Best Smart Lights for 2024 – CNET [CNET]

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Article updated on May 2, 2024 at 4:30 AM PDT

We’ve tested dozens of smart lights from all the top brands, and these are the best you can buy.

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Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission.

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Ry Crist Senior Editor / Reviews – Labs

Originally hailing from Troy, Ohio, Ry Crist is a writer, a text-based adventure connoisseur, a lover of terrible movies and an enthusiastic yet mediocre cook. A CNET editor since 2013, Ry’s beats include smart home tech, lighting, appliances, broadband and home networking.

Expertise Smart home technology and wireless connectivity Credentials

  • 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team

Chris Wedel Home Tech Editor

Chris Wedel is a fan of all things tech and gadgets. Living in rural Kansas with his wife and two young boys makes finding ways to stay online tricky — not to mention making my homestead smarter. However, by utilizing his years of experience in the tech and mobile communications industries, success is assured. When not conquering the outdoors and testing new gadgets, Chris enjoys cruising a gravel road in his UTV with some good tunes, camping, and hanging out with his family.

Expertise Smart home devices, outdoors gadgets, smartphones, wearables, kid’s tech, and some dabbling in 3D printing Credentials

  • Covered the mobile and smart home tech space for the past five years for multiple large publications.

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.

$10 at Amazon

Wiz smart light bulb on a table

Best white-light smart bulb

Wiz Tunable White LED Smart Bulb

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$42 at Amazon

philips-hue-floodlight-1

Best smart BR30 floodlight

Philips Hue White Floodlight LED

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$19 at Amazon

Govee smart light bulbs in different lamps showing orange, magenta, and turquoise colors in a home

Best color-changing smart bulb

Govee LED Smart Light Bulbs

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$60 at Amazon

Govee RGBIC M1 light strip showing vivid colors in an home entertainment area.

Best smart light strip

Govee RGBIC LED Strip Lights M1

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$80 at Amazon

lutron-caseta-in-wall-wireless-smart-lighting-kit-product-photos-5.jpg

Best smart light switch

Lutron Caseta In-Wall Dimmer Switch

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For many, getting into the smart home gadget world can be a bit daunting. With so many great smart home devices to choose from, picking which one to start with can make a person’s head spin. One of the easiest and likely least disruptive ways to dip your toe into the smart home pool is with smart lights that you can control and automate. Even looking at the seemingly thousands of choices in smart lighting can be confusing. Not to mention the choice to get smart light switches over bulbs. To help you out, we’ve gathered up the best smart lights and lighting accessories to hopefully save you time and money in your quest to make your home smarter.

philips-wiz-connected-smart-wi-fi-led

This color-changing Philips Wiz Connected LED works with Alexa and Google, and costs just $13.

Ry Crist/CNET

How affordable? You can build an entire smart lighting system with dirt-cheap white light smart bulbs that cost less than $10, color-changing bulbs for less than $15 a piece, solar-powered outdoor smart lights for as low as $35 a pop, plus dimmable smart light switches and nifty new lighting accessories for less than $50 each. Willing to splurge a bit? Smart statement pieces from names like Nanoleaf promise to cover your walls in color, too.

Yes, there are a lot of options when it comes to picking smart bulbs. However, once you’re ready to upgrade your smart home system with smart lights — that’s where we come in. We have the best picks for LED smart bulbs, wall panels, strip lights, smart switches, Bluetooth bulb options, or accessories you’re after — we’ve tested plenty of them. These are our top recommendations for the best smart lights you can buy.

Best smart lights

one of the best smart lights, and that comes from Wiz. While the brand name may not ring a bell for you, its sibling company that’s under the Signify umbrella likely is familiar — Philips Hue.

