The best smart bulbs

Smart bulb reviews usually rank on features - scene libraries, music sync, effects. Those are the parts most likely to be gone or changed in three years, because they live in an app the manufacturer controls.

We rank on the parts that do not change: how much light comes out, how accurately it renders color, and whether the bulb speaks a standard that will outlive its vendor's app.

The gap in that table is CRI. Most smart bulb makers do not publish it at all, which is itself informative - and it is why the LIFX A19, at 1,100 lumens and a published CRI 90+, sits at the top here. It is the only bulb in this group bright enough and honest enough to be a small room's main light rather than an accent.

"Which one bulb should I buy?" The brightest one that publishes real figures. If a smart bulb is replacing the main light in a room, output and color rendering are what you notice daily, and paying two to three times more for them is defensible.

"How do I make the whole apartment smart?" Buy the cheapest Matter bulb you can get in multipacks. At five to ten bulbs, price per bulb dominates and the difference between them matters far less than actually covering the rooms. A WiZ Connected A19 or a Wyze Bulb Color makes that realistic; a whole apartment of premium bulbs generally does not.

The one thing not to do is buy premium bulbs for two rooms and leave the rest unlit-by-app, because a half-covered home is more annoying than either extreme - you never learn which switches you can trust.

A smart bulb is a ten-year piece of hardware attached to a two-year piece of software. Vendors discontinue apps, change terms, and occasionally exit the category entirely, and a proprietary Wi-Fi bulb whose app is gone becomes an ordinary bulb controlled by the wall switch.

Matter is the hedge. A Matter-native bulb answers to Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa and SmartThings on equal terms, so it survives you changing phone ecosystem and it survives its own manufacturer losing interest. Where the price difference is small, take it - what Matter is and is not is set out in Matter smart bulbs explained.

And the flaw every smart bulb shares, regardless of brand: it needs constant power to stay reachable, so anyone using the wall switch takes it offline. That is not a product defect you can buy your way out of - it is inherent to putting the intelligence in the bulb, and it is why a smart plug is sometimes the better answer.