Wi-Fi smart bulbs are cheap and easy. They can also leave you hanging

Who needs a smart home hub you can snag cheap Wi-Fi smart bulbs that connect directly to your wireless router? Sounds like a bargain. Until it isn’t. 

Sengled users learned that lesson the hard way as the company’s servers have strained and sputtered over the past several weeks, rendering many of Sengled’s smart lights useless. The situation got so bad that Amazon yanked Sengled’s Alexa skill last week, noting that “we hold a high bar for the Alexa experience.” 

Now Sengled customers are scrambling to deal with their unresponsive bulbs, some looking for workarounds while others are resigned to swapping out the dead lights with replacements from other brands.  

The episode illustrates a painful truth when it comes to the smart home: cheaper, hub-free smart devices might not be cheaper in the long run. (Sengled has yet to reply to our queries, and the company’s Facebook and Twitter feeds have been dark, save for posts from disgruntled users.)  

While Wi-Fi-only smart products that don’t need a hub may seem more affordable at first, they typically rely on the company’s servers to function properly. If those servers suffer an outage or the brand itself goes out of business, your cheap Wi-Fi bulbs will turn into paperweights, essentially flushing your initial outlay down the drain. 

The good news for some Sengled smart home users is that the company doesn’t only make Wi-Fi bulbs; the brand also offers Zigbee and Matter bulbs that can be controlled with smart hubs, including Sengled’s own hub as well as those from third parties. 

Of course, Sengled’s hub is reeling from the company’s server outages just like its smart bulbs are. But there’s nothing stopping you from resetting your Sengled Zigbee- and Matter-enabled smart lights and pairing them directly with a Zigbee or Matter hub from another brand, an option that isn’t available for Sengled’s cheaper Wi-Fi-only bulbs.

Amazon’s Echo speaker, for example, has a built-in Zigbee hub, a solution that allows Sengled users to bypass the now-yanked Sengled skill for Alexa. If you have a Matter bulb from Sengled, you can pair it with the Matter-enabled Apple HomePod or Google Nest Hub. A Zigbee and/or Matter hub from Samsung SmartThings is yet another option. 

Once connected to a new hub, those malfunctioning Sengled bulbs will spring back to life, Sengled’s servers be damned. 

For those who really don’t like depending on the cloud (Alexa, Google, and Apple smart speakers can fall victim to server failures, too), there are Zigbee- and Matter-enabled hubs that work completely locally. Spin up a local Home Assistant instance, install the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 dongle (which comes with Zigbee and Thread radios), and you’ll be able to control your connected Zigbee or Matter-over-Thread bulbs no matter what happens in the cloud. 

Now, going with smart bulbs or other smart devices that require a hub does mean kicking in the extra cash for the hub, which may cost anywhere from $50 to $100 or more depending on the hub’s capabilities.

That said, the extra expense of a hub is cheap compared to replacing a host of Wi-Fi bulbs left hanging by a dead server.

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lights.