Wiz does make color-changing bulbs that are also quite good, but here we are focusing on the brand’s high-quality tunable white bulbs. These are a typical-shaped bulb, A19, with an E26 base with an incandescent equivalent rating of 60W. In terms of how bright this bulb can get, you’ll get plenty of output from the Wiz Tunable White LED Smart Bulb is rated at 800 lumens with a color range from a warm 2700K to a cool 6500K

There are multiple ways to control this bulb: Use the Wiz app on your phone, Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri or IFTTT. While these smart home platform integrations aren’t necessarily unique, Matter support is a bit more novel — at least right now. These options mean that you’ll have a lot of flexibility in where and how you manage your Wiz smart bulbs. One of the ways people use these smart home platforms is for automation, like connecting to a smart sensor to turn on the lights when motion is detected. With these new Wiz bulbs, that ability is fully built into the light with the need for a secondary sensor.

Read more: Best Cheap Home Security Devices

There are some downsides to the Wiz bulb, and that is in the motion automation feature and Matter connectivity. As for what Wiz calls Spacesense, this feature works mostly well, but in order for bulbs to link together and interact properly for motion detection, you have to ensure that bulbs are at least 6.5 feet (or 2m) apart. I’ve also had some inconsistencies with the reaction time for the feature. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but it’s worth noting. As for Matter, that is more of an issue for the new smart home device standard and hopefully improves with a future update.

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If you’ve been led to believe that you need to spend a lot of money to get the best smart light bulb, you’ve been misinformed. As it turns out, one of the cheapest smart bulbs is one of the best smart lights, and that comes from Wiz. While the brand name may not ring a bell for you, its sibling company that’s under the Signify umbrella likely is familiar — Philips Hue.

Wiz does make color-changing bulbs that are also quite good, but here we are focusing on the brand’s high-quality tunable white bulbs. These are a typical-shaped bulb, A19, with an E26 base with an incandescent equivalent rating of 60W. In terms of how bright this bulb can get, you’ll get plenty of output from the Wiz Tunable White LED Smart Bulb is rated at 800 lumens with a color range from a warm 2700K to a cool 6500K

There are multiple ways to control this bulb: Use the Wiz app on your phone, Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri or IFTTT. While these smart home platform integrations aren’t necessarily unique, Matter support is a bit more novel — at least right now. These options mean that you’ll have a lot of flexibility in where and how you manage your Wiz smart bulbs. One of the ways people use these smart home platforms is for automation, like connecting to a smart sensor to turn on the lights when motion is detected. With these new Wiz bulbs, that ability is fully built into the light with the need for a secondary sensor.

Read more: Best Cheap Home Security Devices

There are some downsides to the Wiz bulb, and that is in the motion automation feature and Matter connectivity. As for what Wiz calls Spacesense, this feature works mostly well, but in order for bulbs to link together and interact properly for motion detection, you have to ensure that bulbs are at least 6.5 feet (or 2m) apart. I’ve also had some inconsistencies with the reaction time for the feature. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but it’s worth noting. As for Matter, that is more of an issue for the new smart home device standard and hopefully improves with a future update.

Wiz smart light bulb on a table

Photo Gallery 1/1

If you want something a little more advanced than the Wyze Bulb, then consider going with Philips Hue LED bulbs” target=”_blank. At $16 each, Philips’ Hue White LED” target=”_blank bulbs are a lot more affordable than you might expect, and the newest Bluetooth versions of the Philips Hue bulbs can pair directly with Alexa or Google Assistant without the need for the Hue Bridge. The same goes for the Lifx Mini White LED, which works with Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and IFTTT. As of writing this, that one’s $23 on Amazon.

Want something more decorative? Hue is starting to release vintage-style LED Hue White bulbs” target=”_blank with fake filaments twisted inside (you’ve probably seen bulbs just like them at your local hipster dive bar). They’d be a good pick for exposed-bulb setups where you aren’t hiding your light source under a lampshade. 

If you prefer Google Assistant, then you might be better off with a C by GE smart bulb” target=”_blank. Maker GE Lighting is a Made for Google partner, and its LED smart bulbs are designed to pair seamlessly with your Google Home smart speaker” target=”_blank and Google Nest Hub smart display” target=”_blank. You don’t need a hub, and you don’t even need the GE smartphone or tablet app — just turn the LED lights on and sync them with your setup right from the Google Home app. From there, you’ll enjoy some of the snappiest and most responsive voice control we’ve tested.


