Best USB Hub 2026: Seven Ports, And Only One of Them Fast

No product reviewed on this site has a bigger audience than this one: 178,478 ratings at 4.5 stars, which is three hundred and fifty-nine times the smallest sample in this article and roughly twice the population of the town it is likely sold into. Whatever else is true about a four-port hub with individual switches, one hundred and seventy-eight thousand buyers have already agreed that it works, and at this price the thing being agreed about is whether a five pound board with four sockets ever stops talking to a laptop. It does not, apparently, for the vast majority.

Its specification is a small lesson in what this market cannot decide about itself. The title calls it a USB Splitter 3.2, and the hardware interface field on the same listing says USB 3.0. Both refer to the same connector: USB 3.0 was renamed 3.2 Gen 1 in 2019, and the marketing department of one of the most established accessory brands has been using the two names interchangeably ever since, on the same page, twelve lines apart. The box contents give it away even further, listing an eight inch built-in cable and misspelling warranty as Warrenty — a page written by someone who had the product in front of them and no reason to believe anyone would measure it.

Eight inches is eleven centimetres of cable, and that is this hub's real limitation: it will sit immediately beside the port, which is fine for a laptop and awkward behind a desktop. The body is 62.3 grams of ABS, 8.7 by 3.8 by 1.5 centimetres, with a switch and an LED per port so a device can be powered off without unplugging it — a feature the buyer of the BENFEI further down this ranking describes using to charge things in a camper van. The reviews here are as undramatic as the sample suggests: it is a good hub according to a fifteen year old, it is slim and it works, and one buyer runs a CD player that reads USB music files off it.

The most informative five lines of specification in this article are on this listing. It says its HDMI port outputs 4K at 30 hertz — not 60, which is the number a buyer needs to know before connecting a monitor and wondering why the mouse feels slow — and it says, in the same bullet, that file transfers run at 5 Gbps through the USB-A 3.0 port while two additional USB-A 2.0 ports are ideal for peripherals. That single sentence is a complete map of the hub: one fast port, two slow ones, one video port, one power port. Almost nothing else in this ranking tells a shopper which of the sockets in front of them is the fast one, and the consequences are real. A five-gigabit flash drive in a 2.0 port transfers at a tenth of its speed, and the file manager does not explain why.

The power arrangement is stated just as plainly: a 100 watt pass-through input takes charge from a laptop's own adapter and returns it to the laptop, which is how nearly every USB-C hub works and how almost none of them describe it. Buyers here are careful rather than enthusiastic — one reports zero problems across Apple devices, another returned the unit because he had wanted the version with an ethernet port, and blames himself rather than the product.

At £8.47 it costs less than some four-port hubs in this ranking, and 31,079 ratings at 4.5 stars put it second only to the SABRENT's extraordinary audience. The body is aluminium, 91 grams, 12.2 by 2.8 by 1.2 centimetres, and the model number is CM478 — worth remembering, because UGREEN's listings of this family share review pools, which is the subject of the entry further down this ranking.

The only hub in this article that converts its speed into something a person can picture. Five gigabits per second is a number nobody carries around in their head; a ten gigabyte file in 16.4 seconds is a coffee break. The arithmetic is also correct — ten gigabytes divided by 16.4 seconds is 4.88 gigabits per second, which is what 5 Gbps delivers once the overhead is counted — and that is worth noting in a market where the SABRENT further up this ranking has two different version numbers for the same socket on one page. Somebody at UGREEN wrote this line with a calculator, and it shows.

Everything else about the hub is deliberately plain. Four USB-A ports out of one, plug-and-play on Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS and Android, an indicator light, and a plastic body of 60 grams, the lightest thing in this ranking — eleven centimetres long, so it hangs off a laptop without pulling. It is not powered and does not claim to be, so it is for mice, keyboards, flash drives and printers rather than for charging, and the compatibility list quietly mentions the PS5, PS4 and Xbox, which is where a great many four-port hubs in British homes actually end up.

The reason it is third rather than second is the number beside its star rating: 23,534 ratings, which is enormous, and which it shares exactly with two other UGREEN models reviewed in this ranking. Three listings, three different products, one review pool. That is not a fault of the hardware, which is the cheapest here at £6.28 and rated 4.6 stars, but it does change what the number means to a shopper comparing this hub with the SABRENT's 178,478.

