Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance LED Smart Light Bulb Starter Kit, 3 A19 Smart Bulbs & 1 Hue Hub (Works with Alexa, Apple HomeKit & Google Assistant)

I bought the wrong lightbulbs.

There are other options out there that are much cheaper and do the same thing. If price isnt an issue then get these but I could not tell these lights apart from 15$ color bulbs with app pairings I had tried elsewhere.

I like the adjustability and brightness of these lights. I dont think they are a good value, even with the big discount of the sale price. The color brightness is certainly better than Feit. But Feit bulbs can be had in a two pack for half of the cost of a single Hue bulb. They dont require a hub, they have Google and Alexa integration. And while they arent as bright with the colors, they do include some interesting color cycling similar to what you would see on RGB for a PC. Hue may have that functionality somewhere, but I have yet to find it. I dont know how useful that is, its not something Im particularly interested in, but it may be to some. I may buy one more Hue product (a strip light) for my office but anywhere else I want smart bulbs Ill be looking to Feit. They stand behind their product, and the one time I had a failure, they didnt question me or make it a hassle. I had two new bulbs in a couple of days.

Ive had cheap color changing bulbs in the past and theres a few things that are different in these versus those no-hub bulbs. Firstly, they are not nearly as reliable. This is in regards to connection as well as response time. My cheapo bulbs tend to get disconnected every 1.5-2 weeks while these Philips bulbs do not disconnect EVER. 2nd, the cheapo bulbs do not get NEARLY as bright as these do, especially when I put them on white or warm white colors. The Philips bulbs are more accurate in terms of color reproduction. Hue app is great. These work with all 3 major smart home hubs/apps (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit). The downside is the price. Although, I got these when they were $99 for 3 bulbs + hub, their normal price of $149 or higher is just outrageous. The bulbs should be $75 tops but meh, what can you do. WIthout quality competitors, Philips can continue to keep the price this high. Hopefully soon, competitors will be able to replicate the quality that Philips and LIFX provide.

These bulbs are great. I should have purchased these from the beginning. The only thing that kept me away was the priced because they do cost more than I would like to spend on a product like this. However, they are clearly the best smart bulbs on the market. Pros: 1) They maintain a connection to the Home app better than any bulb I have tried. 2) The colors they produce are so much nicer than other bulbs. Right out of the box it was immediately apparent that the colors were just beautiful. They seem so much more natural than other bulbs. 3) The variety of colors is amazing and the apps ability to let you pick a color through Siri that isnt necessarily a standard color is fun as well. For example, I asked it to change the color to a pumpkin orange. It also knows colors that you typically only see in a Crayon box, like cerulean. 4) The use of a bridge combined with Zigbee. At first I thought I would prefer bulbs that connected directly to my WiFi network as opposed to using a bridge. However, I have come to realize that having them on their own frequency keeps them from causing congestion on my WiFi network. Now I only have the bridge and the bulbs talk to the bridge and each other. 5) The bridge just stays connected. Cons: 1) At first, when I was connecting it to my Home and syncing over the rooms, there was a dance I had to play as I was adding a room at the same time. It took a few tries to get everything synchronized but now that it is, Ive had zero problems. 2) It would be great if they made a brighter version. That isnt really a con against these because they are as bright as they are advertised to be, but since I cant get a brighter version, I need to list that here.

One of the bulbs began to randomly turn off.

Works exactly as advertised/expected, and was incredibly easy to setup. Had the hub, 3 rooms and 9 bulbs up and running in under 15 minutes. Wish I had jumped on the Hue bandwagon sooner. Seamless integration into our Apple/Alexa ecosystem. Looking forward to playing with all of the features to setup more automation of our lighting. Totally worth buying the hub/bulb kit if you plan to build towards a whole-home Hue environment.

Since these are based on Zigbee, these lights work wonderfully, the colors look as good as any other current RGB bulbs and the white brightness is on par with other 800 lumen lights. If you do not intend to use the included hub (if you already have a hub or are using an Echo Plus or 2nd gen Show with built in hub) then you must first deregister the bulbs in the box with the hub in the box ( an easy 2 step process) once this is done the bulbs can be detected by any Zigbee enabled hub (the will not be detectable until you deregister them)

Super easy to set up using the philips hue app and seamlessly integrated with Alexa and Siri (Apple Home Kit). I did notice that Alexa sometimes didn’t work with voice commands. This seemed very finicky as it would happen from time to time but not on consistent basis. I would say the exact same voice prompt and Alexa sometimes would work or not. I never did figure out why this was. Surprisingly I found using Siri was the easiest since I have my Apple Watch on most of the time and I only have a single Echo Dot 3rd generation in my living room, so it wouldn’t pick up my voice commands if I was in a different room. I did not have the volume turned all the way up on my Echo Dot so that might account for this. I noticed Alexa would respond immediately to my voice commands while Siri most times took a few seconds but nonetheless still eventually did what I wanted; just had a little lag time. One annoying issue I encountered was that Apple HomeKit added one of my zones twice, and when I synced Apple HomeKit to my Hue Hub via Philips Hue App, it showed my outside lights zone twice. It didn’t affect my lights outside; they worked just fine, it just always showed I had a double zone outside. There’s probably a way to fix this but I never bothered with it since the lights still worked fine and it didn’t affect any of my schedules I set for the lights to turn off and on. This is a great starter kit for anyone wanting to take a dive into making their home smarter. Great value for the money! I also like that each of the bulbs communicate with each other via zigbee; rather than each bulb trying to connect to the hub or your router. That gives you a lot more freedom to add bulbs throughout your house or outside without worrying whether the WiFi signal will reach or not. I plan to purchase additional Philips LED Smart light bulbs to add to my other rooms and would highly recommend! FYI, the bulbs that come in this kit are the soft white not the ambiance white (different shades of white).

These bulbs retail individually for $45-50. I bought this three pack for $100, dropping the price of each to $33.