LIFX - 1100-Lumen, 11W Dimmable BR30 LED Light Bulb, 75W Equivalent - Multicolor

The app is so much easier than HUE. Colors are better and brighter. However, not as soft as the HUE's colors. What I like about the LIFX is that on the app you can pick a pure color like Blue or Purple and tone it down on the app by adding a little white to the color. The bulbs from LIFX are much brighter than HUE's. And, I have a few light strips which are great and a couple of rooms of the BR30 bulbs in my existing Hi Hat fixtures. The only thing is that unless everyone in your house has the app, it's a pain to control the lights as they have no way to turn them on or off. There is a switch from Logictech that is a 3 way press switch which also works with IFTTT technology. You can easily wirelessly program this click switch (which is very small and thin) to turn the lights on and off. Or, to control a number of other wireless things in your house. For now, the other members in my family can use Echo (Alexa) and speak to turn the lights on or off. The BR30 sized bulbs also state on the package they can be used indoors or outdoor locations (with the HUE you can't do that). Also, as mentioned in many reviews, no hub needed to buy with LIFX system. Installation took all of 3 minutes to screw in the bulbs and download the app. Took longer for me to decide what names to give the bulbs. Grouping them is easy so in my room with four hi hats I can turn all on in a group or turn each one off or on individually. Color rendition is great. Even the shades of white are amazingly true. Soft white, daylight, Flourescent light....you name it, it covers the whole temperature spectrum. Whereas before with regular bulbs you had to choose a temperature and stick with it, you just dial up what you like with these bulbs. Love them so far. And, oh yes...one more thing. If you are going to buy a few, buy the multi packs on Best Buy's website as a pack of 4 is $196 rather than buying 4 bulbs individually at $60/each for a total of $240 (much cheaper). If you still feel you need to compare them after my review, buy one of each brand and a hub for Philips HUE and try them out for yourself. I think if LIFX had better marketing and more product on the shelves in Best Buy they would be the clear winner of which bulb sells more. However, Philips is killing LIFX on marketing and using the fancy packaging in stores. Go for the LIFX over Philips...you won't regret your decision.

Pros: Great mood lighting Make and save your own themes Dimmable (but don't use with a dimmer switch) Rich colors Some cool pre-canned effects, i.e. Flicker, Color Cycle, Spooky, etc. (these are customizable) consume very little power I like the simple app No hub needed Convenient to turn on and off all lights in the house at once. Geo fence. Lights will come on for you, or the kids, just by pulling into the driveway. Safety feature. Keep your phone by your bed. If you hear a bump in the night you can very quickly turn on any light, room full of lights or all lights. At 25% power, in color mode, they are burning less that a watt each. I like that you can turn the I.R. mode off. With I.R. on, below around 9 watts your power consumption will jump from 0.5 watts to 7.6 watts. Even when you believe the light are off - they aren't really. They are giving off I.R. light and burning 7.6 watts each. Grouping lights by room and by house. Great for entertaining. You can put up some soothing, cozy colors. They really set the atmosphere - when you have enough of them. Decorate your room, or house, with light. Best with white or off-white walls. Cons: They are heavy. I can see the horizontal arms, under the lamp shades, holding the sockets sagging under the weight. Most light sockets were designed for an incident bulb that weighs next to nothing. These Lifx bulbs replaced normal 40 watt equivalent or 4 watts LED bulbs that also weighed next to nothing. They can often loose connection, although I haven't noticed as much of that lately. I probably returned at least a dozen that would never connect or stay connected even after bulb resets. (Turn on and off 5 times) They get pretty hot for an LED bulb. The 4 watt bulbs barely got warm and that's good for your AC. For best signal the router manual says: "Place the router away from large glass surfaces." If your light bulb is enclosed in a ceiling fixture, chances are it's behind glass. But that's not why mine are only in table and floor lamps. Also not due to the builder-grade ceiling lights with weak, flimsy assembly between the socket and the light fixture. Although if I tried installing one in a ceiling fixture - that might become a reason. When you turn on a light switch, your probably doing it because you need light. My Lifx light would come on set to Red or Blue, etc. at 25% power. This does not work if you turned on the light to look for something. So you have to go find your phone and open the app, set it to White, turn up the brightness. That's not convenient. So ceiling lights are for actual light and table and floor lamps are for mood lighting. With the weird shape, they won't work with every fixture. They barely fit under some of the Tiffany shades. Some of the shades had to be raised a small amount to accommodate the squared off corners. If you have a lot. They take up a lot of spots on your router. The BR30 version doesn't not completely turn off unless you cut the power. Once your eyes adjust to the dark room, you'll see a very faint glow - even through a translucent lamp shade. It's very dim and not a big deal but it is definitely not fully off. The A19s are all in Tiffany lamps with cut glass shades - so they are behind glass, mostly. Something the router manual says to avoid. The BR30s are in floor lamps with either Alabaster style or cut glass shades. Again, behind glass. The metal arms on the table lamp sockets are metal tubular steel and built solid - yet because these arms are horizontal I can see the arms sagging under the weight. Some of the bulbs are sort of peeking out from under these shades - not so with the LED bulbs that were in these lamps. The socket on one arm actually broke under the weight. I have yet to try and fix that.