It’s bright, at 1200 lumens, this LED smart bulb is efficient, and it’s a bit expensive — but it’s part of a very good smart lighting platform that works with everything. Like the rest of Hue’s new bulbs, the new floodlight uses both Bluetooth and Zigbee, so you can skip the Hue Bridge and just pair directly with your smartphone or with Amazon Alexa or Google if that’s all you want. However, if you go the route of skipping the Hue Bridge, you’ll lose out on many of the smart features.

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There aren’t as many smart floodlights as classic, A-shaped smart LED bulbs, but your options are growing. That includes a pretty significant new addition from Philips Hue, which recently released a floodlight version of the popular Hue White smart LED bulb described above. Plus, with this bulb offering IP44 water resistance, you can use it outdoors as well as inside.

I like the Philips Hue White floodlight for all of the same reasons I like the regular-size bulb. It’s bright, at 1200 lumens, this LED smart bulb is efficient, and it’s a bit expensive — but it’s part of a very good smart lighting platform that works with everything. Like the rest of Hue’s new bulbs, the new floodlight uses both Bluetooth and Zigbee, so you can skip the Hue Bridge and just pair directly with your smartphone or with Amazon Alexa or Google if that’s all you want. However, if you go the route of skipping the Hue Bridge, you’ll lose out on many of the smart features.

If you’re an Amazon Alexa user looking for something cheap, then Sengled” target=”_blank leads the way with a smart floodlight that can pair directly with the Echo Plus or the Echo Show — if you don’t have one of those, you’ll need the Sengled hub plugged into your router. You’ll find those bulbs on Amazon in a two-pack that costs $18.

Sengled makes floodlights that change colors, too (and obviously, so does Philips Hue). But if it’s a color bulb that you want, I say it’s worth it to go with Lifx, an Australian startup that routinely aces our color quality tests with bold, bright shades that look terrific. The company’s lights all use your Wi-Fi network to talk directly to your router, so they don’t need a hub, they come with an excellent, full-featured app and they’re compatible with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant (and IFTTT) right out of the box. 

A color-changing Lifx floodlight costs $45 at Amazon. That’s not cheap, but Lifx floodlights are also a few hundred lumens brighter at peak settings than any competitor we’ve tested to date. Couple that with the color quality, and you’re looking at a very worthy upgrade pick.


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Lifx gives it a pretty good run for the money, but on the whole, Philips Hue” target=”_blank still boasts the best smart lighting platform money can buy. If that matters to you more than the Lifx bump in brightness and color quality, then a Philips Hue bulb is probably worth the extra cash. The newest color-changing Hue bulbs with Bluetooth radios that let you use them without the Hue Bridge sell for $55 for a single bulb, but you can save $10 if you’re willing to buy the $100 two-pack.

If you’re just controlling your home’s lights using the Alexa or Google Home app, then the platform strengths of Lifx and Philips Hue are a little less important — and you can probably afford to go with something less expensive. Again, I like Sengled bulbs for use with Alexa and Google Assistant. The brand offers color-changing smart bulbs for about $20 apiece. If you really want a bargain, then check out the Philips Wiz Connected LED” target=”_blank. At just $11 each, it’s one of the least expensive color-changing bulbs that money can buy, and while the colors aren’t super bright, it gets the job done, complete with Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, plus a surprisingly full-featured app.

Want an option less expensive than Lifx or Philips Hue products that’ll work with Apple HomeKit and Siri? Check out the color-changing Sylvania Smart Plus smart LED light bulb, currently available for about $15 each.


Another very impressive light strip is the Lifx Lightstrip Color Zones. While it is a bit more pricey than Govee’s offering, coming in at $80 for the 80-inch kit, Lifx has long been known to offer exceptional colors from its lighting products. For a less expensive option, while I haven’t tested it just yet, Sengled’s Zigbee light strip” target=”_blank is one of your newest options, relatively speaking, and it only costs $30. Just know that you’ll need a Zigbee hub to control your lights — Sengled’s hub, the SmartThings Hub, or an Amazon Echo Plus or Echo Show will all do the trick.

