What are the Best Christmas Smart Lights?
By Bradly Spicer Published on: November 18th, 2020
This Christmas season, we’ve decided to go all out with a Smart Home challenge to find the Best Christmas Smart Lights on the market, regardless of price.
Smart Lighting itself is full of lots of third party cheap products, some of which are fine if you have a Zigbee or Z-wave hub, but for most of us, we just want something that works with our Alexa or Google Home Assistant.
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How we rank our best Christmas Smart Lights
With any challenge like this, we need to set ourselves some criteria, otherwise finding the Best Smart Christmas Lights would be an absolute mess. As such, we’re going to be marking and grading each product on the following:
- Usability
- Quality
- How Smart is it?
- Price
Twinkly Christmas Lights – Our Pick
Twinkly is our pick of Smart Light for Christmas, if you haven’t, definitely go and check out our Twinkly Christmas Lights & Twinkly Music Review.
Twinkly is intended to work as an interior and exterior smart lighting solution that works directly from your phone, it comes in a variety of sizes based on the amount of RGB Lights they offer:
It’s important to remember that Twinkly isn’t your average led light string that you’re wrapping around your tree, it really is designed to work with a variety of shaped Christmas trees alongside an array of light designs like Candy Cane, Diagonal, Sunset, Snow and Rainbow.
Usability
Wrap them around your Christmas Tree or drape them on your windows, they’ll give you some of the best customizability for that authentic Christmas spirit.
They aren’t non-tangle and definitely need storing away properly unlike your other Christmas lights, yes, we all have issues putting them away. But, they are far easier to put and get running with.
Quality
I’m going to base the quality on the other Christmas Smart Lights we mention in this guide, because there’s not much you can say about Smart LEDs other than they’re either using cheap dim LEDs or bright LEDs.
To confirm, the Twinkly LEDs are very bright should you want them to be, which is to be expected at this price tag.
The quality does reflect the price tag though, they’re extremely sturdy, can be extremely bright and are packaged exceptionally well.
How Smart is it?
As Smart as lights get! They’re fully controllable via a Smart Phone App, and have basic control with your voice assistant.
What’s great about the app is that it’s actually well designed, unlike a certain Philips Hue App. I really can’t commend Twinkly enough for the innovation behind their app.
If you’re looking for customisability of a light strip, Twinkly has nailed it.
Price
Being this good comes at a price though, the Twinkly lights range from $139.99 to $200+, and whilst this may be scary, it’s definitely worth noting that these lights are cheaper to run than your traditional Christmas lights and are the best on the market.
If you want the best on the market and the best to show off, the price really doesn’t matter.
Beauteye USB Bluetooth LED String Lights
These might not be the most aesthetically pleasing ‘Smart Lights’, but they work well enough if you’re happy to control them by your phone instead of a smart assistant.
Usability
You can to some degree swap the colour of the lights on the bulbs across the tree, however, there are no patterns and you cannot tweak the colours in a custom fashion as they advertise. It’s one color only, no dynamic choices.
Quality
Not great, it’s easy to tell that they’re cheap chinese made plastic bulbs. You’re not going to get the best color nor will you get a great diffusion of the color on the lights.
I can’t recommend these for build quality unfortunately.
How Smart is it?
They’re not very smart, you’re looking at something which can only be controlled by a specific Smart Device App and must be powered via USB.
It cannot be controlled by a voice assistant like Google Home, Amazon Alexa or Apple Homekit.
Price
These are ridiculously cheap, but that is obviously for a specific reason. You’re not going to be getting a premium product or a product you can rely on for this price tag.
If you’re looking for very basic ‘smart’ Christmas lights, these are fine, but you really do get what you pay for.
EAMBRITE Smart Globe String Lights
We mark these as the second-best Smart Bulbs for a Christmas Tree, they meet the criteria of being controlled by a Voice Assistant (Amazon Alexa & Google Home), have an array of settings and presets and can be controlled by your phone.
Usability
They’re very easy to set up, much like all Christmas lights they run in a strip and can be draped over your tree easily.
You do need to power up a control box to operate it and to receive commands via the app.
Quality
It’s surprisingly good for the price bracket, don’t get me wrong, they’re not amazing and you’re not going to have something that will last you years to come without damage.
The bulbs diffuse nicely on the hazey plastic bulb casing, they’re not too dull and work fine in a dark atmosphere creating a very cosy surrounding.
How Smart is it?
You can control them via your phone, voice assistant or directly at the control unit, overall, they’re pretty Smart. You do need to use a specific app but once it’s all set up, just tell it to turn on with your Alexa or on a timed schedule.
Price
These bulbs are very reasonable for Christmas Lights, even more so if you use the browser extension Honey which as of writing this offers around 10 potential coupons.
At just under $20, you’re not looking at much more than your normal set of Christmas lights. So, from a logical standing, these may as well be your next decoration purchase.
What are Smart Christmas Tree Lights?
If you’re not too clued up on Smart Lights, they’re simply lights that you can turn on and off, control the brightness and in some cases the colour of the bulb from your voice assistant or Smart Phone.
You’ve likely had an interaction with a Smart Light already, whether it’s at your friends house or having a look around your local Technology store.
So, you may be wondering, what makes a Smart Christmas Tree Smart Light any different to a normal smart light?
We’re going to take the Brand Twinkly into account here as they are the highest quality Smart Lights we found.
With Twinkly, you can drape your Christmas tree with their Smart Lights and control the brightness, colours and more directly from your phone.
It doesn’t stop there, you can make your own patterns, gradients, shapes and effects from just a few taps on your phone, it’s honestly crazy how cool it is and what better time to impress your family than Christmas?
If you opt to not use Twinkly, that’s fine, but you’re going to be limiting yourself out of a lot of features as there really is nothing else that compares on the market.
Most of the Smart Lights on the market advertises themselves as “Voice Assistant Compatible” are simply too basic, with Twinkly, you can turn them on/off, change the brightness, change the color of the decorations etc.
