My biggest concerns are security and reliability. I’m less concerned with cost. I already have lutron caseta in the house so I don’t think I’m going to have that many lighting devices. Hue seems to have the best selection of indoor and outdoor units under one ecosystem.
I’m using around 85~ bulbs with two hubs and a Lutron RadioRA 3 system. The hubs are connected to Home Assistant, and I use automations to set the Hue lights to “off” when the switches are turned off to keep everything in sync. It works quite well. I can’t speak for using HA as a hub since I don’t do that, but with the setup I have I can turn the lights on and instantly request a color change or set brightness and it works very reliably.
I’ve had Hue for around 10 years now and have never had any issues with it. I’ve even written some apps to do things I wanted since they have a very well-documented, local API on each hub.
The quality seems to be pretty high. I’ve had bulbs mixed into the bunch that have survived 5-7 years and several home moves.
Expensive, yes. Quality seems to be decent though.
Hue bulbs just work. I’ve used other wifi bulbs (no competing Zigbee bulbs yet) in the past and you have to work around their flaws and drawbacks. The Hue bulbs just feel like they’re behaving exactly how you’d expect them to. Can’t really compliment a lightbulb much more than that.
10/10 would buy again!
My whole house is hue, I would recommend them to a friend.