The Sylvania Smart Plus Light Strip is even less expensive, and available on Amazon right now for less than $20. It uses Bluetooth to pair directly with your smartphone without the need for a hub, and while it doesn’t offer native support for Alexa or Google, it does support Siri. It isn’t as bright as Lifx’s strip and it only puts out one color at a time, and the Siri voice controls were occasionally laggy in my tests, but it’s a reasonable budget pick for HomeKit households, especially at its current price.


the CNET Smart Home, our favorite has long been the Lutron Caseta. Lutron is a lighting aisle mainstay, and its light switches use a proprietary signal called Clear Connect. That means that they require the Lutron Bridge in order to connect with your router, but the good news is that Clear Connect is about as swift and reliable as wireless protocols come.

Aside from the strong performance, Lutron’s Caseta switches come in a variety of colors and designs, and apart from the dimmable version seen here, you can also get standard on/off switches, wall-mounted remotes that can serve as a second for three-way setups, audio control switches that sync with Sonos and fan controls for automating a ceiling fan. If you really want to go big, you can add Lutron’s luxurious automated shades to your setup, too. Whatever you choose, all of it is compatible with just about everything, too: Alexa, Google, Siri, Nest, IFTTT — you name it.

A single Lutron Caseta with the mandatory Lutron Bridge and a Pico remote that you can mount in the wall or take with you around the house is available on Amazon right now for $75. That’s a fair price for a solid foundation that you can build on whenever Lutron stuff goes on sale.

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If you’ve got a hardwired light that you’d like to be able to automate, you can swap the bulb out for a smart bulb — or you can just smarten things up at the switch. That’s an especially cost-effective approach if it controls several bulbs at once.

Among all of the smart switches that we’ve tested at the CNET Smart Home, our favorite has long been the Lutron Caseta. Lutron is a lighting aisle mainstay, and its light switches use a proprietary signal called Clear Connect. That means that they require the Lutron Bridge in order to connect with your router, but the good news is that Clear Connect is about as swift and reliable as wireless protocols come.

Aside from the strong performance, Lutron’s Caseta switches come in a variety of colors and designs, and apart from the dimmable version seen here, you can also get , that can serve as a second for three-way setups, audio control switches that sync with Sonos and fan controls for automating a ceiling fan. If you really want to go big, you can add Lutron’s luxurious automated shades to your setup, too. Whatever you choose, all of it is compatible with just about everything, too: Alexa, Google, Siri, Nest, IFTTT — you name it.

A single Lutron Caseta with the mandatory Lutron Bridge and a Pico remote that you can mount in the wall or take with you around the house is available on Amazon right now for $75. That’s a fair price for a solid foundation that you can build on whenever Lutron stuff goes on sale.

Our lack of access to the CNET Smart Home due to the pandemic has hindered our ability to test smart switches, so watch this space for an update once we’re able to fully resume our tests. But if you just want something simple and inexpensive, you should check out TP-Link’s Kasa line of switches, all of which can connect with both Alexa and Google without need for a hub. For my money, I like the $14 version that’ll dim the lights.


triangular Aurora panels before following them up with square-shaped, touch-sensitive Nanoleaf Canvas panels, too. Now, the brand has a third-gen set of panels up for sale — hexagons, this time. And, unless you strongly prefer triangles or squares, those hexagons are the ones you want.

The panels can display a wide variety of animated effects, including a library with hundreds of user-created options that are free to try for yourself. They also feature a built-in microphone that lets them animate in rhythm with whatever music you’re listening to or whatever game you’re playing. You can turn them on and off with a tap and choose between presets with the built-in buttons on the base panel, but they also support lighting controls with voice commands via Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. 

