Request for Advice - Blue vs. White for HA/Hue setup

Lighting General Discussion
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Hey, folks!

Years ago, I accumulated around ten or so Hue light bulbs, so I’ve been in that ecosystem for a bit. I’ve since gotten married, and my wife is not jazzed about opening an app on her phone to fuss with lights (understandably), which is why I’ve started seriously considering Inovelli as an option. It hasn’t been a snap buy for me though, but that’s largely because of the option paralysis!

I know there are the Blue (Zigbee) and the White (Matter) switches. As far as I understand, Blues are the sensible pick because Zigbee is a mature protocol, the Hue bulbs can be bound directly to the switches given they’re both speaking Zigbee, and HA support for connecting to each of these pieces is solid.

On the other hand, Matter is “the future”, so if there are looming concerns about FOMO, or perhaps even security concerns considering comms over wifi are going to be more secure than what’s happening in the Zigbee mesh, then Whites are still worth considering. The only additional nit there is that it seems like, to continue using my Hue bulbs, I’d be stuck with the Hue Hub, which I’d really rather do away with before Philips requires account logins to use the app and such. But maybe there’s some other bridging technique I could use, e.g. HA has beta support for Matter now, so can that bridge a button press on a White to result in some action on the bulbs if I set them up with z2m and it not introduce an awful amount of latency? I wouldn’t want to hit the switch and it take 2 seconds for the bulbs to respond.

And that brings me to the unthinkable - chalking up my significant investment in the Hue ecosystem as a series of missteps in my smart home journey and getting some different bulbs on top of the smart switch purchase. Then that really opens up my options. If I got dumb bulbs especially, the cost of any bulb failing is obviously a lot cheaper than if one of these suckers bites it now, and it should result in a snappier on/off/dimming experience, but I worry I might miss some of the gimmicky color stuff that Hue provides.

So what would y’all suggest I do here? Buying enough of these switches to outfit even a small-to-midsize smart house is still a significant expense, so I want to be sure I’m considering all of the variables and ultimately picking something that will be robust for years to come. I’m hoping hearing about other folks’ experience will help me make a decision in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!

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Blue series without a doubt. The binding to the switch is the best feature with hue bulbs.

I’m constantly tinkering with my HA setup so there have been times where things stop working and can be annoying until a restart or fix the configuration/automation. The binding is amazing not only for its instant response, but not needing to talk to a hub is a huge plus. Lights will always work regardless and is one of the essential things to me that always needs to work.

I was on the fence for a while too because I didn’t want to lose the hub/app combo. Still considered going Matter for my 2nd floor because of the future but decided to keep with the zigbee. While it’s more expensive Hue has been great and as long as they keep making zigbee bulbs I won’t consider changing.

The iOS home app is also my app solution now because I am not much for creating HA dashboards every time I add 1 device. Still miss the hue app as it was easier to use but there are other great apps for home lights that filled the void (until HA makes it easier to create dashboards)

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I feel like this is exactly what I needed to read. Sometimes, I have dev brain that wants flashy new toys and fears obsolescence, but I really need to approach this with a DevOps mentality. This is pretty fundamental infra for the house. It needs to maintain 99.9% uptime, and I’m already introducing a layer of risk by making this stuff smart to begin with. Thanks for talking sense, Gbo!