this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Ikea's smart bulbs are compatible without much effort (Home Assistant running Zigbee2MQTT). Much cheaper and widely available year round, only downside I've seen is the temperature range isn't nearly as impressive as the white ambiance Hue bulbs.
2nd vote for IKEA bulbs. They just work. (Also using ZigBee2mqtt and HomeAssistant)
Considering this thread, guess I should look into why zigbee with mqtt is better then just the default zigbee HA gives.
Zigbee is a mesh network, but Zigbee with mqtt has a hub that stores messages. I haven't used it myself but it would mean that if, say, a Zigbee bulb was routing a message on the mesh network through a smart switch across the room to the hub, and the switch dropped the connection for a moment, a hub reply could be dropped entirely. Just briefly, but thatd be the intermittent issues that people are describing here.
MQTT stores all those messages in the hub though and makes the light bulb check in to get the messages, so if a light bulb were to do that and the switch disconnected, the light bulb would notice the failure and just retry, and the message is still on the mqtt hub to be redelivered.
Dunno if this description is exactly correct, but it sounds like it from my brief look on Wikipedia on communication differences.
Thanks for your explanation.
I just want to add that the Hue bulbs are also compatible to Home Assistant. (I'm currently using it with the 'default' ZHA which doesn't work with some China sensors and actors. AfaIk, Zigbe2MQTT would do.)
I've got several Hue bulbs running through Zigbee2MQTT on HA.
No issues, easy setup, and annoyingly expensive but they have the temperature range my wife prefers.
I also consider switching to Zigbe2MQTT one day.
OP said they don't want to pay for Hue.
I assume they mean they won't pay for a Hue Zigbee bridge, a relatively closed eco system, (and some cloud subscription or whatever they mean with Hue Premium) and new (expensive) Hue bulbs, but they already have Hue bulbs in use in an ad-hoc mode with a Zigbee controller.