for $103: Like others on this list, the Catit Pixi wet and dry feeder uses ice packs to keep wet food fresh and uncovers the meals below in six compartments in a rotating schedule. The schedule can be programmed via the app or changed on the body of the feeder. At this price point, the app shouldn’t be this limited and glitchy. The schedule is available in military time only, and the app is extremely limited—you can only set the meal schedule for the same day, and when I wanted to do only two to three meals a day spread over two days, I had to reschedule the meals for every new day. The feeder didn't keep it cold enough to spread the meals out and the wet food was not at a safe eating temperature. At this price point, just get the Petlibro Polar wet feeder for a few bucks more.

Catit Pixi Smart Cat Feeder for $140: Kibble is stored in the body of this dry feeder, but it doesn’t have a window to visually check food levels. The calendar to plan meals shows only a week at a time, and although it should repeat daily based on the schedule, I found that some days there would be no schedule despite setting one up. The Pixi also doesn’t tell you how much food was dispensed; it just refers to it as a “portion”—I manually measured and found the portion was less than a tablespoon of kibble. After using it continuously for more than a month, I found it was extremely glitchy and almost never reliably stuck to the programmed schedule, sometimes skipping meals altogether. This feeder is potentially dangerous, and I'd caution pet parents against relying on it.

Closer Pets C500 for $75: This automatic wet and dry feeder can schedule up to four pre-portioned meals (and one meal given manually) that are opened on a timer system using three AA batteries (sold separately). The user presets the four times they want the bowls, which have ice packs underneath, to rotate. The bowls are quite deep and narrow and aren’t super easy for cats to reach, which could cause whisker fatigue. And although there are two relatively large ice packs, when I checked on the feeder after a night’s sleep, the packs weren’t very cold. This may be OK for kibble, but wet food was kept at unsafe temperatures, and my cats couldn't reach all of the food.