Philips Hue Vs Nanoleaf Essentials

<Updated 18th Oct 2023>

In February 2021 I purchased my first 2 Nanoleaf A19 bulbs/globes, so I thought I'd compare with Philips (AKA Signify) Hue A19 Ambience colour bulbs/globes. 

I was expecting this to be more of a live post, that I would update regularly as I got more experience with Nanoleaf in particular. Oooops. Sorry about that!

The Environment

First of all, I am comparing like with like here. In the Living Room, I have a HomePod mini, which is acting as a Thread border router. The Hue Hub that the bulbs/globes use is also in the Living Room.

Both sets of bulbs/globes are colour and can deliver Ambient lighting. At point of update, though, I should point out that Nanoleaf have HomeKit specific bulbs/globes but are also now shipping Matter compliant. Just to make it really confusing, it seems that the HomeKit products have been discontinued in the USA and only Matter are available there. Ambient lighting no longer works in HomeKit with Matter v1.1 as it does not support this capability. It is still possible to do it in the Nanoleaf app.... but I hate having to use multiple apps. Rumour has it that it will be supported in Matter 1.2, which we are still waiting for..

I had installed in virtually identical lamps, with 2 bulbs/globes per lamp. The only difference was one is a table lamp and the other one is a standing lamp. They are, however, a set, and the head of these is identical.

The test on the 25th Feb 2021, I was running iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/AudioOS 14.5 Public Beta 2, except on my iPad Pro, where I was still running 14.4.

Comparison:        Nanoleaf Essentials                   Philips Hue

Price                    $19.95¹                                      $49.97¹

Connectivity        BLE/Thread                              Zigbee*

Lumens               1100                                           800

colours                16 million                                  16 million

Standby power    0.17W                                        0.5W

Max power          9W                                            9.5W

Voltage                110-240V                                 110-130V**

Hub Required      No                                            Yes (Max 50 accessories per hub supported)*

¹ Prices correct at time of writing
*Note: Hue supports BLE as well, but not for HomeKit thus why a Hub is required.

** When I moved to the UK, I find that my USA bulbs worked just fine on 240v.

Implementation

Philips Hue

This is covered in so many places, I see little value in doing it here. Essentially it is a multi-step process.

1. Add the Hue bridge to HomeKit, if not already done.
2. Go to Settings, and light setup inside the Hue app.
3. Discover new lights
4. When light is discovered, give it a new name if you wish
5. Go to room set up, add the new lights to which ever room you want.
6. Should now appear in HomeKit, modify as you wish although anything that is different from the Hue app will cause an informational message in Hue.

In my case, I created an Accessory Group called "Table Lamp" and had both bulbs/globes in that group.

Nanoleaf Essentials

This is just a standard HomeKit accessory addition. The HomeKit code is supplied in 2 places. It is printed on the bulb/globe itself and also on a card inside the box. Not too surprisingly, you use the one on the card.

When it is added, you can then use the Nanoleaf app to see if there is a firmware update. You do this by going into Settings, this is the 3 dots in the lower left hand corner of the App, and then selecting firmware updates. I had to do this from 14.4 as I kept finding 14.5 would fail. Not Nanoleaf's problem. This firmware upgrade gave, amongst other things, Thread support.

Over the years, I have found that Nanoleaf's update has been patchy especially as I've added more and more Thread devices. It would incorrectly show other vendors devices as theirs. However, they seem to have fixed this now and I have no recently found this to be a problem. Still, it took years to resolve!

Once more I created an Accessory group, in this case with the Nanoleaf's and called it "Standing Light"

How do I know it's using Thread?

Ironically, I used the Eve App to find out if it's using Thread or not.

There are a number of different kinds of Thread devices, this is showing 2.

You will note that the Nanoleaf devices are showing as Routers, of which you can have up to 32 in a Thread network.

The Eve Door & Window Sensor is showing as a Sleepy End Device. I believe it is actually a Synchronised Sleepy End Device (SSED) as it wakes up on a periodic basis to communicate. This is in addition to a state change.

What's not shown here is the HomePod mini, which is acting as the Border Router, essentially a bridge in to/out of Thread.

The scene baby! Yeah!

OK, I've been watching some Austin Powers recently!

To be completely fair I created a scene to turn on/off the lamps at the same time.

When I run the scene, as you can see from the video, the Nanoleaf comes on slightly in front of the Hue. Not by much though. What is also interesting is the way that the Hue switches off, it gradually dims which is more like an incandescent lamp. The Nanoleaf just switches off. It'll be interesting to see how that works over time. Will people still want the equivalent to incandescent, or will they want it to gradually dim/brighten? I think it should be a user selectable option.

<Update 18/10/23>

The specs of the lights have now changed.

Comparison:        Nanoleaf Essentials                  Philips Hue

Price                    $19.95¹/£13.99^1,2                      $64.99¹/£54.99

Connectivity       HK over BLE/Thread                 HK over WiFi to a hub then Zigbee*

Lumens               1100                                           1100

colours                16 million                                  16 million

Standby power    0.17W                                        0.5W

Max power          9W                                            11W

Voltage                110-240V                                 240V

Hub Required      No                                            Yes (Max 50 accessories per hub supported)*

¹ Prices correct at time of writing. 

² Matter bulbs are £19.99 in the UK

*Note: Hue supports BLE as well, but not for HomeKit thus why a Hub is required. 

Since I performed this test, I moved to the UK and I left most of my Hue bulbs/globes behind although I did bring a few and especially light strips. I've also had to buy some more to fit certain lights that Nanoleaf does not cover.

The biggest area that I retained Hue was for the lighting behind my TV using Hue Sync and Hue Play. However, I recently replaced this with Nanoleaf 4D (I'll do a seperate write up) and this meant I only had 9 Hue lights left. I've now moved the 9 Hue lights to my Legrand gateway and have remove the Hue hub. Incidentally, I sold my Hue product for just under 50% of what it cost me, but which more than paid for the Nanoleaf 4D. Ironically, the only functionality I have lost is the ambient lighting but the lights that were left did not require that capability.