With reliable bulbs, comprehensive feature sets, and compatibility with virtually every smart home system, Philips Hue has established itself as the go-to choice among high-end smart lighting brands. More than just a standard smart light bulb, Philips Hue offers bulbs in every size, shape, and style you can imagine. However, while they're easy to use and can do great things on their own, Philips Hue bulbs require a separate Hue Bridge to use more advanced features like scenes and away-from-home control.
The Hue Bridge is also certified with the Matter initiative, allowing you to connect whatever smart bulbs you want as long as you have the Hue Bridge. But, of course, so many Hue lighting choices can overload buyers, so we've rounded up the best Philips Hue smart lights and bulbs for your home.
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Philips Hue Starter Kit
Best overallThe Philips Hue Starter Kit is the way to go if you're ready to invest in the Hue ecosystem. It includes a Hue Bridge and four light bulbs to get multiple rooms up and running with the system. The Bridge may not seem like a necessary inclusion, but it's needed to unlock most of the Philips Hue features. With the Bridge, you can group lights by room, use away-from-home controls, schedule automation, and sync lights to movies, music, and more.
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Philips Hue Gradient Lightstrip
Premium pickWhen it comes to your smart home, why stop at bulbs? Illuminating your smart home isn't limited to lamps and fixtures, as Philips Hue provides a wide range of lightstrips that can add fun, cool energy to your smart home. Whether you've got it behind your TV to spice up movie night or use it to create an accent wall for a fun party, the Philips Hue Gradient Lightstrip is a stellar option for any smart home.
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Philips Hue Go Portable Lamp
Best valueWhat sets the Philips Hue Go Portable Lamp apart from the rest is the rechargeable battery and the ability for the lamp to last an incredible 18 hours of run time. You also don't need a Hue Bridge to access its full set of features. Completely portable and perfect for camping, reading, or just simply having some extra light around that can be moved, the Philips Hue Go Portable Lamp is the best value among Hue lighting.
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Philips Hue Gradient Signe Table Lamp
Space-saving elegant lightingAt just under 5 feet tall, the Hue Gradient Signe Table Lamp can make a huge difference in the ambiance of a room. It often works best in a corner, where it can distribute its light along the adjacent walls. But with careful placement, it can make an entire room perfect for entertaining guests or enjoying a cozy, quiet night with the family. You can even sync it with music and movies to great effect.
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Philips Hue Go Portable Table Lamp
What appears to be an average everyday wired lamp is actually Philips's unique take on their own smart tabletop lamp. The Philips Hue Go Portable Table Lamp is the most convenient smart lamp you can buy; simply lift the body off the charging base to take it to any room within your home. While it's not an overly bright device, it is extremely convenient and allows programmable customization.
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Philips Hue Lily Base Kit
Most outdoor lights are boring, white-only, and half of them aren't even smart lights. The Philips Hue Lily Base Kit changes everything, giving you colorful, smart lighting outside your home. This three-pack of color-capable smart spotlights can add beautiful accents to highlight your home's exterior and ensure your yard is never dimly lit again. These lights also have an IP44 rating, making them perfectly reliable for any unexpected weather.
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Philips Hue White and Color A19/E26 Bulb
Smart lights are great, but they don't even begin to match up to the brightness of a regular bulb, especially when adding color to the mix. Luckily, Philips Hue offers multiple brightnesses of its class of A19 E26 "White and Color Ambiance" smart bulbs. While the 60W bulbs produce 800 lumens that work fine for small rooms, you can add the 75W bulb with 1,100 lumens — or the 100W bulb with 1,600 lumens — to further brighten your space.
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Philips Hue A19 Smart Edison Vintage LED Bulb
When you think of light bulbs, a pretty straightforward image likely displays in your head, but Philips turns that idea into something completely unique and classy. The Smart Edison Vintage LED Bulb is the perfect addition to any classic decor within your home. The soft warm-to-cool lighting and filament bulb provide that chill, coffee shop vibe perfect for an office or reading nook. On top of its unique design, this bulb can also work without the Hue Bridge.
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Philips Hue Play Bar
Doing away with traditional light bulbs, Philips proves there's more than one way to light your home. The Philips Hue Play Bar connects to the Hue Bridge to provide programmable mood lighting and a handful of customizable settings. You can also connect the Play Bar to the HDMI Sync Box to create dynamic lighting responsive to your TV or music. And with everything included to get set up, you're ready for the Hue Play Bar lighting experience.
Lighting up your space
If you're just starting your smart lighting journey and Hue is your ecosystem, the Philips Hue Starter Kit provides the hardware and the value to take you from a dumb house to a smart home in a single purchase. However, if your smart home is already set up, or if you want to try one bulb for starters, the A19 E26 White and Color Bulb or the A19 Edison Vintage LED Bulb offer more than a standard bulb while improving your setup.
The Gradient Lightstrip is a sizable investment, especially once you try to rig it under cabinets or across multiple walls and need to buy extensions — but it's hard to deny the class it brings to a room. Need a less costly alternative? Try the Hue Play Bar two-pack; it doesn't support gradients but produces plenty of brightness.
We also tracked down a couple of excellent standalone Hue smart lamps to add dynamic, colored lighting to any room without permanent installation. The latest version of Hue Go Portable offers convenient battery power, while the Signe is one of the nicest floor lamps on the market. If you're in the market for something a little more traditional yet still massively convenient, check out the Hue Go Portable Table Lamp. Its unassuming design hides a convenient, detachable charging base, making it perfect for temporarily turning any room up a notch.
Now, it's not always just the inside of your home that may require additional lighting, so we've also included an outdoor lighting option to keep you from being left out in the dark. Philips makes outdoor lights in three colors, two of which are basically just small pathway lights. However, the Lily Base Kit is meant to shine bold and colorful light across a wide selection of your home's exterior.
Making the most of Philips Hue smart lighting
It's worth noting, again, that most Philips Hue bulbs work with or without a Hue Bridge, as they will turn on and emit the specified color. However, only ten bulbs can be set up with Bluetooth before you need a Bridge. More importantly, you'll miss out on some neat and smart features without a connected Hue Bridge. For instance, setting up the hub gives you access to dimming, automation, and scene selection.
The Hue Bridge unlocks some of the features that make a smart home, well, smart. So, having some of the best smart lights for your smart home is worth the investment. Whether you do or don't spring for advanced components like the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box (which lets you match your lighting to your TV or music), Philips Hue lighting is easy to use and easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.