The first bullet of this listing is a warning, and it is the most useful sentence in this article: this device supports data transmission only, not charging, with three exclamation marks for emphasis. That is a hub with seven ports telling a shopper in advance that none of them will charge a phone — and in the same market, the buyer of a rival seven-port hub further down this ranking describes charging things from the individually switched ports in a camper van. Both are honest; the difference is the power supply. A hub either has a power input and a board capable of feeding current out, or it is a splitter hanging off one laptop port and limited to whatever that port will pass. The ABFCRTTW is the second kind, and it says so before anything else.

Its measurements carry a second lesson. The dimensions are given as thirty millimetres long, seventeen wide and one hundred and thirty high — on a hub that lies flat on a desk. The third figure is the cable, four feet of it, entered into a field that asks for height. The brand's other listing in this article does exactly the same thing with a 120 centimetre cable and 135 millimetres of height, which makes it a habit rather than a typo, and it means the dimension line on these pages is unusable for anyone measuring a desk.

What is left is a good, plain hub: aluminium, 90 grams, seven USB 3.0 ports, and 2,315 ratings at 4.5 stars, with buyers describing it as handling everything thrown at it and as light as anything. At £16.98 it is the most expensive hub here and the one to buy if seven data ports are the requirement and charging is not.

The clearest port map in this ranking, and it comes from a five-port dock that could easily have counted its way out of the problem. Instead of seven ports, three fast and four slow, this listing names each socket by what it does: one USB-C upstream to the laptop, three USB-A, and one USB-C downstream for peripherals, with the downstream ports providing up to ten gigabits per second. Ten, not five — double the speed of most hubs here, which is why this dock can exist without a power input and still be worth carrying. And then the note a shopper needs before spending: USB ports support data transfer only, not charging a laptop.

That combination is the honest version of the product. A USB-C hub with a 100 watt pass-through, like the UGREEN above, feeds the laptop from the laptop's own charger. This dock takes a different route: it moves data at twice the speed and takes no responsibility for power at all, and it says so in the same breath as it explains the ten gigabits. One buyer summarises the reason these products exist with unusual directness — excellent, just what was needed as there are so few ports on a laptop — and another calls it a basic hub of a variety of connections that works out of the box with no setup.

Its category rank is published too: 7,575th in Computers and Accessories, and 116th in its own subcategory, which is a modest placing from 1,410 ratings at 4.4 stars. The body is 70 grams of aluminium at 25.4 by 3.2 by 1.1 centimetres, and it is Thunderbolt 3 host-compatible. At £12.64 it sits between the cheap four-port hubs and the seven-port desks, and it is the one to buy if the files are large and the charging is somebody else's problem.

The counterweight to the warning at number four. That hub, also with seven ports, opens by telling shoppers it cannot charge anything; this one gives every port its own on/off switch, and its buyer describes using exactly that in a camper van — one socket individually switched for power, which worked a treat. Two seven-port hubs in the same ranking, two different jobs, and the honest specification is what separates them: one page admits the limitation in its first line, the other supplies the feature that makes the limitation less annoying. A switch per port is not a power input, and this listing does not pretend it is. What it does is let a phone stay plugged in overnight while three other sockets are switched off, which is what most people actually want from a hub on a desk.

Its figures are otherwise unremarkable in a good way: seven USB 3.0 ports, five gigabits per second, ten times USB 2.0 as the bullet says, a 3.3 foot cable, and a body of 120 grams — the heaviest hub in this article, which is what a seven-socket desk unit weighs. The published category rank is 1,321st in Computers and Accessories and 20th in its own subcategory, the strongest placing in the article, from 989 ratings at 4.6 stars.

At £9.99 it undercuts the other seven-port hubs here by seven pounds, and it is the one we would put on a desk: the switches make it usable without unplugging, the rank says the market already agrees, and the warning that other listing prints at the top of its page is here replaced by a feature that does the same job better.

