Customer Ratings & Reviews

These lights are the perfect amount for my tree and the customization is very cool. A bit on the pricey side

So, i made a best buy account JUST so i could sing the praises of these lights. I have a Galaxy Note 8 from 2017 so you know what i set them up with. All i did was follow the instructions in the little booklet and everything went perfect the first attempt. They connected and mapped and everything with zero issues. The app has been updated a few times this week so maybe it solved people's complaints, or maybe people just don't understand home networks as much as they think they do. I ran into ONE hurdle when my phone wasn't connected to the same wifi network during setup but the App quickly told me so i could switch networks and complete setup. The one thing i wish i had a little guidance one was the method of actually putting these things onto the tree. They come as 2 separate strings connected in the middle with the control and power cable stemming from that junction. In the end i just went for it and did 2 swirls which started from the bottom and ended at the top. Took me maybe 5 minutes. I hid the thin wire in the core of the tree and you can't even tell now. I had zero issues and am 100% happy with this product and that's so rare that i had to make an account to let you know. These were purchased at a store and not shipped anywhere. My tree is about 7 feet tall and not too wide. The 250 string was perfect for that. Thank you for your time.

Beautiful lights! I have the 400 RGB lights on a 7.5ft balsam hill cathedral tree (it's a slim one). The amount of lights is great for this tree, could've even gone with the 600 light strand for extra wow. The lights are customizable (right now i have a purple/orange combo with a real slow twinkle for halloween. You can set a timer, adjust the brightness, do all the things in the app. It was little tricky to get it set up with wifi, you have to make sure everything is updated ( it's a little slow to prompt this in the setup. Once that part was done, easy peasy. A little spendy, but I want what I want. Plus, if i decide to choose different colors and patterns I can do that anytime my heart desires.

These lights are very cool and work as well as advertised. I have them across the front of my house and down my porch columns. The effects are very customizable and look fantastic. Might just leave them up year-round. I strongly suggest you perform the advanced mapping at dusk or dawn when there is enough light for the camera to see, but just dark enough for the LEDs to be visible but not glaring. I had several poor mapping attempts at night, but once I remapped at dawn, it was incredibly accurate. If you open the Measure app on your iPhone and your AR system can’t see we’ll enough to measure distances, then it’s too dark for mapping. I wish the Twinkly app would just tell you when the conditions aren’t good enough. Regarding the app, it works fine but could be better. There were some bugs like the camera image was blank during mapping. I just exited and reopened the mapping tool until it shows up. I also can’t believe there’s no sunrise/sunset option on the timer…that’s very basic. However, the app’s shortcomings don’t detract too much from the overall experience.

