5 smart bulbs compatible with Google Home and Alexa

Buying a few smart bulbs is the necessary first step if you want to create your own smart home ecosystem. The intelligent lighting has become an excellent option to manage your house as well as create interesting experiences. In the market we can find a multitude of alternatives available in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colors and styles.

Best smart bulb: Philips Hue

Philips Hue

Philips Hue is the father of smart lighting . Although the best option is still to get a Philips Hue bridge, which is included with the starter kits, you can choose to buy Bluetooth versions, which are cheaper and communicate directly with your smartphone without the need for a bridge. This means that you lose control of the bulbs when you are not at home, but once inside your home, you can still enjoy control of Alexa and Google Assistant.

The light quality of the Hue bulbs is excellent, offering color temperatures between 2200K and 6500K , as well as more than 16 million colors available thanks to their RGB technology. It will be difficult for you to find a setting that is not suitable.

Hue's simplicity working in tandem with platforms like Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, and Amazon Alexa , is one of the reasons it's the starting point for many users' smart home settings.

Runner-up: Lifx

bonbilla Lifx

Lifx is a platform that started as a Kickstarter funded project, now it has become a worthy rival for Philips Hue bulbs, thanks to features such as 16 million colors, 1,000 shades of white, and a maximum brightness of 1,100 lumens . The best part is that Lifx bulbs don't need a jumper to work.

All you need to do if you want to enjoy all the benefits of Lifx into your life, is to mount one of these great bulbs in a socket and everything is ready. Lifx bulbs come with built- in Wi-Fi , allowing them to easily communicate with your mobile app or a smart speaker.

Lifx offers us a range of bulbs that is constantly growing, so you will always have an option that suits your needs. Its light quality is excellent, with a temperature range of 2500 to 9000K for white light, along with that nuance of 16 million colors that RGB technology provides. The new range of Lifx Mini bulbs is much more like traditional bulbs, although in return you will have to settle for a fixed white light of 2700K.

Lifx even manages to outperform Hue thanks to its built-in features for creating presets and effects . While Hue relies on a third-party app ecosystem to do just about anything, Lifx offers clean functionality out front and the center of it all is your app.

The integration of Alexa and Google Assistant is excellent, although with HomeKit it is a bit more complicated if you bought your Lifx bulbs before HomeKit compatibility was activated. In this case you will need to go through a painful reboot option to virtually get the HomeKit code.

Best budget option: Sengled Element

Sengled Element

Sengled has been in the smart light industry for quite some time, allowing it to offer a wider range of options characterized by affordable prices. Paying approximately 25 euros for two bulbs in their "soft white" or "daylight" flavors is a very good way to start with this.

If you have an Amazon Echo Plus speaker, a Samsung SmartThings hub, or a Wink hub, you can use the bulbs without using a bridge. Otherwise, you will need to purchase a Sengled concentrator , which you can get with a couple of bulbs thanks to the starter kit, which can be yours for about 40 euros.

Sengled also currently offers support for voice assistants Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. In the case of Alexa, you can use the bulbs by connecting your Eco Plus speaker directly to them, but in the case of the Google assistant you will have to do it through a center, be it the Wink, the Samsung SmartThings or the Sengled itself.

These lights offer a maximum brightness of 800 lumens , along with a color temperature of 2,700K. Thus these lights are more or less what you might expect from a standard household light bulb in terms of lighting. If you get the Sengled control center, there is an application available that you can use with your mobile to manage up to 64 bulbs, more than enough to illuminate your entire home.

Best budget RGB bulb: Lemonmax

Lemonmax

Lemonmax is characterized by being a manufacturer of appliances focused on the home with prices that are usually incredibly affordable, while maintaining a very good quality. That is confirmed by its smart bulb priced at just € 14, which is capable of doing many of the things that other much more expensive bulbs do . You also don't need a control center to use it, so it will be incredibly inexpensive to get started with smart lighting.

The Lemonmax smart bulb is capable of offering a maximum brightness of 900 lumens , which you can regulate, as well as its color temperature that is available between 2700k and 6500k. In our opinion, it is the white light bulb with the best value for money that you can find for sale right now.

Best option in customization: Nanloeaf

Nanloeaf

Nanoleaf offers us an advanced lighting system characterized by being modular , which allows adding new panels to obtain an interesting and unique lighting configuration. There are currently two versions available, the triangular panel and the new square model.

After you've placed them in the desired pattern, you can use the maker app to customize, change colors, and create movement patterns individually on each panel.

With their starter kits you will get nine panels and a base station to control them, of course you can buy more panels to expand the configuration. The panels weigh next to nothing, so there is no need for screws.