The best budget smart bulbs

A budget smart bulb does the main job as well as an expensive one: it turns on and off from a phone, dims, changes color and follows a schedule. The savings come out of four places, and knowing which ones you care about is the whole decision.

• Published specifications. Two of the four bulbs here print a lumen figure. The others print nothing - not lumens, not CRI. That is normal at this price and it is still a real cost, because you cannot plan a room on a bulb that will not say how much light it makes.
• The bottom of the dimming range. Premium bulbs publish a floor - Hue says 0.2%. Budget bulbs generally do not publish one, and they stop noticeably higher. In a hallway you will never notice; beside a bed you will.
• Local control. These are Wi-Fi bulbs. No router, no schedules. Systems with their own radio and a hub keep running.
• The long tail. App accounts, firmware updates and whether the company still supports the bulb in five years. Matter support is the practical hedge against that, which is why one pick here is chosen for it.

1. A published lumen figure. It is the one number that lets you size a room. Prefer a bulb that prints it.
2. Hub-free. At this price a bridge would double the cost of the room.
3. Matter, if the platform matters. Especially for Apple Home, and for not being stranded in one app.
4. The right shape. A cheap A19 in a recessed can wastes half its light on the inside of the fitting. Cans want a BR30 - see A19 vs BR30.

Wyze Bulb Color - the pick. 1,100 published lumens with color and tunable white, at the lowest price per socket here. It is the only bulb at this price that prints the number a 75W-equivalent bulb should print, which is why it is the one to fill a house with.
Cons: no published CRI; Wi-Fi only; the app account is compulsory and Wyze has changed its subscription terms more than once.

WiZ Connected Color A19 - the safest cheap bulb. Hub-free color from Signify, the company behind Hue, so the app and firmware are maintained by a lighting company rather than a startup.
Cons: publishes neither lumens nor CRI; Wi-Fi only.

Sengled Matter A19 - for Apple Home and the long view. Matter-first, so it works across Apple Home, Alexa and Google without a vendor app holding the keys. The hedge against a cheap bulb being abandoned by its own app.
Cons: tunable white only - no color; no published lumen or CRI figure.

Wyze Bulb Color BR30 - for recessed cans. 950 published lumens in the flood shape a can was built for. Filling four or six cans is where smart bulbs get expensive fastest, and this is the cheapest way through it that still publishes an output figure.
Cons: no published CRI; 950 lm is below a bright BR30; several cans on one wall switch still all die when someone flips it.

The bedroom. The dimming floor is the specification budget bulbs do not publish and the one you feel every night. If one room gets the expensive bulb, make it this one.

Anywhere you read or cook. Color bulbs render color worse in white mode than plain white bulbs, and none of these publish CRI. Put a high-CRI plain bulb over a counter or a reading chair and keep the smart bulbs for the rest - best high-CRI LED bulbs covers those.

Enclosed fixtures. Smart bulbs run hotter than plain LEDs and most are not rated for sealed fittings. Check before you fit one to a flush mount - enclosed-fixture bulbs explains why it shortens their life.