Philips Hue bulbs

Which have died on you? Don't get bottom of the barrel stuff and stick with Hue and you'll likely have zero problems.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

When the Hue bulbs are removed from the bridge they go into pairing mode. I migrated from one zigbee controller to another recently and it was thankfully very easy.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

Hue bulbs are just ZigBee bulbs if you want them to be. I've never even used their app or hub- no cloud dependency, no vendor lock in.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

Favorite is Hue because they're quite reliable and I prefer ZigBee for my primary lights so I can bind them directly to my Inovelli Blue series switches. This ensures the lights still work if HA is down (albeit without Adaptive Lighting). I do really enjoy ambient lighting and having that lighting dance to music for mood setting. For that, I'm very OK with WiFi lights (WiFi bulbs are supposedly quicker to respond when using apps like iLightShow). I picked up the Govee Aura Lamp and it's pretty cool (admittedly, the built-in music processing is more fun than using it with iLightShow though). I …

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

I ran Hue via the Phillips hub in HA for years until a few weeks ago when I inadvertently reset the hub and lost the pairing to my 50+ bulbs and accessories. Since I had to re-pair everything anyway, I decided to try foregoing the hub and just used ZHA and a Sonoff dongle and so far it's been a better experience. By far the worst part was having to delete the whole Philips setup in the Echo configuration and rebuild all the Alexa-side stuff to connect through HA, but now that that's done everything seems much more reliable.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

Hue for sure, the integration is local over zigbee Govee is cloud only and has lots of latency. Its also the slowest to reconnect to wifi, often needing me to open the app before the wifi reconnects after an internet drop or similar.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

I moved to Z2M, much better overall with no stability issues and all my lights work with it which are hue bulbs and some IKEA LED panels. No need to use hue at all anymore in terms of their hub which is nice, the hue bulbs seem to work well as routers for the network so I've been happy with that as all my other items connect through them reliably. What do you currently do in hue ? Colour changing, brightness, home/away can all be achieved in home assistant. I personally haven't felt I lost any feature but can't say there isn't a specific loss.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

Unless something has changed recently (mine are all 2+ years old) Philips Hue bulbs don’t need a hub. They are Zigbee and work really well (locally) with HA. You can pair them with Z2M/ZHA or a hub, but not both.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

… capable of doing with the device. It’s not the most obvious answer, and I’ll try to explain what I mean; If Home Assistant detects a light bulb from the Philips Hue series manufactured by the Philips company Signify, it’s typically able to do everything with that bulb that the Hue Bridge would be able to. With one possible exception; HA may have trouble fetching the latest firmware and update it in the bulbs internal microcontroller. But Home Assistant is also capable of having that bulb presented to it *by* the Hue Bridge, instead of talking directly to it. Home Assistant can present …

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

I'm always so confused by posts on here complaining about having to do complicated stuff like this and still having problems. I have a bunch of Phillips Hue bulbs, Sonoff door and temperature sensors going through a SkyConnect, and they work totally fine with ZHA 100% of the time. They're pretty spread out over my house and I did absolutely nothing to optimize the network. What are you guys doing that causes so many problems? Is it other brands of Zigbee devices? I assume I've gotten lucky somehow with my setup.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

If you want "the best" it would be Hue bulbs over zigbee. Not app, no hub, no internet, just the best bulbs you can buy

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.