TLDR Summary: I bought two sets of 400 LED RGB-W Gen II Twinkly Strings & the Twinkly Music Dongle – for >$400 this is a massive disappointment of vastly too many setup problems, buggy software, design failure with features that simply aren’t designed to work the way you would want or expect. The hardware could work, if they can fix the software, but as of December 2020 this is a waste of money and a huge frustration, save yourself the hassle. I’ve wasted more than two months on this. String Length: The 400 LED RGB-W Gen II strings aren’t the 105ft long that you might expect, given the product information on Twinkly’s website, but rather two 52.5ft long strings from the controller. This may affect your install. I don't know about the 250 light sets, but you can see the two bundles in the picture, so I'm sure it's the same thing. Outdoor usage: Twinkly’s website shows many examples of lights on trees and outside. But then the manual says it’s not waterproof, so I reached out to Twinkly to find out; apparently it’s IP44 certified (rain-proof), but not IP67 or IP68 which are submergible. For outside in the rain so long as it’s not lying in a pool of water it should thus be OK. I guess I’ll see how long they last. Light Mapping Challenges: I spent hours installing the lights, climbing on a ladder and zip-tying the lights to the ceiling of my gazebo. The next step was the 3D mapping to teach the Twinkly application where the lights are so that it can programmatically display patterns on the lights. You have to hold your phone still for 10-15 seconds while it takes a long exposure of the lights; you need to repeat this several times so that it sees each light at least three times from different orientations. However, if your layout is too large and you can’t get far enough away for your camera phone to see the whole layout, which I couldn’t even when lying on my back on the floor of the gazebo, then you have to take many pictures to combine them all together. I took 30-35 pictures the first time I tried to get all the lights to go green (the setup color indicating that the light has been seen from several directions). Then it spends several minutes rendering the 3D model in the cloud. At this final stage you wait and hope it’ll work. Unfortunately the rendered pattern is often useless and doesn’t look anything like the nearly 2D flat matrix of lights on the ceiling of my gazebo. After several attempts I did get a model that I could at least recognize was the lights on my gazebo ceiling. But then I realized my mistake of using the camera phone in landscape orientation, but the app runs in portrait orientation, and there’s no rotation function on the mapping, so the whole pattern was annoyingly rotated 90 degrees on the screen. Incredibly the Twinkly app lacks this basic functionality to rotate the rendered model! I reached out to Twinkly to ask about the lack of rotation, and a lack of warping as I needed to stretch the pattern to make it more accurate. I was told these features were supported in iOS, so I started again, now using an iPad. Alas, the camera on the iPad was worse than my Samsung S8 phone, and the results were entirely hopeless, I also never actually saw any additional features in iOS either – so much for rotation & warping. Finally I did achieve a good mapping by using a Samsung S20 phone which has an ultra-wide angle lens built in, so it could see more of the lights in one shot, it still took several shots, but did a vastly better job of mapping, and by holding the phone in portrait the whole time it didn’t have a rotation problem with the final result. If you can see your whole set of lights with the camera of your phone in one shot you’ll likely be fine, otherwise, prepare for several attempts to get it right. Google Assistant Sync e.g. “Hey Google” control: The Twinkly app is frankly pretty basic and incomplete and shouldn’t be considered much more than a setup tool, it’s not really ideal for normal usage. For that, Twinkly have integrated their lights as a Google and Alexa “Skill” that becomes integrated into Google Assistant. If you’ve named your lights appropriately you can then refer to them in “Hey Google” commands. There’s not a lot of guidance as to this, so originally I called my group of 2x400 lights “Pair800” but later realized it would be much better calling them “Gazebo” so renamed them as such. Once you’ve then synced the Twinkly App with your Google Home app, you can use the Google Voice Assistant to verbalized commands such as “Turn Gazebo On” “Change Gazebo to Teal” “Change Gazebo Brightness to 20%” once you have it setup, and if you chose a sensible name for your lights, this works really well. Nice Surprise Benefit – if don’t use your primary Google account for your Twinkly setup: Given all the hassle related to my 3D mapping challenges I was very pleased to find that if you’ve created your Twinkly Account using an email other than your primary Google account (I used a different email address), then you can install the Twinkly app on multiple devices, owned by different users, and using your Twinkly account as the ID each of the different apps and users can control the lights from their phones too. This way I was able to set up the control from my daughter’s android phone, her iPad, and my phone too. I was lucky to have created the account using something other than my Google account for the Twinkly account, otherwise I’m not sure I would have had this option. This also renders the benefit that whatever device is able to capture the best 3D model automatically shares the light mapping model with all other devices connected to the same account. The downside is that there’s only space for one 3D mapping model, so anyone could accidentally screw things up for all users of the account by starting the mapping again and there’s no mapping “lock”. Also, if you have a “good” but not “great” mapping, you have to decide whether to try again, knowing that you’re throwing away the “good” mapping before you can see whether you can improve it. Music Sync – the biggest disappointment and deception of all: This is where I think Twinkly really fails and thoroughly lets you down. Inside the Gallery of the Twinkly app there are a set of effects, including many that you can download for free. Some of them have a music sync option, so that you can preview them with your smartphone, using your phone’s mic to sync the audio it hears to the movement of the lighting effect. This is advertised all over Twinkly’s website. What they don’t tell you is that you need to keep the smartphone active for this to work, so if you switch to a different app, or if you get a text popup, or if your screen times out and goes to sleep the audio sync just stops working. Even if you’ve got a spare phone to dedicate to this purpose and can leave it switched on the whole time, the latency is pretty bad, I measured 250ms delay between the audio and the lights, so it doesn’t really feel in sync at all – it’s like watching a movie when the audio and picture doesn’t sync and it looks very weird. I reached out to their technical support and they told me to buy the Twinkly Music Dongle, this is a USB powered network based microphone, the USB is just for power, so you can plug it into any USB power source that is close enough to hear the music. However, what feels like a huge deception is this Music Dongle doesn’t work with any of the effects and patterns available in the Gallery. It only works with its own limited set of patterns that you can’t edit, customize or control. Even worse, you might have thought that you could use the Carousel feature to load your favorite Effects into the Twinkly system and play them throughout a party, changing effect every few minutes with each effect synced to the music, as this is obviously how it should work. Unfortunately, the Carousel feature only works with the Gallery Effects, and neither the smartphone mic nor the Twinkly Music dongle work with the Carousel. So the end result is that you’re forced to choose between 1) either the Carousel to automatically rotate through a set of effects – but entirely without any kind of audio sync, or 2) to abandon using the Carousel to automatically switch between effects, and to enable audio sync you’re stuck with one effect, and manually switching between that one effect and another yourself.

