Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsNot perfect, but offers more lighting options
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2024
My husband and I first started with Phillips smart light bulbs, there is a pretty big feud between the two brands (Phillips vs Govee) so I thought I would share my comparisons between the two to help anyone on the fence on which one they should go with. I would say the biggest differences between the two are:
Connectivity:
We never had issues with our Google home hub being able to control our 3 Phillips light bulbs, whereas with Govee it is literally every time we try to use voice to turn on the lights there is always one or two off, sometimes it won't turn on at all while showing on our hub that it is on, and if you try and turn them off or adjust the brightness it snaps back to being 100% on without them actually being on and you just have to go into the Govee app to control them. However, this led to my husband and I arguing a bunch because I wanted the Phillips light bulbs back and he wanted to stay with the Govee, we found a compromise that was purchasing a cheap stand lamp from Walmart and weirdly I've had connectivity issues between the 3 Phillips bulbs and Wiz ever since, no voice control just trying to use the app to turn them off and on and also with the schedule setting automatically trying to turn them off and on, I have no idea why. So it could be that connectivity greatly varies between the two depending on your light fixture (maybe something to do with voltage or wiring?), potentially how close and far your things are to one another (the lamp is further from the home hub vs our ceiling fan is closer), and I've even noticed that weather and it seems like humidity seems to influence it. Reliably during heavy thunderstorms and when our smart thermostat is reading high humidity in the house I have severe connectivity issues between both Govee and Phillips smart bulbs.
Brightness:
Govee is considerably more dim than Phillips bulbs. I was actually able to keep my indoor plants super happy with Phillips and they immediately stopped thriving when we switched to Govee, which is why I wanted to switch back to Phillips (connectivity issues aside). This makes them unusable as growlights and they also don't even offer a growlight mode in their app, you can set the color to purple but that is even more considerably dim than having it be white. I've found that the Phillips works better on bright white than growlight mode anyway, but it's still nice that Phillips is happy to also function as a grow light in general, if you care about that. The dimness of the Govee isn't so bad that you will feel like you are in the dark or anything like that, but if you're ever working on something where you need a bright light to be able to see what you're doing (I like to do puzzles and diamond paintings) I struggle with the Govee, and in general they feel more like mood lighting and create more of a calm atmosphere especially on the warm yellow setting. I keep our office on white, leaning more towards cold white, so I can see everything I'm doing in there. I've found that max cold white looks weird and makes my eyes hurt like there is too much blue color in it or something.
Controls:
Only one account can control Govee lights with Govee whereas Phillips allows more than one account to connect and control lights, and the way that they do it is secure with one account being the main account that allows access to the lights from other accounts (the main account gives you a code to join the "family" with). I'm not sure why Govee doesn't offer this, maybe it can cause security issues? Who knows. But it hasn't been a huge issue, I just signed into my husband's account, I've signed in once and it has never made me sign in again to verify that I'm me or anything, we can both use the app at the same time just fine, there has been no downside to using one account for two people.
Lighting Options & Color:
Govee offers considerably more lighting options and more creative ones at that, the lights can cycle through colors and have different blinking patterns or listen to sounds and change with the sound. My husband prefers Govee for this reason and likes to mess with the lights like they're a fidget toy. Phillips has some colors and different color modes to choose from as well as brightness settings, but beyond that it is just on/off and the color presets it does offer are less interesting and fun in comparison. The colors with Govee lights are also much richer and deeper in color, I think how dim they are is actually why this is, with Phillips being more bright and producing more white light than anything else the colors appear very white/desaturated.
CONCLUSION:
We just use both and like both for different reasons. I have my Phillips growlight lamp and then the rest of our house uses Govee. When I'm doing something that needs a lot of direct light, I have a moveable table that I just move more directly under the light so I can see better.