The Best Smart Bulbs of 2024

The LIFX SuperColor Flood Light is an excellent way to get a flood light with some serious color. Like other LIFX products, the SuperColor Flood Light can shine a massive range of colors, and LIFX touts the brightness of SuperColor bulbs. Indeed, the SuperColor Flood Light does get very bright. LIFX quotes a brightness of up to 1600 lumens, and we found that it could blanket a large area in bright light.

The bulb will have no problem lighting up a room; if you use it outdoors, it’ll light up a driveway or front yard quite easily. It has a weather-proof design with IP65 water resistance, so it’ll survive most average weather situations, including rain. The bulb is smart, too. It supports Matter so that it can be used with any major smart home ecosystem, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit, and it doesn’t need an additional hub like you would need with a Philips Hue hub.

Unfortunately, it supports Matter over Wi-Fi, not over Thread, so it may not be as responsive as some Thread-enabled options. However, our testing found that it still responded quickly in a HomeKit environment.

The light works with the well-designed LIFX app, which is easy to use. The bulb is a little more expensive than some other floodlights, but is also more versatile and brighter, making it worth the money.

The LIFX SuperColor Smart Light is LIFX’s latest do-it-all bulb. The light isn’t necessarily built to be used in all light fixtures in your home (unlike its basic lower-cost A19 bulb), but instead in an environment where you want a little more brightness.

It gets quite bright at 1600 lumens and should easily light a small or medium-sized room. The only downside is that it’s a little big and bulky and may not fit every light fitting.

The bulb supports Matter; however, it’s Matter over Wi-Fi, not Matter over Thread. That Matter support will allow it to work in all major smart home ecosystems, including Google Assistant, Alexa, and HomeKit. (Thread is a connectivity standard that allows smart home devices to talk to each other quickly and without latency.)

Despite not supporting the Thread mesh networking feature, I still found that the bulb was responsive, at least in the HomeKit environment in which I had it set up—though keep in mind that HomeKit uses hubs like the Apple TV to make its smart home more responsive.

The bulb is a little more expensive than many alternatives, but it is a great way to get a little more brightness from your lights, with good smart home support and the lack of a hub that would otherwise cost extra.

The Nanoleaf Essentials Changing Light Bulb is one of the only smart bulbs in our guide that supports Matter.

A Matter hub, like the HomePod (2nd gen) and thread controller, which these bulbs function as is required to unlock all of the Nanoleaf bulb's features. However, Bluetooth lets you control basic features like circadian lighting, brightness, and color scenes.

The Nanoleaf smart bulb also works with Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and Google Home, making it a versatile pick for almost any smart home. It has a color rendering index of 80, which is lower than the Wyze Color Bulb, but Nanoleaf's still has great color output and shades of white.

We find the Nanoleaf app a bit tricky to navigate, as there are many settings you can fiddle with. This bulb is meant for indoor use and does not work with a dimmer switch.

This is currently one of the only Matter-enabled smart bulbs you can buy, making it a great choice for anyone looking to advance their smart home with the latest technology.

Feit Electric Smart Bulbs provide affordable smart lighting that's quick to set up and simple to use. The bulbs connect over a 2.4 GHz internet connection (without the need for a separate hub), making it easy to control the lights from anywhere with the companion app. The bulbs also support hands-free voice control with smart assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, but not Siri.

We had a little trouble figuring out how to change the color of the lights from the app at first (press and hold the bulb in the app), but it was easy to do once we figured it out. Feit’s bulbs can be set to millions of colors and shades of white, and you can dim the brightness in the app or by voice.

The bulbs support scheduling and groups but are less feature-packed than others that offer location-based smart controls and timers. However, these bulbs are responsive to voice commands from Alexa and Google Assistant and maintain a reliable connection.

The Geeni Prisma Plus LED smart bulb is another great budget pick for beginners that doesn’t skimp on convenient features. It supports hands-free voice control via smart assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana (but not Siri). You can also control the lights via the Geeni app, which offers two-factor authentication to help keep your account secure.

In the app, you can change the color, saturation, and brightness of the bulb. The tunable bulb offers millions of colors, as well as several shades of white, and the light is bright and crisp on almost every setting.

It also offers preset light scenes like rainbow, cocktail, night, reading, and rave. You can also create your scenes and automations—like automatically turning the lights off when you leave home—and set the bulbs to a schedule.

The latest version of Cync's bulbs ditches the need for a hub, making these bulbs an ideal choice for anyone who wants to quickly set up a few lights that they can control from an app. You can use voice commands via smart assistants Alexa and Google Assistant to control these lights, but it does not offer integrations with Apple HomeKit as the previous generation did.

The bulbs can be set up in the Cync app, which offers two-factor authentication to keep your account secure, but it can be slow to load on iOS devices. In the app, you can tap anywhere on the color wheel to choose the exact shade and hue you want, or keep each bulb white and select the warmth or coolness that suits your mood.

These bulbs don't offer preset lighting scenes, a fun extra found in other bulbs in our guide.

Cync makes outdoor smart plugs, indoor security cameras, and other smart home devices to help you build out your own Cync-powered smart home, which is where these full-color bulbs fit in best.

Abode, typically known for DIY home security gadgets, is taking the plunge into smart lighting with its first-ever smart bulb, the Abode Color Bulb. The 800-lumen bulb creates bright and vibrant white light and colors remotely via the Abode app, voice assistants Alexa, and Google Assistant. (It doesn’t work with Siri, like some of Abode’s other smart home devices.)

Abode’s bulbs technically don’t need a hub for basic controls like changing the color and dimming the lights, but there’s a catch. You need a hub to access scheduling features other bulbs provide natively.

If you have an Abode Iota Security System, which includes a hub for home automation, adding a few Abode Color Bulbs makes a lot of sense and keeps your smart home all in one ecosystem. If not, other bulbs in our guide offer more bang for your buck. Another thing to consider is that Abode’s Color Bulbs sell as a two-pack (with a higher price per bulb than others in our guide).

Some third-party automation features are available for Abode bulbs such as support for Alexa Hunches, which allows Alexa to intuitively control the lights when you are away or asleep, as well as Alexa Routines. The bulbs also work with Routines in the Google Home app.

The bottom line is that, while the colors are rich and bright, Abode’s new smart lights lack native features many other smart bulbs have. Unless you already have an Abode setup, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere on our list for your smart bulb needs.