Can You Still Use a Key With a Smart Lock?

The short answer

It depends on one decision you make before you buy: whether the smart lock replaces your deadbolt or mounts over it.

A retrofit lock — the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, the Level Lock+ — is a motor that turns the thumbturn on the inside of your door. The cylinder on the outside is the one that is already there, so every key on your ring, your partner’s ring and your landlord’s ring keeps working, unchanged, forever. August puts it in one sentence: the lock attaches to your existing door lock, on the inside of your door over the deadbolt, “so you can still use your keys.”

A replacement deadbolt — the Yale Assure Lock 2, the Schlage Encode Plus, the Wyze Lock Bolt — takes out the old lock entirely, so your old keys stop working on that door. What you get instead varies by model, and it is a specification worth checking at the point of order: Yale sells keyed and key-free versions of the same lock, Schlage includes one physical backup key, and the Wyze Lock Bolt has no keyhole at all.

Which locks keep a key, in their makers’ own words

Two rows deserve the detail. Yale is unusually direct about the dead-battery case on its own product page: the lock is battery powered so you still have access during a power outage, and “if the batteries die, you can always dig out your back-up key (included).” Schlage publishes the same belt-and-braces approach from the other end — a low-battery indicator on the lock’s touchscreen and in the Schlage Home app to give advance notice, plus one physical backup key in the box.

The Wyze Lock Bolt is the interesting outlier, and the one people misunderstand. It has no keyhole because Wyze decided the fingerprint reader and a 4-to-8-digit keypad code are the two ways in, with the app as a third. If the batteries go flat while you are out, Wyze publishes the fallback: the USB-C port allows an instant, brief charge so you can enter your home. That is a perfectly reasonable design — it just assumes you can lay hands on a USB-C power bank, which is a different kind of preparedness from a key in your pocket.

Why you might want to keep the keyhole

Three reasons, and only one of them is about you.

Other people. A cleaner, a dog walker, a parent, a tenant, a landlord: anyone who already has a key and does not want an app is a reason to keep the cylinder. Codes solve this too — Schlage publishes up to 100 scheduled access codes and Yale advertises unlimited shared codes — but a code is something to explain and a key is something to hand over.

Renting. A retrofit lock changes nothing visible on the door and leaves the landlord’s key working, which is usually the difference between permission and a polite no. It also comes off in ten minutes when you move, with the original hardware untouched. Our smart home for renters guide covers the same logic applied to cameras and doorbells.

Your own nerve. Some households simply do not want their front door to depend on a battery, and that is a legitimate preference rather than a failure of imagination. A keyed smart lock lets you have the codes, the remote check and the automation without betting the door on them.

Why you might want to lose it

A keyhole is a mechanical attack surface. Picking is rare and overstated, but cylinder snapping and bump keys are real techniques against cheap cylinders, and a lock with no keyhole is immune to all of them. The Wyze Lock Bolt’s fingerprint-and-code design is the clean expression of that idea at a price that undercuts every other lock we cover.

There is also the plain practicality: the main reason people buy a smart lock is to stop carrying, hiding and losing keys. A lock with a cylinder you never use is not a problem, but a lock with no cylinder is an honest commitment to the thing you bought it for. Just make the dead-battery plan first, not second — our guide to how long smart lock batteries last is the one to read alongside this.

One thing neither choice changes: a smart lock is only as good as the door and frame it is fitted to, and no lock of any kind compensates for a weak strike plate. That part is unglamorous, cheap and covered in are smart locks safe?

The locks to buy for each answer

These three are the picks from our best smart locks ranking that the key question actually decides between. All three are one-time purchases with no subscription of any kind.

If you are choosing between the two retrofit locks, August vs Level is the comparison; if you are choosing between retrofitting and replacing, August vs Yale is the one that frames it properly. For a short-term rental where codes matter more than keys, our best smart locks for Airbnb and rentals page covers the host side, and the best Alexa smart locks covers the voice-control angle.