“You can use a timer to automatically turn everything off late at night,” says Giles Sutton, a long-time smart home integrator and executive at the home technology association CEDIA. “You can control everything together with an app or lighting system…It’s really a continuation of the technology you have in a smart home.” After speaking with Sutton about the key features of the best outdoor smart lights, we researched and chose top outdoor and landscape options based on ease of installation, useful features, and brightness and color customization. Our favorite is the Philips Hue Calla Smart Pathway Outdoor Bollard Light Base Kit, which offers excellent colors, detailed control options, simple installation, and comprehensive smart features. It’s our recommendation for those willing to invest in a premium smart lighting platform. Here are the best smart outdoor lights. Using the Hue Calla and its robust smart features requires a Philips Hue bridge to serve as a hub. If you don’t already use one, it adds more cost to a product that’s pricey on its own. Not to mention additional Calla extension units if you want to set up multiple lights. When it comes to smart lighting ecosystems, though, Philips Hue has one of the more comprehensive, high-quality catalogs of indoor and outdoor lighting solutions you can invest in. Price at time of publish: $143 This 14-watt LED bulb has a brightness equivalent to a 120-watt incandescent light bulb, making it much more energy efficient. The fully dimmable white light tops off at an impressive 1200 lumens, with temperature tunable between 2200 Kelvin and 6500 Kelvin. It can also change colors, but the colored light isn’t nearly as bright or vivid as comparable indoor lights. Price at time of publish: $19 That amounts to 40 preset scene modes and fully customizable effects, along with a music-sync mode that reacts to the audio your phone hears. Each bulb also uses a warm white color to create more varied shades and tones for mood-setting. The Govee H7020 supports connectivity over both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, depending on your distance from your home wireless router or mobile device, respectively. You can control the lights through the Govee Home app or voice commands if you sync them with your Alexa or Google Assistant devices. The product is fully waterproof and shatterproof and available in 48-foot or 96-foot strings. With either length, the bulbs are 3 feet apart, which may make them look too sparse in certain settings. Price at time of publish: $70 This waterproof pathway light is dim until you switch it to full brightness through the app or something triggers the built-in motion sensor, in which case it shines to its maximum of 80 lumens. It’s nowhere near the brightness of a regular bulb, but it’s quite strong for a pathway light. It doesn’t stay at max brightness for long, though, potentially only 30 seconds, according to Ring customer support, so it doesn’t serve well as a constant light source. Price at time of publish: $35 When the sensor detects movement within 30 feet, it will light up for 90 seconds, with a powerful max brightness of 1200 lumens. The white light is a warm, yellowish 3000 Kelvin, but unfortunately, the color temperature isn’t adjustable. Price at time of publish: $26 The infrared feature, unfortunately, raises the price higher than comparable smart bulbs and calls for a separate security camera and motion sensing to take full advantage. But outside of night vision mode, the bulb still produces very bright white light, with tunable color temperature from very warm 1500 Kelvin to very cool 9000 Kelvin. Price at time of publish: $60 The 1080-pixel camera delivers a decent high-definition video feed, but you need a Ring Protect subscription in order to record any of the footage. Installation should be relatively straightforward, especially if you’re replacing an existing floodlight. However, if you need to set up new wiring or simply aren’t confident with electrical work, you may need a professional to install the device. This particular product doesn’t require a Ring Bridge, but it does make sense to add it to a broader Ring security setup that gives you a single point of control for devices like doorbell cams, other smart lights, and more. Price at time of publish: $140 Its 600-lumen max output isn’t exceptionally high (the Lily XL model jumps to 1050 lumens if you need more brightness), but it still casts very effective decorative lighting when combined with the tunable color temperature and high-quality color options. The Lily base kit comes with three spotlights, the required power supply, and power cables, an expensive bundle that doesn’t account for the Philips Hue bridge required for all the smart features. With the bridge and the Hue app, you can customize and save light and color settings to work just about anywhere in your yard, adjust manually as your landscaping or lighting needs vary, and change automatically throughout the day. You can also connect to the leading smart platforms and voice assistants, including Apple HomeKit and Siri, for other ways to sync your outdoor lighting with your devices and daily habits. Price at time of publish: $311 The animated light and color effects are much more elaborate than the options on traditional lights, with a catalog of presets and essentially endless customization possibilities. You can even scan in a 2D or 3D mapping of your own light configuration, which you can then paint effects onto with your finger. Besides playing with lighting effects, you can use the app to set timers for turning the lights on and off, but you won’t find more complex scheduling and control options found on other smart lights. Similarly, you can sync with Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple HomeKit for basic voice commands and additional routines, but not detailed animation controls. The price tag is also quite high for lights that likely will only see use at certain parts of the year. Price at time of publish: $140 Many types of outdoor lighting, particularly for decorative use, don’t get very bright simply because they don’t need to. “But when it comes to other areas, it’s nice to have flexibility over brightness, as in being able to dim or change color temperature,” adds Sutton. “Some of the more striking applications of outdoor lighting is in the landscaping, and for that, you don’t necessarily need more brightness. It’s not functional lighting; it’s decorative. It’s creating an aesthetic.”
