Thinking about smartening up the lights in your home?  is one of the first names you should consider. 

Among all of today’s smart lighting platforms, Hue is the most , the most and the most well-connected, too. It doesn’t matter if you’re an , an , an , a , a , a , a  or about a bajillion other examples I could list — Philips Hue’s lights work with all of it.

If you barely understand what any of that last sentence means, don’t worry: Philips Hue is a great pick for smart lighting newbies, too. And hey, maybe that’s why you’re here. You want to know more about the platform before you buy in — especially because a lot of these lights don’t come cheap.

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Well, we’re here to help, with everything you need to know about Philips Hue in one place: What it is, how it works, how to put it to use in your home, which bulbs to buy first — and yep, which ones are overpriced duds, too. And please note that I’ve included links to Amazon where appropriate, as well as a few of our top picks here at, well, the top — CNET may get a share of revenue from purchases made through those links. Gotta keep the lights on, right?

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All right, so what is Philips Hue?

Philips Hue is a line of smart LED light bulbs and fixtures. Each one communicates wirelessly with the Hue Bridge, a little modem-looking thing that you keep plugged into your home’s router. That connection to the cloud lets you control Hue’s lights from your phone, with a voice command via Siri, Alexa or the Google Assistant, or by automating them to turn on and off at specific times or when other devices trigger them.

Many of Philips Hue’s bulbs and fixtures can change colors upon request (hence the “Hue” branding), but some are just basic bulbs that put out plain ol’ white light and nothing else. Prices range from $15 a piece for bulbs like those to $250 for a 58-inch tall color-changing floor lamp (spoiler alert: that’s one of the overpriced duds you can definitely skip).

How do I use these lights?

To get started with Philips Hue, you plug in the Hue Bridge and connect it to your router via an Ethernet cable. Then you’ll screw in your Hue bulbs or turn on your Hue fixtures. Download the Philips Hue app to your Android or iOS device and open it up — it’ll walk you through the rest of the setup process.

Once you’ve paired your lights with the app, you sort them by room and give each one a unique name. The app (and if you’re using them, the Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant voice controls) will let you control entire rooms at once by saying, for example, “turn on the living room.” You can control individual lights, too, which is where naming everything is important. “Turn on the desk lamp” is a lot less clunky than, say, “turn on Hue White Ambiance Bulb 4”

The Hue app comes with a number of preset “scenes” that, when activated, will automatically change all of the lights in the room. Along with basic scenes for normal, soft white and daylight-toned white light, there are multicolor scenes that will randomly apply colors from a preselected palette across all of a room’s lights. For instance, a Spring Blossom-themed scene will randomly assign shades of pink, red and white across your lights, while a Northern Lights-themed scene will go live with shades of green and blue. You can make and save your own scenes in the Hue app, too, which lets you return to a custom mix of colors that you like with a single tap or voice command.

And how does Philips Hue work?

In a word? Zigbee.

…Oh, right, I should probably be a little more specific. Zigbee is a wireless communication technology like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. You can think of it as a language that lets smart lights talk to each other and to their control hub. All of Hue’s bulbs and fixtures have their own built-in Zigbee radios, as does the Hue Bridge, which you keep plugged into your router. Its job is to act like a Zigbee-to-Wi-Fi translator for your home network and your lights.

For instance, you send a signal to your router whenever you turn a Hue bulb on using the app. From there, the Hue Bridge translates that command into a Zigbee signal and sends it out to the bulb. All of this happens in a fraction of a second, and since the connection to your router keeps your Hue Bridge connected to the cloud, it means you can control your lights from anywhere in the world where your phone can connect to the internet.

One quick note: You’ll need the square-shaped, second-gen Hue Bridge pictured above for all of that. The circular, first-gen Hue Bridge is .

Wait, does Zigbee cost anything?

Nope, you don’t need a Zigbee provider or a Zigbee subscription or anything like that. Zigbee isn’t like Wi-Fi in that sense. It’s more like Bluetooth. It’s a local wireless network for your home — specifically for your smart home gadgets. Once you plug the Hue Bridge into your router, screw in a Hue bulb, and pair the two together via the Hue app, the two will start using Zigbee to communicate like two kids playing with walkie-talkies. You don’t have to sign up for Zigbee service or pay a monthly Zigbee bill or anything like that.

