What is the best alternative to MagicLightSmart LED Light Bulb?

The Hue bulbs need to be connected to a hub which needs to be wired into your router. This adds another device to the mix, and also increases the cost (it's $60 on its own, but it is also included in some of the bundles).

The first gen bulbs (what are available right now) have a maximum brightness of 600 lumens - similar brightness to a 50-watt bulb. The second gen bulbs will have an increase to 800 lumens, which is in-line with the amount of light that 60-watt bulbs produces - however these aren't available qui...

Blue tones tend to come out purplish, and green tones tend to be more yellowy than they should be.

While you can have virtually endless numbers of Ion Shines hooked up at once, only 2 can play audio at once. It would be really handy if you could connect more up, as their sound would compound making it seem louder and richer.

While the lights are dimmable from your smartphone, most smart bulbs offer a RGB LED which lets you illuminate your room/house with different colors and shades of white. These lights only have 1 shade of white, and can be dimmed.

The app doesn't allow for light scheduling or custom color cycles.

The colored RGB lights can only achieve 50% brightness on their own; after 50% white LEDs are also turned on to achieve a very high total brightness. However, mixing white light with colored light will dilute the colors so that red light at 70% brightness will look more washed out than red light at...

To achieve their high brightness, the Lifx need more diodes than other LED bulbs, which means that they get hotter. To help deal with the heat, there are more heat sinks which adds the weight (they weigh 10.4 ounces each). Despite the heat sinks though, they still run a bit warmer than other LED bu...

The bulbs are connected through the WeMo Link which is a central hub, which then connects to your phone. It adds cost to the setup, but thankfully you only need 1 to control a large collection of WeMo Links. This hub doesn't have any wired connections - it plugs into any ordinary wall power out...

There is no option for a remote control or web-based control.

These bulbs only produce 490 lumens - equivalent to 40-watt bulbs. They aren't bright enough to light up a room on their own, and unless you have multiple in one room they will only effectively be used as accent lighting

While other systems can handle up to 50 bulbs, the Nyrius app can only manage 8 bulbs. The bulbs aren't too bright either, so you will be limited to 2...maybe 3 rooms before you'll have to look for another smart bulb option.

The Nyrius bulbs use bluetooth, which is limited to around 100 feet. This means that you can't change the lights over WiFi when you are away from the house.

The hub needs to be plugged directly into your router, adding one more thing cluttering the likely already busy area. This also means that you have little choice in the placement of the hub, while other systems have a wireless hub that can be plugged into a wall socket in a closet or somewhere else...

These lights are limited to color temperatures - they don't offer full RGB coloring. They can do shades of blue and yellowish as well as bright white, but no deep blues, reds, greens or other colors.

These lights have a hard time adapting to certain activities. For example, if you are reading and being fairly still, the lights will think that the room is empty and turn off automatically. Because of the learning ability, in the future sometimes the lights will think you are reading and stay on e...

At 600 lumens, these bulbs are 25% dimmer than most other bulbs. This will make illuminating rooms - the primary function of light bulbs - a bit more difficult although not impossible. The bulbs may not be sufficiently bright to simply replace existing bulbs...you may need to add an extra lamp or l...

While the app contains everything needed to make the most of the smart bulbs, it places features inside menus where you wouldn't expect to look. For example, one of the sections is called "Lab" where you can find the Colorful, Game, Music, and Night Light settings. The timer button is...

Bluetooth has its benefits, although it only has a short range. You need to physically be near the bulbs in order to change their settings, while other Wi-Fi bulbs (or bluetooth bulbs connected to a Wi-Fi hub) let you control your lights from around the world as long as you have an internet connect...

Be aware, if you're planning to switch your lights when away from your local wifi

The Ilumi bulbs only use bluetooth (no WiFi), but they work together through a mesh network so that if you are within bluetooth range of one of them, you are in range with all of them. Range is said to be about 150 feet away from the outermost bulb.

Two headlining features of the Ilumi are slow to react - Music Sync should change the color of the bulbs along with any music that is playing, however it lags behind and doesn't respond well. The same can be said for the Torch Mode which is supposed to turn on your lights when it senses your ph...

$60 per bulb is very expensive, even for smart bulbs. They are energy efficient, and also rated up to 20 years of lifetime which can help justify the cost a bit.

The app isn't as intuitive as the other higher-end competitors, and lights have a slight delay when turning on.

While virtually every other smart bulb is rated at 25,000 hours, the Osram Lightify is only rated at 20,000 hours. While it isn't certain these lights will clunk out before the others, it seems more likely.

The app could use a lot of work. For such an expensive bulb, the app really should work better than it does.

At just 200 lumens of brightness (most smart bulbs provide 800 lumens), this is only good for accent lighting. You won't be able to effectively light a room, even with a few of these bulbs.

To make room for the speaker, the bright areas of the bulb are cut off. Light will shine above and below the speaker, making for an awkward looking lighting effect (light shines up and down, but it doesn't surround the bulb as is typical of smart bulbs).

The colors that the Cree connected provides are just below average for smart bulbs. At 80% of the spectrum, they fall behind the GE Link (90%), Belkin WeMo (88%), and Osram (81%) but a hair ahead of the Philips Hue (79%).

You will need a hub, but at least you can pick your choice of hardware from cheap solutions ($30) that just control the lights to $50+ systems that can be the brains for your whole connected house.

As with all smart bulbs with in-app dimming, dimming from a lightswitch provides less than optimal results. The two dimming systems both try to take control, which results in flickering and some buzzing.

The 430 lumens brightness of the Elgato Alvea is almost as bright as a 40-watt bulb, but not quite. These lights will be very expensive to use as primary light sources, as you'll need many of them to sufficiently light up a room. They are really only cost-effective as accent lighting.

While most smart bulbs let you pick from a color picker, for solid colors the Elgato Alvea has 7 to choose from (blue, green, orange, purple, red, white, yellow). Each shade is then adjustable in both brightness and shade, however it would have been much easier to just use a color palette like most...

Unfortunately, Elgato Alvea doesn't support any Android devices. It only works with iPhone (4S or later), iPod (5th gen) iPad (3rd gen or newer), or Apple Watch.

Between installing, registering, and connecting, the setup process is very slow and buggy. Even once connected, changing the colors or settings takes longer and appears more choppy than competing bulbs. Updates can fail to install properly multiple times in a row (even with restarting your phone a...

To access any smart features, you will require a hub. There are different hubs available, with more to come. Currently there is the Link Hub ($30) which will handle lighting, or the Wink Hub ($50) will be able to work the lights as well as other smart home systems. There's also the coming-soon...

The GE Link requires 12 watts to produce 800 lumens - the TCP LEDs and Belkin WeMo provide the same lumens at 11 watts and 9.5 watts, respectively, and the Philips Hue provides 750 lumens using only 9 watts. The GE Link is one of the most inefficient RGB LEDs available, however it is still many ti...

180 lumens won't do much good in terms of lighting (for comparison, regular bulbs produce about 800 lumens - the Oort bulb provides less brightness than the typical refrigerator light). This is really only effective as a supplement to an existing lighting solution as mood lighting, and not a re...

With a range of only 12m, don't expect to control your lights from far away. The good news is that the bulbs work together in a 'mesh' configuration, meaning that as long as you are within range of one bulb (and the other bulbs are in range of each other as well), you can control all t...

The colors this bulb produces don't look saturated, and there isn't a very wide range of colors (about 20 noticeably different colors).