Installation
For any smart product, part of the installation is connecting to the internet, often to your home’s Wi-Fi network, and sometimes syncing with a smart hub or other devices. Manufacturers usually present the process as quick and straightforward, but technical hiccups are always possible, and troubleshooting can be frustrating for some. In terms of installing the physical fixtures, most smart outdoor lighting for the consumer market is simple enough to install—potentially as easy as screwing in a light bulb. With some fixtures, you may need to mount them on the wall or stake them into the ground. You then need to connect to a power source, so it’s important to know how to install outdoor lighting safely or consult a professional installer or electrician. “You can often have more options if you’re using a hardwired fixture as opposed to a wireless one,” explains Sutton. “You can have so many different varieties of light fixtures if you run an electrical cable to it, so that’s something to consider. But with landscape lighting, it’s very easy to find options that don’t necessarily need wiring.”
Smart Features
Smart lighting of any kind connects to the internet through Wi-Fi or another wireless protocol, which provides access to certain features that are generally common across manufacturers and products. You typically use the brand’s free mobile app to turn the lights on or off from anywhere or set them to switch on/off automatically based on a certain schedule, sunrise/sunset times, etc. You can control lights individually or group compatible products together. Some platforms, like Philips Hue or Ring, may offer richer feature sets and easy integration with the brand’s other smart devices (like cameras, motion sensors, or other lighting), but often require a separate hub specific to those devices.
Why Trust The Spruce?
Anton Galang is a contributing writer for The Spruce, specializing in smart home products and other consumer technology. He has been writing, editing, and testing in the tech space since 2007, with work published in PC Magazine and Lifewire. He uses smart lighting, speakers, displays, and other gadgets in his own home and is always looking to grow and update his collection. “There are a number of systems that will allow you to add remote dimmers to existing electrical cabling running to light fixtures,” Sutton says. “These in-line dimmers tend to be products that are professionally installed by an electrical contractor or systems integrator. But certainly, you can retrofit an entire lighting control system if you want, and what I’ve found is a lot of homes don’t tend to have dimmers for outdoor lighting, so that’s often a popular upgrade.” Sutton also recommends checking the transformer requirements for dimming. “Another thing to think about is making sure you have the right transformer to run with your lights, so they dim properly. If it’s an older fixture, it might not necessarily have dimming capability.” Another factor to check with LED bulbs, in particular, is whether they’re rated for use in enclosed fixtures. The excess heat in an enclosed fixture can damage the LED technology in bulbs that aren’t designed for it, leading to malfunctions and potential safety issues. “Most of the lighting technology we see in outdoor lighting now is LED because they give you the brightness and the low energy and the color temperature control as well,” explains Sutton. “That technology has really accelerated over the past couple of years.” His work on this article expanded on his previous research on smart light bulbs and smart plugs for The Spruce, considering outdoor lighting offerings from over a dozen manufacturers and factoring in various lighting types, installation options, smart features, brightness and color quality, and price ranges. He also discussed additional installation, application, and functionality considerations with Giles Sutton, former smart home integrator and current senior vice president of member success and sales at the global home technology association CEDIA.
