Illuminate Your Life With These Top Smart Bulb Picks

There’s something truly magical about commanding your house light on using just your voice. Even using your app to switch off the kitchen light when you raced out of the house in a morning rush is pretty cool.

It’s why smart lights are so often the starting point in any smart home. Below, we’ve rounded up the best smart lights you can currently buy, as well as some factors to take into consideration before you do.

TL;DR – These are the Best Smart Bulbs

1. Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance

Best Smart Bulb

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Philips Hue is probably the best-known name in smart lighting. It got in the game early, and today has an impressive lineup of bulbs and fittings to choose from. And when you’re ready to go beyond the standard bulbs, there are more interesting fixtures and accessories, such as the Hue Dimmer Switch or the Hue Lightstrips.

Hue lights offer a large gamut of features such as color control, scheduling, and integration with third-party apps. It’s platform-agnostic too, working with HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT, and more.

However, you’ll want a Hue Bridge for the full effect. Yes, its latest lights offer Bluetooth as well – a great way to trial Hue if it’s your first time – but the range of features is more limited. Hue’s White and Color Ambiance bulb is a great place to start.

2. Sengled Color Changing Light Bulb

The budget choice

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Sengled offers a more wallet-friendly option. Most of its bulbs require a hub, although it now offers its white, ‘daylight’, and color bulbs in Wi-Fi versions that talk directly to your router.

The app is good enough and gives you all the expected features, but it’s not as fully rounded as Hue or Lifx. The same goes for the quality of the bulbs themselves, which also aren’t quite as bright. We do like the power consumption tracker that lets you see how much energy your individual bulbs are using.

Alexa and Google Assistant support are here, but no HomeKit.

3. Lifx Mini Color

The best without a hub

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Lifx’s bulbs are very expensive, but on the plus side, they connect directly to your router over Wi-Fi, which negates the added cost of a bridge.

And its bulbs are of very good quality: nice and bright, with 16 million colors to choose from. Its A19 and BR30 bulbs have a slightly strange shape that fires the light more upward than we’d like, but otherwise, we’ve no complaints about the performance. Lifx supports Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit.

We’d recommend starting with the Lifx Mini bulb, which comes in white, ‘Day & Dusk’, and color variants.

4. Yeelight LED Bulb 1S

Cheap but plenty functional

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Yeelight’s smart color LED bulb almost sounds too good to be true: no hub, low price, a good color temperature range, and integration with Alexa, Google Assistant, and HomeKit. And yet, it delivers, with a fantastic smart bulb that should have Hue, Lifx, and company watching their backs.

The app has features like scheduling and timers, with good responsiveness overall. The bulbs are plenty bright too – 800 lumens – and the color bulb offers 16-million hues. It doesn’t support as many third-party platform integrations as Philips Hue, but Yeelight ticks a lot of the right boxes.

5. Wyze Bulb

For the absolute basics

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See it on Amazon
See it on Home Depot

Wyze wants to lower the price of entry to the smart home, and its smart light does exactly that. $8 a bulb or $30 for four. It’s hard to argue with that.

But despite costing a fraction of the price of some rivals (looking at you, Hue and Lifx) Wyze’s Wi-Fi bulbs offers all the basic features you’d expect and doesn’t require a hub to get going. That means app control for adjusting temperature, setting schedules, and turning your bulbs on/off when you’re out of the house. They also integrate with Alexa and Google Assistant.

The problem with Wyze it that it only has one white bulb right now, with no color options.

6. Nanoleaf Canvas

Best for decorating your home

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Nanoleaf isn’t like the other brands on this list; instead of bulbs, it makes light panels of different shapes for you to combine in interesting formations.

Whereas some smart lights are meant to blend into the background, Nanoleaf’s are made to be seen. You have a choice of triangle or square panels, and there will be a hexagonal version available in the spring.

You’ll need a starter pack to kick things off, then it’s a case of adding expansion sets until you’ve realized all of your geometric fantasies. Just plan out the shape you want to make, affix the stick pads to each panel, and then get arranging. It’s more effort than simply screwing in a lamp bulb, granted, but the end result is so much more impressive.

What to look for in a smart bulb

Smart lighting can really change your home life, but with so many available options out there it’s important to first do your research. The first port of call is to check that the base fittings are correct for your home. Luckily, many smart bulb manufacturers make a variety of different fittings. Here’s what else you need to think about.

Hubs, Zigbee and Z-Wave

The above bulb recommendations can be split into two camps: those that require a hub, and those that don’t. If they don’t, that means they’re either connecting to your router using Wi-Fi or to your phone with Bluetooth.

If they need a hub, then in all likelihood the bulbs are running on Zigbee or Z-Wave. For the uninitiated, these are two wireless protocols that function like mesh networks. The benefit is that Zigbee and Z-Wave networks are more stable and avoid putting more strain on your Wi-Fi.

But Wi-Fi bulbs are growing in popularity due to the fact they don’t need a hub and can connect directly to your router. The main drawback here is connectivity – you need to have a strong Wi-Fi signal wherever your bulbs are, which mesh Wi-Fi systems and Wi-Fi extenders can help. However, be careful not to overload the home network with all of your lights.

Finally, some bulbs come with Bluetooth. Hue now sells its bulbs with Bluetooth built-in, giving you the choice of controlling them just from your phone. The obvious drawback here is that you lose that control when you leave the house, and the overall range of features is thinner.

Your platform of choice

As well as how your bulbs connect, you need to think about your smart home platform. Do you live in an Alexa home? Worship at the altar of HomeKit? Make sure any smart lighting you buy plays nicely. Most work with Alexa and Google Assistant, but a smaller number are HomeKit-friendly.

Brightness, temperature, and dimming

Not all smart bulbs are born equal. Color temperature within white bulbs – letting you shift from a colder white to a warmer yellow – is an important feature. Not all white bulbs support color temperature, and of those that do, the range can vary.

Finally, do you want your smart lights to be dimmable? Chances are the won’t work with an existing in-wall dimmer in your home, but some smart light brands now sell dimming accessories. Worth thinking about. Of course, you’ll be able to dim with the app/voice controls in most cases, but sometimes you just want a good old fashioned light switch.

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Hugh Langley is a tech journalist who’s fascinated by wearables, health tech, the smart home, and more. You can find him tweeting (often nonsense) over at @hughlangley.

Source: IGN.com Illuminate Your Life With These Top Smart Bulb Picks