On top of all of that, the new Hexagon panels are easier to stick to the wall thanks to new, detachable mounting plates. At $200, they aren’t cheap, but they’re fun and dynamic, and perfect for a kids room or a gaming room.

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If you want to go all out with smart lighting — maybe for a game room or a kids’ room — then you might consider color-changing Wi-Fi LED smart light panels for your walls. A Toronto-based startup called Nanoleaf got there first with its triangular Aurora panels before following them up with square-shaped, touch-sensitive Nanoleaf Canvas panels, too. Now, the brand has a third-gen set of panels up for sale — hexagons, this time. And, unless you strongly prefer triangles or squares, those hexagons are the ones you want.

The panels can display a wide variety of animated effects, including a library with hundreds of user-created options that are free to try for yourself. They also feature a built-in microphone that lets them animate in rhythm with whatever music you’re listening to or whatever game you’re playing. You can turn them on and off with a tap and choose between presets with the built-in buttons on the base panel, but they also support lighting controls with voice commands via Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. 

On top of all of that, the new Hexagon panels are easier to stick to the wall thanks to new, detachable mounting plates. At $200, they aren’t cheap, but they’re fun and dynamic, and perfect for a kids room or a gaming room.

For a while, Nanoleaf’s main competitor was Lifx, which offered its own color-changing, square-shaped wall panels called Lifx Tiles” target=”_blank. Those Tiles have since been discontinued, leaving Nanoleaf as the only notable name in the category for a little while. However, Govee has stepped up to fill that gap, and some may argue that Nanoleaf has been beaten in some ways. The Govee Glide Hexa Light Panels start at $130 on Amazon for seven panels, like Naoleaf, or spend $180 for 10 panels. You’ll get vivid colors and plenty of customization options too.


Watch this: Coolest alternative smart light fixtures

Philips Hue’s users are the most spoiled when it comes to accessory options. In addition to the Aurora, you could add one of Philips Hue’s wireless dimming remotes to your setup, or maybe motion sensors — Hue offers both an indoor and an outdoor version. 

My favorite of the bunch, though, is the Philips Hue Tap” target=”_blank. It’s a circular remote with four buttons that can trigger specific lights or specific Hue scenes (if you have a Hue Bridge, it can trigger Apple HomeKit devices, too). The thing that makes it truly great is that it powers itself using the kinetic energy of each button press. No batteries, no recharging — just finger power. Best of all, it won’t break the bank: You can get one right now for about $50.

If you like that finger-powered approach but would rather have it in a light switch design that you can mount in your wall, then check out the Click smart switch from RunLessWire, previously known as the Illumra. Like the Tap, it needs no batteries or wires, and comes with four programmable buttons that also support Apple HomeKit devices.

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a full portfolio of affordable outdoor smart lights, all of which can sync up with your Ring cameras and sync up with Alexa for voice control, too.

My favorites of the bunch are the Ring Pathlights, especially the new solar-powered version pictured above. At just $30 a pop on Amazon, each one includes a built-in motion sensor that can turn on a light or a group of lights whenever someone passes by, and they can trigger your Ring cameras to start recording, too. That’s a great way to build a smart home that’s aware of what’s going on outside. 

You’ll need a Ring Bridge in your home in order to use them, but you can currently get one bundled with two solar-powered smart Pathlights for $80.

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Outdoor lighting is key to a safe and secure home, so upgrading to smart outdoor lights that double as motion detectors and sync with your security system makes a lot of sense. For my money, the best way to get there is with Ring, which offers a full portfolio of affordable outdoor smart lights, all of which can sync up with your Ring cameras and sync up with Alexa for voice control, too.

My favorites of the bunch are the Ring Pathlights, especially the new solar-powered version pictured above. At just , each one includes a built-in motion sensor that can turn on a light or a group of lights whenever someone passes by, and they can trigger your Ring cameras to start recording, too. That’s a great way to build a smart home that’s aware of what’s going on outside. 

You’ll need a Ring Bridge in your home in order to use them, but you can currently get one bundled with two solar-powered smart Pathlights for $80.