What a world we live in. I bought these without my wife knowing. At free will, you can change the color or dim the lights how ever you want. If you watch Star Wars, you can turn them blue or red. If you have a Christmas party, green and red. We installed them in our living room, so if we have a party, we can completely change the look and feel of the house. They’re expensive, but they’re LED lights that you can change the colors on... We literally live in a world where you can change the color of a lightbulb with your phone. Hilarious. And also very energy efficient! In all honesty, I recommend these to everyone I know. They’re great lights and fun for a quick change of mood. My only gripe with them, is if the internet goes out, they’re not as much fun. They also take quite a while to connect if you have more than one. Still, worth it. Wanted to include a pic of myself dancing in purple lighting, but my wife said that would be cheesy. Just buy the lights.

There are many things to like about the Lifx smart bulbs such as the price point, color reproduction, no hub required, and brightness (75 watt equivalent vs. most LEDs 60). However I had one issue I could not resolve and Lifx support took too long to respond to my issue. I waited until the last possible day to return the bulbs and as it would happen Lifx responded the very next day... The issue I had was with the IP Address these bulbs tried to commandeer from my network. I have IP addresses reserved for certain devices on my router and it is not supposed to hand out addresses to any device that doesn't match the specified MAC. Yet somehow when I would power cycle my router these bulbs would assign themselves IPs that were reserved... This caused all kinds of issues on my network and had me stumped for days. The last day or two I had the bulbs I finally figured out why I was having so many network issues and why my smart bulbs were not responding. Unfortunately the 15 day return policy at Best Buy was almost up so I returned them though I think I might have been able to get them working by rearranging my network IP reservation scheme but didn't have the chance. I've got many devices on my network and never had an issue with IP address reservations before. Oh well I spent a bit more and got the Phillis Hue setup and have been very impressed I just wish they were brighter.

LIFX has one thing going for it and that is their bulbs are significantly brighter than Philips Hue at 1100 Lumens. This is the only reason I bought these after owning some Phillips. Philips refuses to make a bulb brighter than 800 Lumens. People complain about the Phillips’s bridge, but it is the bridge that makes them so stable. LIFX at times are a little glitchy especially using HomeKit. I will sometimes tell it to turn on bulbs I have grouped together and two of them will come on and the third one either won’t or will be a different color. Lifx Connect directly to your Wi-Fi so like everything else that is Wi-Fi operated sometimes it is just going to be sluggish depending on how much traffic’s going through at that moment. This is why the bridge that Phillips has eliminates that issue. The fact that Phillips does not make a brighter bulb is the only thing that’s keeping LIFX alive in my opinion.

I used the philips hue for a little over a week and after doing some research it seemed like a lot of reviews were saying lifx was much better and boy were they right!..lifx makes a much brighter, more colorful, longer lasting, and affordable bulb. It's convienent that you do not need to purchase a bridge and the bulbs are the same price..the con to that I guess is lifx is a larger bulb but that makes no difference in the product to me. Philips hue lights were great but after using lifx you realize they are a step behind the lifx bulbs can imitate any color the philips bulbs can and more with not only more colors but what seemed to me much brighter ones to. The only thing I think philips hue has on lifx is the variety.philips has several different kind of lights the bloom, the go, even a lamp and several other lights on their website however lifx is catching up by recently releasing their strips and again are far superior compared to the philips hue light strips. Overall I would highly highly recommend lifx tho I'm still thinking about purchasing some philips hue bloom/go lights to fit in places the lifx just don't do well in because I don't have a proper size light fixture.

brighter than the a19 but I think its a little overkill and misplaced for my ceiling fan lights. ended up stepping back down to the a19 because I didn't see a need for the added lumens or price. still good bulbs just not for me. below is my review of the a19 because the br30 is very similar just brighter and I think more focused. ... "First brand of smart bulbs I purchased. very nicely packaged and everything is pretty easy to set up. really liked the fact that you didn't need a hub to connect the bulbs like the philips hue bulbs. my only complaint is that I didn't seem to find a compatible dimmer switch and the Flic button seems to have horrible reviews. I like having a button or switch next to my bed so for that reason I will be trying out the hue bulbs in combination with the dimmer switch that they provide. nice bulbs just didn't meet all my criteria."

I highly recommend this series of bulbs. No hub required. No fuss. All you do is open it, screw it into the socket of the lamp or fixture, get the app, calibrate it and boom. Done. I have two in the living room and they work flawlessly with Alexa. All we do is tell her to change the mood of the room and it adds to the immersion of a movie or adds to the mood if we're cuddling or hanging out with friends. The effects are cool. I plan on using them to make our house more "spooky" for trick or treaters at Halloween. The only con is that it's expensive. But, we put these only in our communal areas where the best quality of light is needed. We put cheaper RGB bulbs in other rooms where we don't need as bright of a light or as many colors. Spend the money where it's needed most, I say. :) The picture attached to this review is of our living room ceiling fan with two different colors on each LIFX bulb. You can see how it adds to the atmosphere. It calms the energy. Highly recommend!