NanoLeaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue – Smart Home LED Light Comparison

So what are the biggest difference between the NanoLeaf Smart Ivy and any Phillips Hue White/White Ambiance/Color Ambiance? Physically, the Smart Ivy’s look quite different but what else? When you boil all the features down, you’re basically paying more money for Nanoleaf’s fancier looking light bulbs and losing out on all the extra functionality that the Phillips Hue line of bulbs has to offer.

NanoLeaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue – Which smart LED bulbs should you get?

At Smart Home Reviews Eh!, we take the time to use the products in our own homes before doing a review. Little did we know how many times we had to swap light bulbs in the various rooms that we place either a Smart Ivy or Hue bulb. It’s very time consuming!

We’ll be honest, it took us a while to wrap our heads around smart home LED lights. Why? Because it took a while to “break” our current understanding of what home lighting could be used for. We’ve been using the lights the same way all our lives (and we’re assuming you have as well) the jump from “dumb bulbs” to “smart, remotely controlled, custom coloured bulbs” was quite daunting. If you’re curious to see how the Philips Hue lineup stacks up against the Nanoleaf Aurora, check out the comparison!

With all that being said, we will say that the Philips Hue line of smart LED bulbs have been quite easier to use when compared to the Nanoleaf Smart Ivy bulbs. For our Nanoleaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue comparison, we’ve given the Nanoleaf Smart Ivy a score of 3.2 eh’s out of 5 and the equivalent set of Phillips Hue bulbs a score of 4.1 Eh’s out of 5. There’s are two areas where the Philips Hue is better but they deal with accessing the smart LED bulb and might not be applicable to everybody.

Get your own Philips Hue lights/luminaries on Amazon (CA/UK/DE) or on eBay!
Get the Nanoleaf Smart Ivy on Amazon (CA/UK/DE) or on eBay!

Design differences – The Smart Ivy bulbs look AWESOME

When it comes to the physical design, the Philips Hue line of bulbs look like actual light bulbs whereas the Nanoleaf Smart Ivy bulbs look very unique (we would say they look badass). We do have to give props to Nanoleaf for thinking beyond what lightbulbs can actually look like. The unique design of the Smart Ivy bulbs do have a downside which we’ll elaborate below.

Both sets of smart home LED light bulbs are dimmable though we had troubles using them with dimmer switches. When it comes to color, the Smart Ivy’s are rated to 3000k while the Hue White are rated to 4000k. However, if you buy the same priced Hue White Ambiance, you get to customize color white. Coloured lightning has been a highlight for smart home devices so the single coloured Nanoleaf product was a letdown. If you need a bit more information on smart home lighting, check out this post!

When it comes to brightness, the 800 lumen Smart Ivy lights at 3000k are brighter by a couple hundred lumens when compared to the Philips Hue bulbs at a similar color setting. However, the Hue bulbs are brightest at 4000k at 800 lumens which means they’re the brighter, warmer bulb whereas the Smart Ivy is a brighter, cooler bulb. From our perspective, get the Hue bulbs for your living room/bedroom and the Smart Ivy’s for the working area/office in your homes.

Setting up any of the Philips Hue bulbs has been quite easy. The Nanoleaf Smart Ivy bridge took multiple tries and we almost quit reviewing the product. Why? Because we couldn’t get it to connect to our home network. It looks multiple resets before it worked (we have no idea why). Both products have been stable since setup and the bulbs still connect easily despite being moved around dozens of times.

Before we move onto functionality, the last thing we will point out is that the Smart Ivy bulbs will emit light in a pattern. The LED’s aren’t diffused so depending on where you put them, you’re going to see bright spots.

Functionality differences – Philips Hue comes out on top

Philips Hue blows the Nanoleaf out of the when it comes to overall functionality. In our opinion, the biggest reason for this discrepancy is the fact that Philips has been at this for several years now whereas Nanoleaf is still relatively new at the smart light bulb game. An example of Philip’s maturity is the integration of their Hue bulbs into other third party apps. We were surprised to see Sleep Cycle simplify the process of waking up with a Philips Hue bulb.

The biggest difference for us is that Nanoleaf doesn’t offer stand alone remote access. Philips allows the Hue bulbs to be accessed through their own service. If you want to control your Smart Ivy bulbs remotely, you’ll need to setup an Apple TV or iPad as your Apple Home command center.

Nanoleaf also doesn’t offer any wearables integration which might not be a big deal for most people but it is a feature that Philips has.

The Nanoleaf app itself focuses heavily on the Aurora with almost no UI dedicated to the Smart Ivy bulbs. It’s almost like the Smart Ivy’s are an after thought.

Compatibility – Nanoleaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue

When it comes to compatibility, both sets of lights work with IFTTT, Apple Home, Alexa, Wink, Smart Things and Google Home. There isn’t a service that we’ve come across that doesn’t work with these lights which is nice. This isn’t the case for smart LED lights from Sylvania (Osram).

We hope our Nanoleaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue comparisons has helped you out. If you liked this post and are considering getting some for yourself, check out our links to purchase your products. Let us know if you have any comments or questions in the comments below!