This is the listing that says out loud what the whole market implies. Seven ports, it announces — and then, in the same bullet, it tells you what the seven are: one USB 3.0, four USB 2.0 and two USB-C. One fast port out of seven, on the cheapest hub in this ranking. Every other seller here counts ports and stops; this one kept going and produced the only honest port audit in the article. Its own model number does the same thing — A+C 7 in 1 — because the hub takes its input from either a USB-A or a USB-C socket, which is why it can sit on an older laptop and a new one alike.

The maths of that breakdown is worth sitting with. A four-port hub with all four ports at 5Gbps, like the UGREEN at number three, offers four times the bandwidth of this one for thirty-four pence more. Where the LBSC wins is the shape of its sockets: two USB-C ports on a hub that costs less than six pounds, and a buyer's verdict is unusually precise about exactly that — excellent value, does the jobs, two USB-C and USB 3. The body is 50 grams of aluminium at 10 by 4 by 1.5 centimetres, the second-lightest thing here, and it carries a published rank of 310th in Computers and Accessories and second in its own subcategory, which is the strongest placing in this article.

Its rating is 4.3 stars from 833 ratings, with nine per cent of buyers at one star — the weakest distribution among the leaders and exactly what this market's cheapest hardware tends to produce. It is the hub to buy when the ports a laptop lacks are USB-C, and the one to avoid when the files are big.

The most expensive hub in this article, and the one that explains how much the words USB 3.0 are worth. Its title announces a 7-Port USB Hub 3.0; its own bullet points, three lines down, describe a hub offering four USB-A and three USB-C ports. Three of the seven sockets, then, are USB-C — which is not a speed and does not become one by being called 3.0 in a title. Whether those USB-C ports run at 5Gbps or at 480Mbps is not stated anywhere on the page, on a hub costing nearly twenty-two pounds, which is more than every other listing here. The one thing this model has that the others do not is a 120 centimetre cable, and for a desktop with the tower under the desk that is a real feature; the price is what it costs to get it.

The dimensions are the family's signature mistake, identical to its sibling at number four: twenty-five millimetres long, seventeen wide, one hundred and thirty-five high. The cable, again, entered into the height field. Two listings from one seller, 130 and 135 millimetres of nonexistent height, which tells a shopper something useful about how carefully these pages are written — and something else about how little of what is written is worth trusting, including the boldest claim in the title.

It does publish its rank, 2,108th in Computers and Accessories and 36th in its subcategory, from 578 ratings at 4.5 stars, and its buyers are happy in the specific, undemanding way of people who bought a hub to reach a desktop: one calls it awesome for a retrofit, another reports no noticeable lag with portable drives. At £21.99 it is the last place in this ranking we would spend the money, and the first place to look if a 1.2 metre cable is the deciding feature.

Six-in-one is a good name and three is the number. This hub is sold as a six-in-one multiport adapter, and its own specification block records three total USB ports — while the item type name, which is the field nobody proofreads, patiently explains the family it belongs to: one USB-C 100W PD input, two USB-A, one USB-C. Add the functions up and you can reach six, because power input and card reading are functions too. Subtract them and you get the number a keyboard and two flash drives actually care about, which is three. Nothing here is a lie in the way a false brightness figure is a lie. It is the same habit the whole market has: the headline counts capabilities, the specification counts sockets, and the two numbers are printed a few centimetres apart without ever being reconciled.

The power figures are where this page repays reading. It states a 100 watt power delivery input and, in the same bullet, up to 85 watts of output to charge devices, with a note that the port is a passthrough rather than a charger. Fifteen watts are lost between the wall and the laptop, which is the ordinary cost of a hub doing the routing, and the number is published here and almost nowhere else in the ranking — the other USB-C hubs here simply say 100W and leave a shopper to discover the shortfall when a charger that used to work begins to warn about slow charging.

The body is aluminium, 80 grams, 11.9 by 4.6 by 1.5 centimetres, and the hub is rated 4.2 stars from 497 ratings, the second-lowest rating in this article, with eight per cent of buyers at one star. One buyer's complaint is the fairest summary of what it is: a good device, not as many ports as other options, but really well made and flawless with different computers. At £16.99, that is a fair description at a price that is not.