Hi Djm203, I'm fairly new to Sonos myself, but I've been looking into multi-room sound systems a bunch lately. There are so many options out there, it can be a bit much!

What's your budget and what features are most important to you?  Those might help narrow down some recommendations for you.  In the meantime, I've been reading good things about Sonos itself (especially with the new Era 100 speaker), but there are for sure other great options depending on what you're looking for!

It depends on what you are using as a source. If that is just music from Spotify, Echo Dots can be a perfectly capable multi room system, I have used them in that manner since 2020.

Although I have used Echo Show units that provide album art as well, and all are wired to Sonos line in jacks for better sound than what the Shows can deliver; I used Sonos because I happened to have the kit, any other good, even old fashioned, speaker system that can take line in signals as inputs as most can, will serve just as well.

Things get complicated if you want to play local owned music on a NAS; here Sonos on S1 is still the best. I say S1 because on S2 that feature seems to be broken with no knowing if and when it will return, and in what form it will do so.

I would checkout Wiim amp as a hub then you can group up echo,HomePod or google speakers to that 

the app they have looks good and it supports DLNA servers