Are smart bulbs really all you’ll ever want?īut before you conclude that Wi-Fi smart bulbs are the way to go, ask yourself if you think you’ll ever want to go farther in the pursuit of a smart home. And if you have a good mesh router, that should be anywhere in your home. A Wi-Fi bulb, in contrast, will be limited only by the range of your router. The same goes for an Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speaker. If you’re not using the Bridge, the Philips Hue bulbs’ reliance on the relatively short range of Bluetooth means you and your smartphone need to be in the same room as the bulb you wish to control. Wi-Fi bulbs like the TP-Link KL130 (and the LIFX smart lighting lineup) offer another benefit, too. If you don’t care about tuning the bulbs’ color temperature, dimmable Philips Hue White bulbs cost $14.99 each-which is about $5 less than what TP-Link expects to fetch for its dimmable white bulbs. On the other hand, you can buy a full-color smart bulb like the TP-Link Kasa Smart Wi-Fi bulb (model KL130) for about the same price ( $29.99 for the A19 style) as Philips expects to fetch for its tunable-white-only bulbs (you can change the color temperature of Hue White Ambiance bulbs from warm white to cool white, but you don’t get the colors of the rainbow).

On the one hand, that’s great for dabblers because it will save them at least $50 ( MSRP for the Bridge is $59.99, but it’s often on sale, and it costs even less when it’s purchased in a bundle with the bulbs).

Signify is currently shipping its next-generation Philips Hue bulbs in BR30 (shown here) and A19 form factors, but the entire line will eventually support Bluetooth in addition to Zigbee. That change means you can control these new bulbs with your smart device (or smart speaker) without needing to also buy the Philips Hue Zigbee-to-Wi-Fi bridge. The quality of light these new Hue bulbs produce is every bit as good as the bulbs that came before, and they have one new feature the others didn’t: support for Bluetooth in addition to the more robust mesh network protocol Zigbee.

Wifi vs bluetooth bulbs