Edit History

@adrianvm if you're seeing that big of a discrepancy when measuring the temperature of your pan and the readout of your Control Freak (Home or otherwise), the #1 culprit is going to be the IR thermometer.  It can be rather tricky to get the emissivity dialed in exactly for stainless steel pans.  I use contact sensors when I'm trying to get exact numbers (or an IR camera which I can calibrate to the pan).  Stainless steel also tends to reflect IR light, so that makes readings even more complicated--especially near the corners.

As far as temperatures go, it's pretty unlikely that the top of your pan is going to get hotter (or at least significantly hotter) than the bottom of your pan, since heat travels from hot parts to cold parts--and the bottom of your pan is where the heat is being applied.  Also of note, the Control Freak's temperature sensor should be accurate within 1C (or better) for the point it's touching -- and the induction ring is surrounding that contact point.  That means that technically the heat induced into the pan via the induction coil has to travel (via the pan) to its center before the Control Freak sees the temperature reading.  That's one of the principal readings why you can get some overshoot when warming up pans--the Control Freak doesn't get the message that the pan has reached the temperature setpoint until the part that it's touching has reached that setpoint.

If you were using super-thin pans which heat extremely quickly, sure, it's possible to get quite a bit of overshoot from a ~1700 watt induction coil heating at maximum speed.  But with 2.3mm stainless-clad pans with an aluminum center, that's thick enough that I wouldn't expect a massive amount of overshoot.

I primarily use Falk Copper Core and Demeyere Atlantis/Proline pans on my Control Freaks.  The Falk are my daily drivers, giving me versatility (lids for each pan, a bazillion pan size options) and quick heat transitions--with a fairly smooth temperature gradient.  The Demeyere disc-based pans tend to give me a pretty consistent temperature across the bottom of the pans.  I have All-Clad pans in several series as well as several other brands.  I've found that pretty much any pan can make good food when there's a human involved using their repertoire of cook skills, but I tend to do a lot of simple "set it and forget it" kind of cooking so I invested more in the pans (which frees up my time and gives me consistent results).

Copper isn't super expensive, but it's rare to find pans which have a significant amount of copper.  When I'm looking for induction-compatible copper pans, I'm looking for ones that are actually copper (i.e. more than half the volume of the pan is actual copper, or ideally closer to 80%).  If the vendor won't give you any numbers to tell you how much copper is in the pan, the answer is usually "enough to say we put some in there."  Cooks know that copper pans work well historically, so having some of the material in a pan is great for marketing and justifying the price of a pan.

I would also avoid any pans that aren't flat on the bottom.  Some pans that say they get flat as they heat up are designed (or marketed) to get flat on the TOP surface but not necessarily on the bottom surface.  I would also avoid any pans that have handles that are so heavy that the pan falls over if there's nothing in it.  I have a couple of those, including some really nice smaller pans--and I have learned that I have to load them up with sufficient weight if I want to cook with them.

One final note...  The Control Freak, in my experience, is designed for pans with a bottom in the 16cm to 26cm range (6.3 to 10 inch).  With induction, it's usually ideal to match the size of the pan to the coil--especially if the pans aren't pushing the energy out to the edges for you.  And if you're going to be using cast iron, be aware that it's technically compatible with induction cooktops but you're probably going to mostly get a ring of heat directly above the coil.  I use cast iron in the oven -- or I preheat it on the oven before putting it on the induction cooktop to maintain temperature.  The only induction stove I'd want to heat cast iron on, and this is a maybe because it's untested, is a continuous-coil cooktop like the Freedom Induction Cooktop.