Are those Zigbee signals secure?

Yes. Since Zigbee is a local network, none of Hue’s bulbs connect directly to the cloud, and all of their Zigbee transmissions back and forth to each other and to the Hue Bridge follow standard encryption practices, which the Philips Hue team has been developing and refining with regular firmware updates for several years now.

Speaking of the Hue Bridge, you have to connect it directly to your router with an Ethernet cable. While that’s a little less convenient than hubs that connect to the router wirelessly, that this approach ensures that your home’s Wi-Fi credentials are never transmitted wirelessly, which would make it easier for someone to intercept them. Hue also requires you to tap the button on the top of Bridge during the initial pairing process and during setup for most third-party connections, which is an excellent common-sense means of keeping someone from taking over your system from outside of your home. On top of that, each Hue Bridge has a unique verification key, which means that if one were to be compromised, the hacker couldn’t use it as a way to take over any others.

Connecting anything to the internet comes with risks, obviously, but Philips Hue has a long, solid track record of keeping its platform secure and , which is what you want from a smart home brand. There’s no reason to think that connecting your lights to the internet poses any more risk than connecting, say, your laptop, your phone or your TV. As always, just be sure to keep your Wi-Fi network protected with a strong password. Better yet, make a habit of updating that password every now and then.

What about the new Bluetooth bulbs? Can I skip the Hue Bridge?

Hue’s newest bulbs are the same basic thing as before, but they now include Bluetooth radios in addition to the Zigbee receivers. That lets you pair them directly with your phone without need for a Hue Bridge.

To do so, you’ll need to use a separate, Bluetooth-based version of the Hue app on your Android or iOS device. It’s a much more basic experience than what you’ll get if you use the full-fledged Hue app powered by the Hue Bridge. You can still turn your lights on and off from your phone, dim them up and down, and group them according to room, but you won’t be able to control them from beyond Bluetooth range without a hub, and you won’t be able to take advantage of advanced features like wake-up fades or Hue Entertainment (more on both in the next section). You also won’t be able to sync them up with most outside services, including Apple HomeKit and IFTTT.

You can, however, connect them directly with current-gen Amazon Echo speakers and with Google Home speakers and Google Nest smart displays. Once you do, you’ll control them via the Alexa or Google Home apps, and turn them on and off using Alexa and Google Assistant commands.

That makes them pretty appealing for people who just want smart bulbs that their voice assistant of choice can control, and who aren’t interested in plugging a hub into their router to unlock any advanced features (and you can always add a Hue Bridge later if you decide you want it). For most, I think the Hue Bridge is worth it from the start — especially since you can typically get it packaged in one of Hue’s starter kits for very little additional expense.

What else can these lights do?

On a basic level, smart lights like the ones from Philips Hue let you control and dim your lights using your phone, using voice commands or using automations that you set up in the Hue app or with a compatible third-party automation service like . 

Basic automations like those let you do things like schedule your lights to turn on automatically in the morning or at sunset, or even more creative use cases, like lights that blink whenever you receive an email from an important contact. You could also connect your lights , then program them to turn on automatically whenever someone enters the room.

Other, more advanced features include that can slowly fade your bedroom lights up during the thirty minutes prior to your morning Google Assistant alarm. Another recent feature called lets you set your lights to mimic the color of whatever’s playing on your computer screen in real time. Connect that computer to your living room TV for a color-coordinated movie night with the kids — that is, if you don’t find the feature .

Philips Hue parent company Signify expanded on Hue Entertainment in 2019 by introducing the , which costs $230 and . With multiple HDMI jacks, you plug all of your media streamers, set top boxes and gaming consoles into it, and then connect it to your TV. From there, it reads the incoming video signals, which lets your Hue Bridge match the color of your lights to whatever’s on your TV screen. That brings all sorts of new content under Hue Entertainment’s control.

