Best Alternatives To Philips Hue Light Strips
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Philips Hue may offer one of the best smart lighting systems on the market, but its smart light strip has some worthwhile competitors.
Philips Hue's smart lighting line can give you everything you need from smart bulbs to smart accent lighting, but there's one place where its product line fails to — pardon the pun — shine: Its smart light strip. The 80-inch LED light strip is fine but for its price, it's not great. For about $90, you get a strand of LEDs that light in one color. There are alternative, similarly priced strips that offer more functionality and alternative, lesser priced strips that offer the same functionality. If you're looking to save a little money while adding smart accent lighting to your home, check out these alternatives!
LIFX Z Smart Light Strip
The $90 LIFX Z smart LED strip is easily my choice for the best Philips Hue alternative. This 6.6-foot strip has eight individual zones, meaning you can alter the color of each of these zones independently. Instead of a single accent color, you can paint your wall or entertainment center with multiple colors, creating all kinds of fun looks.
The LIFX Z works with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, and the Google Assistant, which means you'll be able to use your voice to control your light strip on an iPhone, an Amazon Echo, a Google Home, or any number of other smart devices. The strip is also incredibly bright and full of color — it cranks out a whopping 1400 lumens in 16 million colors and white color temperatures.
Feel like one strip won't do it for you? The LIFX Z is expandable up to 10 meters and yep, each of the eight zones in each of those extensions is individually addressable. You can paint your whole doggone room in color. If you want even more color options than the Philips Hue light strip provides with the same quality and integrations, the LIFX Z smart light strip is a no brainer.
Sylvania Smart+ Light Strip
This $36 Sylvania Smart+ Light Strip starter kit nets you three two-foot LED strips (six feet in total) that you can adhere and mold into all kinds of shapes. With three individual strips, you can add some lighting to your favorite bookcase, create a cozy light feature for your kitchen cabinets, add some bias lighting to your television — the modular nature of this kit means you've got loads of possible arrangements.
The three strips are capable of producing more than 16 million colors and white color temperatures. If you've got a big lighting project on your hand, it's worth noting you can expand the basic six-foot lighting kit up to 20 feet by purchasing the Sylvania Smart+ expansion strips.
You will need a ZigBee hub to control this lighting kit (Amazon's $150 Echo Plus comes with a ZigBee hub built in) but once you've got a ZigBee hub, you'll be able to control your light strip with your voice using the Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. If you're looking for similar functionality to the Philip Hue light strip at a far more reasonable price, this light strip starter kit is perfect!
YEELIGHT Smart Light Strip
YEELIGHT's $30 6.5-foot light strip is quite a deal. With built-in Wi-Fi, you won't need a special hub to connect and control the YEELIGHT — you can use the free app or bark out commands via Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant.
The peel-and-stick, flexible design makes it easy to decorate your cabinets, entertainment center, desk, or television and this light strip provides a unique feature that you don't often see on Wi-Fi smart strips: a built-in button for toggling power and changing the color of the lights.
You may be wondering how YEELIGHT is able to sell a Wi-Fi connected light strip at such a low cost in comparison to the Philips Hue strip (I was, too!). It seems the one tradeoff you're going to get by going with the YEELIGHT strip is brightness. At a mere 180 lumens, the strip outputs a small fraction of light compared to other smart strips. If you're looking for a light strip that'll provide a reasonable amount of lighting (as opposed to ambience), you may want to go with a different strip. If you're just looking to paint your living room or under cabinet area with color, this is an inexpensive way to achieve the effect.
Thoughts?
Do you have any of the smart light strips on the list? Do you love your Philips Hue light strip and would never betray its trust by buying any of the options I've listed here? Let me know! Give me a shout in the comments or over on Twitter!
