Are you looking to spice up one of the rooms in your home with some smart home lighting? Good choice on the smart lights. But the question now is, which smart light setup do you go with? The Philips Hue line of light strips and luminaries or the Nanoleaf Aurora?

Right off the bat, I believe these two products serve two different purposes. From my perspective, the Philips Hue is used to highlight your room whereas the Aurora is like a centrepiece and less of a light.

So in the next few minutes, I’m going to cover the design differences between the two products, talk about the functionality each one has to offer and cover how I would personally use these products.

Nanoleaf Smart Ivy vs. Philips Hue:    • Who is the WINNER? -  Nanoleaf Smart ...  

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When it comes to design, the Aurora stands out. It just looks cool whereas the Philips Hue Go and Bloom look like bowls of lights.

Each set of lights is dimmable and both allow you to customize the color of the light. When it comes to brightness, the 9-paneled Aurora is going to much brighter than a single Hue go or Bloom but if you’re going with the Philips bulbs, you’re probably going to be getting several different bulbs.

The Aurora takes a bit more effort to setup as it is semi-permantley mounted but you can swap the provided mounts 3M command strips to add a bit flexibility if you want to change the panel setup. Using the 3M command strips with the Aurora is much easier than using the Command strips with the Philips Hue LED lights.

When it comes to functionality, both Nanoleaf and Philips have apps that allow you to control the color as well as set scenes for the product. In general, I would have to say that the Philips Hue app is a bit easier to use than the Nanoleaf app. I’ve only run into a couple of minor issues when adding Philip Hue bulbs but the Nanoleaf’s have been quite difficult to deal with.

So when how would I use these products? In short, I see the Philips Hue accessories complimenting a room whereas the Nanoleaf is a stand alone accessory. According to my sister the architect, both product offers different uses. The Phillips Hue is shaped like traditional lightning whereas the Nanoleaf is more modern so it depends on people’s taste. The Philips is what you would expect for typical lighting and the Nanoleaf is more of an artwork or centrepiece for a room. All of that makes sense to me.

My line of thought for the Nanoleaf Aurora is to put it up into any room where you plan to entertain people.

In my living room, my wife has a bunch of paintings put up and the entire setup revolves around those colors. So there really isn’t any space for an Aurora and really, the aurora would distract from the paintings. For this living room, I would definitely use the Philips Hue Bloom or Go lights to highlight the paintings and really set the mood by placing coloured bulbs in the lamps and wall sockets. I would even consider putting an LED strip on the bottom of the mantle and definitely in the cabinets below the TV.

If you need more ideas on where to put smart LED bulbs, check out my Smart LED vs Switch’s video. I’ve got several other examples of where I would use these Philips Hue Bulbs.

Now back to my living room. if there weren’t any paintings, I would probably put the Aurora the wall between the cabinets because it still requires power and the power cable to the lights would really bother me on my mantle. I would still get a couple of coloured bulbs but I would only use them in the lamps to supplement the colors coming from the Aurora.

Where else would I put the Aurora? In the bedroom, having it behind your head would be useful in terms of reading in bed. I guess it depends on how much time you spend in your bedroom. The Aurora would be a hard buy for me to put in my bedroom since I don’t spend a lot of awake time in the room. I’d still definitely get a smart coloured bulb for the night lamp though. If you spend lots of time in your room than the Aurora might be worth in.

How about in the kitchen? I wouldn’t since I personally want normal coloured light while I prep for food. Plus, most modern kitchens have enough stuff in it that sticking an aurora might make the space seem a bit overcrowded.

That’s why I say the best place for the Aurora is basically any room where you plan to entertain people. it’s an expensive accessory so you need to pick and choose where to put it.