The Best Smart Light Bulbs for 2021 to Light Up Your Home

Smart light bulbs can supercharge your home’s ambiance and security with options to set light temperatures, brightness levels, schedules, and more right from your smartphone. Here are the brightest (see what we did there?) bulbs you can get in 2021.

Best Smart Bulbs of 2021

Why you should trust us: Our trusted experts use a lifetime of experience to pick the best products. Learn more about our editorial process.

What to Look For in a Smart Bulb

Among home gadgets you can control with your phone, smart light bulbs have been around for a while. Fortunately, this means that they’ve not only gotten steadily more advanced, but more affordable as well.

There are three main considerations when shopping for smart bulbs. The first is whether the bulb produces colored or white light—or both. In general, white-only lights will be a bit cheaper than colored lights, but both styles are generally tuneable through a range of light temperatures and brightness levels.

The second consideration has to do with the receptivity built into the bulb. All of the bulbs on our list connect via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a hub, or some combination of all three. If a bulb connects only via Bluetooth, it’s important to remember that you’ll only be able to control it when you are within a certain range. On the other hand, with Wi-Fi-connected or hub bulbs, you can have access to your lighting no matter where you are through your smartphone.

Finally, you’ll also want to consider platforms. These days, most—but not all–smart bulbs connect to the major voice assistant platforms: Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit. If you have one of these ecosystems already established in your home, you’ll want to make sure the bulbs you choose mesh well with it.

You should also be aware that smart bulbs can give you a great degree of control over your room’s ambiance. If you want the ability to turn lamps on and off either when you want or according to a certain schedule, you could consider purchasing a smart plug.

RELATED: What Is a Smart Plug?

Best Smart Bulb Overall: Philips Hue

One of the first entrants to the smart bulb arena, Philips has always led in the space with a wide range of lighting products that are reliable, easy to set up, bright, and vivid. So it’s no surprise that our pick for the top smart light bulb is the Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance.

Hue bulbs used to require a special Hue hub, but Philips is now building their bulbs with Bluetooth accessibility, so you can control and link up to 10 bulbs without needing the hub via a smartphone app. The bulbs also integrate with Google and Alexa for voice control, and adding them to a hub lets you link up to 50 lights and get even deeper control of your home’s lighting.

RELATED: How to Add Third Party Smart Bulbs to Your Philips Hue System

Adding the Philips hub lets you group your lights by rooms or zones, which is a handy feature as you get deeper into a smart lighting ecosystem. It also allows you to sync your lights to movies, gaming, or music, and it provides the ability to simulate your presence when you are away by turning lights on and off across your home. While the hub is an additional cost, you can often buy it in a package with bulbs that pretty much zeros out the expense.

Speaking of cost, Philips Hue bulbs are one of the most expensive on the market, but for creating an entire smart lighting system, there is no better option. That being said, if you just want to dabble with smart lighting—rather than bathing your home in it—our budget pick might suit you better.

Best Budget Smart Bulb: Wyze Bulb

While you might be able to save a few more dollars on an even cheaper smart bulb, the Wyze Bulb wins our pick as the best budget bulb because it comes from a reliable brand with a history of making quality, affordable smart products. A single white bulb costs just $12, and a color-changing bulb will run you just under $16.

For that bargain price, you can control the colors, temperatures, and brightness of your lights using a smartphone app, and you can assign different lights into different groups. You can also choose to set your lights on “Vacation Mode,” which will cause them to turn on and off using a variable schedule that mimics someone’s presence in your home when you are away.

Additionally, Wyze will be releasing a door sensor called “Sense” that will make your lights come on or go off when a door is opened or closed, plus all the bulbs integrate with Alexa and Google for voice control. Because Wyze is moving into the smart home security market, starting with a few of its smart bulbs is a great way to begin to assemble the gear you’d need to make your entire home smarter and safer.

Best Outdoor Smart Bulb: Ring Wired Floodlight

Ring, an Amazon-owned company, might be most famous for its video doorbell, but the company also offers a dizzying array of smart outdoor lighting solutions. Our top pick from the company is its wired outdoor motion-sensing floodlight. It’s sturdy, bright, and relatively affordable.

Although the Wired Floodlight will cost a bit more to install than the solar versions, the latter has issues with running out of power and not being as programmable as the wired models. It’s better to pay a little extra for the reliability.

All Ring products require a hub or bridge, which is best purchased along with the bulbs as a starter kit that saves you some cash. Being an Amazon company, the lights only integrate with Amazon Alexa, so if you have a different voice assistant ecosystem in the home and voice control of your lighting is important, you’ll need to choose a different setup.

Best for Google Assistant: “C” by GE

“C” bulbs by lighting icon GE are available in three varieties: Soft white lights that can be dimmed and brightened, tunable white bulbs that let you change the temperature of the lights from cool to warm, and color-changing bulbs that provide the benefits of both along with millions of color options.

The C by GE bulbs also come in two styles of connectivity. You can choose from standard Smart Bulbs, which connect via Bluetooth and therefore don’t need a hub, or Direct Connect Smart Bulbs, which are Wi-Fi-based and can use Google Assistant or Nest devices as a hub.

