Lenco Pro Control vs Seakeeper Ride: Full Comparison
Lenco Pro Control vs Seakeeper Ride
Anyone who’s stood at the helm and felt the bow slap through chop knows the feeling: you’d trade almost anything for a boat that just sits flatter. A few different options & brand names keep coming up when boaters go looking for that fix.
In this guide, we’ll look at a side-by-side comparison of Lenco Pro Control Auto and Seakeeper Ride and break down what sets the two options apart.
- Lenco Pro Control Auto takes the trim tabs you already know, the hinged plates bolted to your transom, and automates them with a motion sensor software that reads how the boat is moving and directs the tabs accordingly.
- Seakeeper Ride starts from a different premise entirely. It’s not a trim tab system at all; it’s a Vessel Attitude Control System (VACS) built around rotary blade actuators that react up to 100 times a second, fast enough that most of that motion never really registers on board.
So which one’s right for your boat? Here’s how they actually stack up.
How They Stack Up, At a Glance
| Lenco Pro Control Auto (12 x 12 in) | Seakeeper Ride 450 | |
| Deployment Rate (inches per second) | 0.7 | 11.81* |
| Full Stroke Length (inches) | 2.25 | 1 |
| Total Time to Full Stroke (seconds) | 3.2 | 0.08 |
| Roll Authority at Full Deployment (degrees) | 9.9 | 10.9 |
| Pitch Authority at Full Deployment (degrees) | 1.3 | 2.4 |
| Gain Setting | Manual | Variable** |
| Retail Price | $2,675 | $4,900 |
**Seakeeper Ride’s variable gains mean that it has a smart-sensing suite that automatically adjusts the systems’s sensitivities to changing sea state, sea direction, hull size/shape, etc., therefore requiring no additional commissioning or tuning during any point of operation.
Automated Trim Tabs vs. a Completely Different Machine
Lenco Pro Control Auto replaces the hands-on adjusting that manual trim tabs require. With standard tabs, you’re the one working the switches every time conditions change. Pro Control Auto is a software that takes over that job and adjusts the tabs for you. Underneath it all, the hardware is still a hinged plate, and hinged plates have a ceiling on how fast their motors can swing them. They’re “constantly” working, but that “constant” doesn’t mean they’re fast enough to fully keep pace with wave frequency. That’s a limit of the mechanism that holds true for every hinged-plate active trim system out there.
Seakeeper Ride takes a different approach. It samples boat motion 1,000 times per second and fires up to 100 corrective adjustments in that same window, with blades capable of cycling as fast as 300 mm per second. A proprietary variable gain algorithm recalibrates itself for sea state, heading, and hull shape without any manual tuning. It’s still reacting to motion after it starts, same as any transom-mounted system, but it’s doing it so quickly that the motion doesn’t have time to register before it’s corrected.
For a closer look at how these categories break down, check out our comparison of trim control systems.
40x Faster: Why Speed Wins This Fight
Seakeeper Ride’s actuators run over 40 times faster than Lenco Pro Control Auto’s. Independent editorial testing landed on the same conclusion from a different angle: Lenco’s tabs responded more slowly than Ride across the conditions tested.
Lenco Pro Control Auto doesn’t sit frozen between adjustments. It’s moving the whole time, but the catch is that its pace can’t keep up with how fast waves come at you, so you still feel motion on board. In some conditions an active trim system can even add to the motion felt onboard by falling a beat behind the wave it’s chasing. Seakeeper Ride’s speed (aka reaction time) is what makes the difference: it’s fast enough that the correction happens before the motion is felt.
The Test Results: 32% Pitch Eliminated, 28% Roll Eliminated
Seakeeper Ride ran an instrumented comparison across three separate testing days, measuring how each system performed against the boat’s bare hull, no trim tab or Seakeeper Ride assistance at all.
- Lenco Pro Control Auto eliminated an average of 11% of pitch motion and 2% of roll motion compared to the bare hull.
- Seakeeper Ride eliminated an average of 32% of pitch motion and 28% of roll motion compared to the bare hull, under the same conditions.
- In head and bow-quartering seas, the Lenco system automatically dropped back into manual mode during testing, providing no automatic adjustments.
- Seakeeper Ride was the only system in the test that cut down yaw as well. That tracks: when tabs deploy asymmetrically to fight roll, they can end up introducing yaw in the process.
The Bottom Line
If you want to boil it all down, Lenco Pro Control Auto is a software added on top of traditional trim tab technology. It’s a workload reducer. It gives a boat’s captain less to do (manually adjusting trim tabs) to offset the motion felt onboard by their passengers. Seakeeper Ride, on the other hand, is a complete underway stabilization solution that goes beyond the capabilities of a trim tab entirely by applying different technology adapted from the aerospace industry—it reduces pitch, roll, and yaw at speed completely on it’s own at speeds faster than the passengers on board your boat can feel motion.
