10 of the 20 features in our table differ between the ESP32-S2 and the ESP32-S3.
Single-core, USB OTG, 14 touch pins, no Bluetooth
One core with native USB OTG, 14 touch pins and a DAC, but no Bluetooth. The S3 has largely replaced it.
Watch out: No Bluetooth and a single core, and the highest deep-sleep current in this list (25 µA).
Dual-core, PSRAM, USB OTG, camera, AI instructions
The all-rounder: two cores at 240 MHz, PSRAM, USB OTG, camera and RGB display interfaces, and vector instructions for AI.
Watch out: On modules with octal PSRAM, GPIO 35 to 37 are taken. Bluetooth is LE only, so no A2DP audio.
| Feature | ESP32-S2 | ESP32-S3 |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 1 × Xtensa LX7, 240 MHz | 2 × Xtensa LX7, 240 MHz |
| SRAM | 320 KB | 512 KB |
| PSRAM | In-package or external | In-package or external, quad or octal |
| Bluetooth | No | LE 5 |
| USB | OTG full speed | OTG full speed + Serial/JTAG |
| GPIO | 43 | 45 |
| DAC | 2 × 8-bit | No |
| Display interface | Parallel (i80, via I2S) | Parallel RGB and i80 |
| Deep sleep | 25 µA | 7 µA |
| AI / DSP | No | 128-bit SIMD (PIE) |
Same on both: Low-power core, Wi-Fi, Thread / Zigbee, ADC channels, Touch pins, Camera, TWAI (CAN), Ethernet MAC, ESPHome, and Arduino-ESP32.
Open the ESP32 comparison →Tick what your project needs and see which of the eight chips fits best.
The ESP32-S2 has a true analog output (DAC). The ESP32-S3 has Bluetooth LE, an RGB parallel display interface, vector instructions for AI and DSP, and a second CPU core.
The ESP32-S3: 7 µA against 25 µA for the ESP32-S2, as typical figures for the chip alone in Espressif’s datasheets. On a development board the regulator, the LEDs and the USB-serial chip usually draw more than the chip itself.
Arduino-ESP32 and ESP-IDF support both chips, so most code builds for either; pin numbers, strapping pins and some peripherals change. Anything that uses a true analog output (DAC) won’t carry over: the ESP32-S3 doesn’t have that hardware.
ESP32 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32 vs ESP32-S3 ESP32-C3 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32-C3 vs ESP32-S3 ESP32-C5 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32-C5 vs ESP32-S3 ESP32-C6 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32-C6 vs ESP32-S3 ESP32-H2 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32-H2 vs ESP32-S3 ESP32-P4 vs ESP32-S2 ESP32-P4 vs ESP32-S3
Figures from Espressif datasheets, ESPHome and Arduino-ESP32 documentation, checked in November 2026.