Smart LED light bulbs are one of the easiest ways to get into the IoT space. These smart lighting solutions let you control your home's illumination from your phone and other connected devices, and in addition to that practicality, they also inject some fun into your space. Color-changing bulbs have a plethora of RGB options for you to customize the lighting mood for your next movie night, date night or game day, or you can opt for cozy warm white light when you need to unwind at the end of a long day. It goes without saying that many of these smart LED light bulbs work with Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant, so if you already have a smart home setup in the works, you can find one that fits into your chosen ecosystem. And arguably the best thing about these devices is that they can fit into any budget; affordable and advanced options have flooded the space over the past few years. We've tested out a bunch of smart lights over the years, and these are our current favorites. If you've done any research into smart lights, you've probably come across Philips Hue bulbs.

One of the best places to start when building a smart home ecosystem is smart lights. Not only are they relatively affordable compared to other IoT gadgets, often costing between $10 and $50 a bulb, but they can also completely change the feel of your home. You can go from boring and analogue to colorful and automated within minutes, and there are endless possibilities when it comes to creating funky-colored light scenes, setting schedules and more. But like the rest of the smart home space over the last few years, there are now more players in smart lighting than ever before. We tested out some of the most popular smart lights on the market and found that most of them are quite good, but there are differences in compatibility, color quality and mobile app usability that are worth considering before deciding which system will be right for your home.

If you want to reset your Philips Hue bridge and bulb for some reason and you are not well aware of how you can reset them. Then this article will exactly tell you how to reset your Philip Hue Bridge and Hue Bulb. Once you finish doing this you are going to notice LED lights on the front part will be flashing which means the reset is processing. And once the lights stop blinking your Philip Hue Bridge is done resetting. And by this time your device gets deleted from the app.

Amazon is making it a little easier to get started with a smart home. The internet giant is selling a bundle that pairs the latest-generation Echo with two Philips Hue white light bulbs for $80 -- a full $50 below the official asking price. And when the Echo includes its own Zigbee hub, you won't need to buy any additional bridges to get started. It's not the absolute lowest price we've seen for this combo (it has dipped as low as $70), but we haven't seen a discount this sizeable for months. The Echo may look like a light-up snow globe, but that's about the only significant quirk.

Across the board, Philips Hue LED lights topped all of our tests thanks to an easy setup, a robust suite of features, and an intuitive app. Additional support with smart assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri adds tremendous benefit to an already impressive portfolio. Once you throw in the additional rainbow of possible light colors, these are without a doubt the best smart bulbs you can buy. The only downside is that unlike some other options, Philips Hue lights do require a hub (the Philips Hue Bridge) in order to work remotely. While they can be controlled over Bluetooth, that will only work when you're physically near the bulb.

Amazon is known to discount an Echo device every now and then, but now? The internet retailer is running a sale for many of its smart speakers, and in some cases they're steep bargains. The drops are sharp enough that they may be just what you need to get started on a smart home, or to finish a setup that might have been too costly before. The best deal may be for an Echo Studio (pictured above) bundled with a Philips Hue bulb -- you can buy it for $170, or $60 off. It clearly has the best sound quality of the Echo lineup, and it supports both high-resolution audio as well as home theater integration.

Lighting might be the easiest way to start a smart home, but upgrading all of your bulbs can quickly add up, especially if you want to add color to your rooms. Today's the day to stock up: Amazon is selling Philips' most popular Hue White and Color Ambiance smart bulbs, the A19 standard LED and BR30 flood light, for $40 each, a savings of 20 percent. It's not quite the lowest price we've ever seen, but it's a great deal. Philips Hue bulbs are leaders in smart home lighting for a reason: They're longer lasting, more versatile, and more expandable than most of their competitors. With support for all three voice assistants--Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa--as well as a recently updated app that lets you easily set up scenes, location awareness, and timers for your entire system, the Hue bulbs are tough to beat at any price.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. We considered more than 20 smart-light-bulb systems and then spent eight weeks testing 10 contenders, confounding a family of four by constantly changing how their lights worked. After all that, we determined that the Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance A19 is the best all-around smart LED bulb. Hue lets you change your lighting color easily and does everything other smart light bulbs do, and it's also part of a larger product and app ecosystem, allowing for more flexibility and creativity than any other smart bulb we tested. It's not the cheapest bulb we tested, but its reliable performance and wide compatibility make it a solid choice for any smart-home enthusiast or newbie. Adding a set of smart light bulbs is an easy way to get started building a smart-home system. We researched all the standard A19-style smart bulbs (the kind that fit traditional lamps and fixtures), and then tested more than 10 models and the systems they work with. In the end, the first popular smart bulb is still the one that outshines (sorry about that) all the others. Unless you already have an Echo Plus, the Hue system requires the use of a separate Hue Bridge, which supports a home of 50 bulbs (available individually) but does add to the overall cost. The Philips Hue setup is simple (we recommend the White and Color Ambiance A19 Starter Kit, which packages a Hue Bridge and either three or four bulbs), and the bulbs' wide interoperability with other apps and smart-home systems makes the Hue series the most flexible and feature-rich smart bulb available. If you're set on a color-changing bulb but insist on more light output, the LIFX Gen 3 beats any color-changing bulb we tried. An individual LIFX bulb is a little more expensive than a Hue, but each LIFX is brighter, so you might be able to get away with fewer bulbs to color-wash your room.

The "plus" in the Amazon Echo Plus is an integrated ZigBee smart-home hub. It's a feature that boosts this smart speaker's price tag by a third compared to the $100 second-generation Echo, and by a factor of three compared to the $50 second-generation Echo Dot. Having one smart appliance do the job of two sounds like a good idea, but most people will be happier with a more powerful smart-home hub that works in conjunction with Alexa, even if the combination costs more. Amazon is way out in front when it comes to enabling voice control of the smart home, thanks to partnerships with all the major players--DIY platforms like Samsung SmartThings and the Wink Hub 2 as well as big installers such as Vivint Smart Home and ADT Pulse--and a deep commitment to helping any and every interested third-party manufacturer tap into its Amazon Voice Service (i.e., its Alexa digital assistant). I can recommend any Echo model--except this one.

The holiday season is in full swing, which means we're all whipping out our decorations and decking our homes out for the festivities ahead. That means it's time to get your spook on. Between monstrous masks that evoke the horror icons who haunt our nightmares (thanks, Chucky), and our favorite home decor (like dangling skeletons and that cobweb gunk you can never seem to fully scrape off), you've got plenty of ways to make your house the scariest on the block. But it's 2017, and you don't need to pull out all your decorations just to get in the Halloween spirit. We're living in the future, and all you need is a smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo and a few connected devices to transform any pad into a creepy crypt fit for the damned.