From testing with several production devices, here’s how I’d rank the active Bluetooth range of the commonly used proxy boards, from best to worst:
- Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO-EA (external antenna)
- Seeed Studio XIAO W5500 (V1.2 and later)
- GL-S10
- Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO (on-chip antenna)
The Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO-EA and the Seeed W5500 perform very similarly and give the best range and connection stability in my testing.
The GL-S10 is only slightly behind — typically about 3–5 feet less range in real-world use.
The Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO with the on-chip antenna comes in last simply because the internal antenna can’t match the external-antenna designs.
If you’re using a GL-S10 today, you will see a small but noticeable improvement going to the Seeed W5500 v1.2+, especially for devices that sit at the edge of range or that require frequent active GATT connections.
One additional point worth mentioning: the Seeed W5500 runs cooler than the Olimex boards.
We’ve seen users report thermal-related issues with the PoE circuitry on older Olimex boards in warm environments (the common workaround is powering them via USB instead of PoE). The Seeed board has not shown these heat-related problems in similar setups.
That said, I actually recommend keeping both if you upgrade.
Home Assistant’s Bluetooth stack includes automatic failover, so if one proxy has trouble with a specific device at a specific moment, the system will transparently fall back to another proxy. Having multiple proxies generally results in a more stable and robust setup overall.
So upgrading helps, but combining them gives you the best reliability.