Thee YeeLights is the best value for money on the market in our opinion. Very affordable and no hub is required. We have ordered them from AlliExpress for the best price… The trade-off here is the delivery time, but hey, there is no hurry. At the end we had 5 bulbs at the regular price of 1 from the Philips Hue (comparable 16M color bulbs).
The YeeLights are excellent, the build is very solid, very easy to install, they are bright and the YeeLights app (tested on Android) is somehow decent. Actually it has features i.e. disco lights that will tune with the music in the room, that other don’t have (not for free certainly) . They also integrated with Google Home very nicely, all-in-all very pleasant experience.
There are some downsides to it as well. If we compare the YeeLights to the Philips Hue we can see the following downfalls:
- The brightness adjustment is not fluid – as you pull the slider very little difference is observed and towards the end the drop is significant. If you are not looking into dimming the environment precisely, then this will not be a big problem. We’ve ended-up having them on high or low brightness, no middle.
- The app is not perfect – if feels like most of the setting are well berried, you need far too many clicks to achieve the basic functionality e.g. adjust the light in the room. The disco app we’ve mentioned above can only control a single light, not a room, not sure why (?!?).
Final verdict goes back to how affordable the YeeLights are. You will probably change all lights in the house for the price of the startup kit of the Philips Hue’s. But also don’t be fulled, the Philips Hue’s are better in almost every aspect, a little better but still better.