Smart home gadgets can make your life way more convenient. The trouble is, a lot of them aren't very good — and they can become more of a headache than a convenience.

That's particularly true for smart lighting. If you know what to get, smart lighting can be surprisingly helpful and do some pretty cool things: turn off when you leave the house, turn on when you come home, make lights warmer or cooler throughout the day, and flash to notify you of events or new information, making lighting even more useful than normal.

But it’s really, really important that you pick out the right system. A good smart lighting system is easy to install, easy to use, and gives you plenty of options for how to set up your home. A bad system, on the other hand, might fail all of that and be a pain day after day. And once you buy into a lighting system, you’re more-or-less stuck with it, so you’d better make the right choice.

Fortunately, there’s one clear standout for best smart lights.

The Winner

Compared to every other lighting system, Philips Hue is a dream. From initial setup, to adding new bulbs, to telling your lights what to do day in and out, using Hue is a smooth and simple process. And when the occasional problem does pop up, it’s usually pretty easy to solve. That’s rare among smart lighting systems.

Here’s something you should know about smart lights before diving into all of this: for the most part, you can’t just buy lights and start screwing them in. First, you have to choose which lighting system you want, and you have to buy a hub for it — think of it like buying a router before you can connect your laptop to Wi-Fi. You have to install the hub, set it up with your phone, and then sync every individual light with the hub before using it.

Hue does the best job of any system we tested at making all of that painless. Same goes for when it comes to controlling lights. Multiple people within a home can use the Hue app (or Siri, if you have an iOS device, or Alexa, if you have an Echo) to quickly turn lights on or off, change their color, or dim them. And while one big drawback to Hue is that you won’t be able to use your light switches anymore (turning them off will knock your lights offline), Philips sells remotes that you can mount on the wall right beside a switch and do the job about as well.

Philips offers three different starter kits: one with plain white lights, one with full color lights, and one with white lights that can switch between cooler and warmer tones. That’s the one I’d recommend, as it’s much cheaper than the full color lights, includes basic color-changing features that you’ll actually use and appreciate (you don’t really need a green kitchen lamp, do you?), and is also bundled with a remote. Depending on what you get, you’ll have two or three lights to start; the system can support 50 or so, so you can fill an entire house with them if you want to.

No smart light system is perfect right now, and that includes Hue. I encountered a few bugs in its new Android app, and its simplicity often means using workarounds (like IFTTT or additional smart systems and sensors) to get your lights to do everything you want. But the potential is there for those who want it. And for those who just want smart lights that’ll work, no other system can come close to Hue.

The Runner-Up

Our review of Samsung SmartThings Lighting & Energy Starter Bundle Verge Score 7 out of 10

Say you want to get a little more advanced. You want your lights to turn on when your smart door lock opens, to turn off when your connected car drives away, and to flash when your security camera detects movement outside. Hue can’t do most of that on its own, but Samsung’s SmartThings can.

A word of warning: while SmartThings sells a lighting starter kit, it’s not a lighting system — it’s a full-fledged smart home system, meant to control everything from bulbs to power outlets to washing machines. That means it’s a lot more flexible than something like Philips Hue, but it’s also a lot more complicated.

For all of that, I still found SmartThings easier to set up and use as a lighting system than most other dedicated lighting systems. And there are also some big advantages that come with SmartThings’ openness to other products: you can install smart lights from multiple manufacturers (in fact, Samsung doesn’t even make its own bulbs; the starter kit comes with the Osram bulb you see above), and you can integrate the lighting far more naturally into your home. I particularly like that SmartThings supports various smart light switches, letting you replace your existing switches with ones that can turn off smart lights without entirely disabling them.

The downside, again, is that this is all a bit more complicated. Some of the bulbs you can buy are better and easier to install than others. And more importantly, SmartThings’ app just isn’t optimized for lighting control, requiring you to dig through menus and turn each light off one by one. That might not matter as much once you have a houseful of devices set up and automated, but it’s frustrating if you’re starting with a more just a room or two.

SmartThings is a compelling option if you’re certain you want a more advanced lighting setup and may even want to expand beyond that in the future. But if that’s not you, go with something more straightforward, like Hue. If you really want, you can always add SmartThings on top of it in the future.

The Others

Our review of LIFX Color 1000 Verge Score 7 out of 10 LIFX takes an interesting approach to smart bulbs. Rather than requiring a hub, LIFX bulbs connect directly to your router over Wi-Fi. That means you can easily set up just a few of them; the downside is, if there’s a corner of your home where Wi-Fi is patchy, just imagine how annoying it’s going to be when the bulbs can’t connect. LIFX’s bulb color isn’t as rich as Hue’s, and the bulbs are fairly large, too — enough so to stick out the top of one of my lamps. With a great app and easy setup, they’re a good choice if you just want a bulb or two, but you won’t want to do an entire home with them. Buy for $59.00 from Amazon

Our review of Lutron Caséta Wireless Verge Score 6.5 out of 10 Lutron’s Caséta Wireless system is a bit different than everything else here, since it lets you program and wirelessly control existing light bulbs, rather than brand-new smart bulbs. This can be really great for overhead lighting if you feel comfortable installing in-wall switches. But for lamps it’s a bit less elegant, since it requires you to plug a big control switch into every outlet you want to use.

Our review of GE C Starter Kit Verge Score 6 out of 10 C by GE are more of a novelty than a lighting system. I don’t mean that to sound deeply critical — that’s just what GE’s going for. The bulbs use Bluetooth, which means you have to be at home and in range to control them. They can all be dimmed, but only two out of each four-pack change color temperature, and between only three preset colors as well (one of which, the evening tone, I found to be far too harsh). But for all their downsides, these work great if you want to try out smart lighting without spending too much. Buy for $70.00 from C by GE Store

Our review of OSRAM LIGHTIFY Starter Kit Verge Score 5 out of 10 Osram makes a good temperature-changing smart light, but its actual connected lighting system doesn’t quite cut it. It’s frustrating to set up and can only be controlled from 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi networks within your home, which is far too limiting. And while its app is straightforward enough to get by, you can get something easier to use, with more features, and a better design elsewhere

Our review of Belkin WeMo Lighting Kit Verge Score 4 out of 10 Aside from Belkin’s light bulbs, there aren’t a lot of bright spots here. WeMo’s setup is more frustrating than it should be, but the bigger problem is its app, which constantly glitches out and disrupts what you’re doing. It makes the system a complete pain to use. WeMo does, at least, offer in-wall switches, so you can avoid the app to some extent if you really want to. Buy for $49.99 from Belkin