Trezor

It is the only device in our rating whose central claim you can actually check. Firmware and hardware are both fully open, and the builds are reproducible — meaning you can compile the source yourself and confirm the binary on your device matches it. Every other vendor asks you to trust that the software does what they say; this one lets you verify it, which is the entire reason a hardware wallet exists.

The Safe 5 pairs that with an EAL6+ Infineon secure element, and we score its architecture 9 out of 10, the highest mark on the card. Openness and a certified chip are usually presented as a trade-off. Here they are not.

The most useful evidence about Trezor is behavioural. In March 2025 Ledger’s security lab demonstrated that voltage-glitching the Safe 3’s microcontroller could dump its flash and reprogram the device, defeating the model’s supply-chain and authenticity protections. The attack requires physical access and desoldering, so it is not a remote threat — and Trezor published the finding itself rather than waiting to be forced into it. That is how a vendor you can trust behaves when a competitor finds a flaw.

Its weakest moment, the January 2024 breach of a third-party support portal, exposed contact details for up to 66,000 people who had written to support, and an attacker emailed 41 of them asking for their recovery seed. Names and emails, no home addresses. We score company and customer-data safety 6 out of 10 — an unforced error, and considerably less dangerous than handing out the home addresses of people known to hold cryptocurrency.

The Safe 3 costs $59 and is, on price-to-openness, unmatched: a reproducibly-built open device with an EAL6+ secure element for less than a third of what flagship models cost. We score its price 8 out of 10 against the Safe 5’s 6.

What the extra money buys is the architecture score — 9 out of 10 for the Safe 5 against 7 for the Safe 3 — and that gap is the March 2025 finding. The voltage-glitching attack that defeats the Safe 3’s supply-chain protections does not affect the Safe 5.

Whether that matters depends entirely on one question: can someone get physical possession of your device, with the equipment and time to desolder it? For most people the answer is no, and the Safe 3 is the better value by a wide margin. If your device travels, is stored somewhere you do not control, or protects an amount that would justify the effort against you, buy the Safe 5.

Both carry the same openness, the same reproducible builds and the same maintenance record, which we score 9 out of 10. This is a genuine two-tier product line rather than an artificial one.