I bought the Smart Light String 100 through BestBuy's Deal of the Day. I absolutely love them. They are easy to set up using the phone app. The app allows you to change colors, brightness, speeds and patterns. There are numerous patterns to choose from and you can create your own. Bought 2 more String 100s through the Deal of the Day. I'm hooked. I'm going to have to buy the Twinkly Festoon or Twinkly Light Strip to get me through the rest of the year, can't leave the Christmas tree up forever.

Ive had my Twinkly lights for about 2 years now. I keep them on year-round on my porch instead of using my traditional porch light. I love the ease of adjustments through the app! My neighbors have also stated they love seeing the colors outside of the holidays! Can't wait to add more!

I love these lights! They’re so bright and colorful and they work perfectly with the app. They integrate well with HomeKit, so they’re easy to turn on and off. The only negative is is that you can’t plug one set into another to make one long strand.

Bought this 100 light set on sale for 50 bucks. Very easy to set up, the strand was long enough to go around the border of the center two window panes on my living room picture window. Very colorful as the bulbs have beautiful rich colors and bright output. I could see how you could really go crazy with a bunch of these lights!

These things are super cool. They were easy to set up using the app. I had no trouble connecting via Bluetooth. The ability to change the patterns by downloading new ones is great. I was even able to link in two shorter strands and they produce the patterns in unison like it’s all one strand. I bought them for Christmas decorating, but I’m leaving them up year-round.

Great for Christmas tree. Easy to set up and lots of options

Got these for my Halloween wreath, I now have 6 sets totaling +1500 bulbs. I reprogram them for every holiday, also use the music stick with creepy Halloween music. You can set them up individually or in a big group (which I did)allowing all of them to work in together. They are easy to program with a library of great special effects. An the lights are nice and bright, well made.

Beautiful lights. Easy to set up and very customizable.

Great lighting quality on the LED’s. The app is very great as well in the customization you have. My only gripe with the product is the length. We were only able to cover the front of the tree (which was only a 5.5FT tree) and that barely was enough. Would love to havw the length be just a few feet longer. Overall though, its a great product.

These were easy to set up and once installed make an older tree look like a new state of the art display. We get complimented every year on our lights and it seems like we are always "selling" friends and family. Almost all of them have gone out and purchased a set after seeing ours. I will say 250 lights are enough to do a 6 foot tree but you won't get the same dazzling effects as you would with two sets of 250. We put two of them on and it is perfect for almost all of the designs on the apps. Speaking of the app you will need to get familiar with it to scan the lights and then add the different designs you want. You can even design your own! They are also Google compatible so saying "Hey Google, turn on the Christmas tree" works for us! I recommend these and likely won't go back to regular lights ever!

Having so much fun with these lights. Bought several sets and still want more. The versatility seems endless. Currently used them for Christmas Trees of all sizes but want to also use them for Halloween and maybe forth of July. Absolutely love how bright they are and how easy the set up was.

I use non-traditional colors for Christmas, so I love being able to throw these on the big front yard tree and in the shrubs and put whatever colors I decide to use. The last couple of years have been pastels. I really enjoy being able to design the look. They're expensive, but they're worth is. I've purchased several boxes of these over the last three years.

these are the coolest christmas tree lights. They can be programmed into dozens of patterns and color selections, the one that sold me is the rolling rainbow effect. It makes a gorgeous light pattern without any ornaments!

We love these lights. This was our first year to use them for Christmas. We changed the color theme every night. Awesome product. They are expensive, but worth the money. We bought more set of lights to give to our kids for their houses.

These are really incredible lights. They were easy to pair with the Twinkly app and work very well. I’ve never seen anything like these and think they are like some of the advanced lights you see at some commercial winter light shows!