Having a smart home isn’t just about clever appliances or smartphone-controlled heating, you can also get clever lights too. That doesn’t just mean smartphone control, as there are all kinds of other great features too.
You switch lights on or off everyday, and they can play an essential part in creating an ambience in a room. Some smart lighting solutions enable you to recreate the colours within a particular image, while other solutions just mean you don’t need to get up off the sofa just to turn the lights off as they have Alexa or other integration.
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Best of all, these smart bulbs will almost always be a big upgrade on your old bulbs in terms of energy efficiency. They’re generally LED based, meaning they use less energy to run and also scheduling makes sure that you can turn them off and on when you’re not around, or geo-gate them to only be on, if you’re at home.
Here are some of the best smart lighting options around, for you to consider.
Our pick of the best smart lighting
Philips Hue is probably the most well-known when it comes to smart lighting and for good reason with numerous features and various bulbs, lamps and other lights, such as strips, available. The wireless system allows you to use your smartphone to not only switch the LED bulbs on and off, but pick the colour and brightness you want, as well as recreate shades within a specific image, like a sunset you uploaded to Instagram or a painting on your wall.
Osram’s Lightify is one of the closest to Philips Hue in terms of bulb type availability. Its wireless system offers not only standard screw and bayonet bulbs, but GU10s, LED strips and garden spotlights too, all of which can be controlled through the Lightify smartphone app.
There aren’t quite as many features as there are with Philips Hue, but you’ll still get remote access to your lights, scheduling functionality, ambiance creation and scene creation. You won’t be able to sync your lights to your music or a film as yet, but the Osram Lightify system is cheaper than Hue, there is a good range of bulbs and it is compatible with most smart home platforms.
Originating on Kickstarter, LIFX is an LED light bulb that can be controlled using a smartphone app but like Sengled, it doesn’t require an additional hub. From the LIFX app, you can turn your lights on or off, adjust brightness, change the colour, and even create a light show to go with your music.
Like many of the smart light solutions available, LIFX also offers a wake-up feature, allowing you to wake up naturally each morning with automatically increasing light, or drift off with slowly dimming lights. The company also offers LIFX PLUS bulbs which have the additional advantage of a night vision settings, and like Philips Hue and Osram Lightify, there are LED strips available too.
Hive, perhaps best known for its smart heating system, offers a few bulbs in its smart lighting range. The Hive range isn’t as feature-rich as the likes of Philips Hue but you’ll still be able to control your lights from your smartphone whether home or away, schedule them and change the colour to create your perfect ambience, assuming you buy the Colour Changing bulb.
Nanoleaf is a fully customisable smart lighting system featuring wall-mounted triangular lighting panels that snap together with simple connectors to create whatever shape you can imagine. The starter pack is expandable with extra panels that can be bought and combined to create bigger and bolder designs in the future too.
The Govee Glide Hexa light panels are a very compelling alternative to the designs offered by Nanoleaf. While they may look similar at a glance, they have some fantastic features to set themselves apart. The most noticeable of which is the fact that the Hexa panels have individually addressable LEDs. This means that each panel can display up to six different colours at any one time, whereas Nanoleaf can only display one colour per panel. The result is super-smooth flowing animations and kaleidoscopic colours, they really do look stunning.
It’s not as sophisticated a system as the likes of Philips Hue, but it’s a superb option if you want your first smart bulb. Our pick of the various products available is the L530E Multicolor Smart Wi-Fi Light Bulb.
Sengled Wi-Fi Classic is one of the only smart lighting options that doesn’t require an additional hub in the UK - at least for many of its products anyway. Instead, the Wi-Fi Classic, Sengled Boost and Sengled Colour Plus bulbs can be taken straight out of their packaging, screwed in and connected directly to your router through the one of the dedicated Sengled apps.
After having success with its various light panels (above), Nanoleaf has launched its Essentials range consisting of this E19 bulb and an LED light strip. Both are compatible with the incoming Thread smart home standard and work with Apple HomeKit.
This flexible bulb can be used with the iOS Home app or Nanoleaf’s own app as you wish. There’s an adaptive lighting mode so the colour temperature changes throughout the day.
Lightwave is not just about lighting, it’s about controlling your entire home whether that be heating, electricity or lighting. It’s a clever system that requires you to swap your sockets and switches for Lightwave units that offer push-buttons and LED indicators, rather than changing out your bulbs like others on this list.
Once you have installed the system, you use the switches and plugs as normal but you get the additional functionality of being able to remotely control and monitor your lighting, power and energy usage from an internet-enabled device. The Lightwave app will let you to set routines based on your usual daily activities, as well as remotely control things.
Belkin offers all sorts of WeMo connected devices and included within the range is the WeMo Smart LED bulb and the WeMo Light Switch, both of which allow lighting control from an iPhone or Android device. The WeMo Smart LED Bulb replaces your existing bulbs enabling you to control, schedule and fully dim them from anywhere using the WeMo Link, Wi-Fi and the WeMo app. It’s worth mentioning that like most of Ikea smart lights, the WeMo bulbs only offer variants of white light rather than millions of colour options.
The WeMo bulbs can be controlled independently or in groups and the WeMo Link can handle up to 50 bulbs. The WeMo LED bulbs offer compatibility with IFTTT, meaning you can create various recipes like the Hue system and they are also compatible with Google Assistant for voice control. There is also a WeMo Light Switch that is designed to replace a standard light switch in your home and allow you to turn your normal lights on and off from anywhere using a smartphone.