With either type of bulb, you can set your lighting to a schedule, and lighting scenes can be chosen from a roster of pre-set picks or saved from user-generated mixes. Accessing the bulbs outside the home requires the Google hub, which will allow voice control of either the Bluetooth- or Wi-Fi-enabled bulbs.

Alexa-enabled devices can also be used as a hub, but only for the Wi-Fi version of the bulbs. If you use an Alexa hub, there’s another option that’s better for you.

Tip: “C” by GE bulbs are now being rebranded as “Cync” by GE. At the time of writing, those bulbs are still hard to find, so we have decided to feature the more widely available “C” bulbs as our choice in this category. We’ll update this information as needed.

Best For Amazon Alexa: Sengled Smart Bulb

Sengled has Bluetooth bulbs that form their own mesh network using an Amazon Echo device as the hub. This network links all of the bulbs together, causing them to serve as repeaters so that even the bulb that’s farthest away from your Echo can still be controlled via voice. If you don’t have Amazon Alexa or an Echo set up yet, you can also purchase a Sengled hub that allows for full functionality.

What’s more, Singled makes a dizzying array of smart bulbs for any function you may need. This includes bulbs with built-in speakers, those that will work in a blackout thanks to a battery backup, and ones that have built-in timers—just to name a few.

On top of that, Sengled bulbs are extremely affordable, as it’s possible to find an impressive range of high-quality smart bulbs for under $10, even when purchasing them individually. Sengled makes it easy to deck out your home in smart bulbs!

Best For Apple HomeKit: Sylvania Smart +

This smart bulb from Sylvania is one of the few that is specifically made for integration with Apple HomeKit. Using Bluetooth, it’s possible to easily set up and control these bulbs right from your iPhone while you are at home. Then, when you want to expand access to your lighting from outside the home, all you need to do is use your iPad, AppleTV, or HomePod as a hub and you’ll be good to go.

Full color, soft white, and Edison bulbs (which are vintage-style bulbs with visible filaments) are available, and all are changeable using the Sylvania Smart Home App. You can do the usual grouping and scheduling of your bulbs, and you can also use bulbs as visual alarms, causing them to flash to remind you when it’s time to do a particular activity without having to use an obtrusive audio alert.

Gadgets and gear in the Apple ecosystem are not usually the most affordable, so we also like the reasonable price of the Sylvania smart bulbs which come in under $20 for white bulbs. It’s a nice financial relief as you upgrade the rest of your HomeKit smart home.

Best Color Smart Bulb: Lifx Mini

Many smart bulbs say they have millions of colors, but Lifx goes one step farther with billions of colors. It’s a pretty hard claim to verify, but the fact is that these bulbs do indeed have a brilliant range of colors that fill your room with sharp, vivid light. Our top pick of their range for this category is the 1100 lumen bulb—which means it can get impressively bright—but you can save yourself some money and still enjoy vivid, colorful light by choosing the company’s 800-lumen bulb instead.

Lifx bulbs deliver all you’d expect from smart bulbs, including the ability to tune, schedule, group, use different presets to set the mood, plus they can be controlled with Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. No hub needed!

Lifx also offers smart bulbs that will beam out invisible infrared light to provide any smart cameras in the room the ability to pick up video clips more clearly, so stepping into the Lifx ecosystem can be a wise move if you’re filming a lot of video content. Just make sure that the smart light can fit in your lampshade, as the wider bulb may not fit in slimmer lamps.

Best Wi-Fi Smart Bulb: Wiz

Wiz bulbs are designed from the ground up to be smart, stand-alone Wi-Fi powerhouses. Each bulb contains 2MB of flash memory along with its own chip that connects to the cloud not only to save user settings, but also to check for software and firmware releases so that the bulbs are constantly kept up-to-date. Beyond that, Wiz leverages Wi-Fi technology to allow users to set different permissions.

For example, you can pre-program different lighting settings and schedules using the Wiz app. Then, you can allow certain members of your family to control the lights while they are at home without allowing them permission to alter settings permanently. You can even grant access to temporary guests that expire after a certain period of time—which makes the system ideal for people with short-term rental properties like AirBnBs.

The Wiz bulbs are simply the most tech-packed lights on this list. The bulbs can be controlled with in-home smart speakers, but taking things a step further, Wiz enables voice control via Google Assistant on Android and Siri Shortcuts on Apple phones. Finally, IFTTT (If This Then That) integration enables a wide range of additional functionality.

Best Bluetooth Smart Bulb: Govee Smart Bulb

Govee is one of the major players on the smart bulb scene, and it has a reputation for putting out affordable, reliable, and high-quality smart gadgets. The company’s smart bulbs are no exception.

Thanks to the Govee Home app, these Bluetooth-enabled bulbs can be set up in a flash, and you can link up to six of them into individual groups. They also have built-in microphones that let the colors flash to the beat of your music have sunrise/sunset options that make the bulbs dim and brighten with the pattern of the sun.

One interesting feature of the Govee bulbs is that, using the app, you can pick any color from any photo on your phone and the bulb will beam out matching light. Plus, because these bulbs all work over Bluetooth, there is no hub needed.

Combine these features with a price point under $15, and it becomes clear why we chose these as our best Bluetooth pick. These bulbs also make a stronger runner-up in our Best Budget category as well.