What does Philips Hue work with?

Like I said before, it works with quite a lot. Most notable are the voice assistants — in fact, Hue was the first smart lighting platform to hit the trifecta and sync up with Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant (and hey, Hue works with Cortana, too). Make the connection, and you’ll be able to turn your bulbs on and off, dim them up and down or trigger your scenes by asking your assistant of choice to do it.

On the Alexa front, Philips Hue also offers direct compatibility between its lights and the , an Alexa smart speaker with its own, built-in Zigbee radio. That means that Echo Plus owners don’t need the Hue Bridge if they want to pair Hue bulbs with Alexa — though they’ll only be able to control those Hue lights in the Alexa app and by using Alexa voice commands. If they want to use the Hue app or any of Hue’s other integrations, they’ll still need the Hue Bridge plugged into their router.

You can also add Philips Hue bulbs and fixtures to a whole lot of other smart home platforms, including , and security-minded automation systems like and Just know that for all of them, you’ll still need the Hue Bridge.

Speaking of the Hue Bridge, it also supports third-party Zigbee lights that aren’t made by Philips. That includes inexpensive smart bulbs from names like and that cost a few bucks less than Hue’s white light bulbs at retail. Just make sure that those smart bulbs send their signals using the Zigbee wireless protocol.

Something else to watch for: A growing number of , making it so your automations and voice controls will continue to work even when things are off at the wall (with a regular light switch, cutting the power makes it so your bulbs can’t receive signals from the Hue Bridge). We’ve already tested  from RunLessWire, and came away impressed. Another, the , simply acts like a dimmer dial that covers the old switch, locking it into the on position.

OK, so tell me about those bulbs. What are my options?

You’ve got lots! Hue sells both color-changing and white-light bulbs in a variety of shapes and sizes. They include:

• : A pretty standard, soft white, dimmable LED smart bulb that costs $15 each. The newest versions include radios for both Zigbee and Bluetooth, which gives you basic control of the bulbs on your phone without need for the Hue Bridge. A starter kit with three bulbs, a smart button, and the Hue Bridge costs $99. Earlier versions are still available without the button for a little less.
• : Slightly more advanced — adds in the ability to change the white light color temperature from a yellowy, candle-like glow up to bluish-white daylight tones. Still no colors, though. After recent price cuts, White Ambiance bulbs, which are available both as regular, A-shaped bulbs and as BR30 floodlights, now cost $25 each or two for $45. Meanwhile, a starter kit with three bulbs, a smart button and the Hue Bridge costs $120. And again, the newest versions of the bulbs include Bluetooth.
• : Also available with Bluetooth now, Hue’s flagship smart bulb does white light at any color temperature you like, plus the full spectrum of colors. They cost $50 each but go on sale frequently. A three-bulb starter kit that includes a smart button and the Hue Bridge costs $180.
• : Hue bulbs in a floodlight form that’s better suited for overhead lighting that shines down in one direction. New Hue White floodlights cost $20 each, while White Ambiance versions , with . White and Color versions that add in the RGB spectrum . All are now available with Bluetooth in addition to Zigbee.
• : Hue spotlight bulbs designed to replace specialty halogen bulbs with dual-pronged bases. A bit niche, and priced the same as the floodlights: $30 for a single White Ambiance bulb, $50 for , $50 for . A White and Color Ambiance bulb with a more traditional screw-in base is .
• : The name is clunky as hell, but this is just Philips Hue’s color-changing candelabra LED. Each one costs $50, which is too expensive given that you’ll almost certainly need to buy at least a couple of them to light up a room.
• : Available in a variety of shapes and designs and starting at $25 a bulb, Hue’s newest lights are classic-looking clear-glass bulbs with twisty, decorative filaments inside. Those filaments are actually comprised of thin strips of LEDs, so you’re getting an old-school design with new-school efficiency and smarts.
• : Available in a two-pack for $50, this is a weather-rated Philips Hue floodlight you can use outdoors. It doesn’t change colors or color temperatures, but it’s rugged enough to stand up to the rain.

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