mvayaskNanoleaf’s new Essentials Matter smart lighting line is a significant step in the right direction for the smart home. With three types of lights currently available – an A19 bulb, a BR30 bulb, and a light strip – along with more on the way, these Essentials are not only affordable but also easy to set up and compatible with various platforms. They are even cheaper and brighter than Philips Hue bulbs and offer many of the same features without the need for a proprietary hub. They operate through Thread, which results in a speedy light bulb experience, and as Matter devices, they are compatible with any Matter ecosystem, including Google Home, Apple Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Amazon Alexa, which has recently announced its support for Matter over Thread.
However, there are certain caveats, especially for Apple Home users. Firstly, these are Matter-only devices. Unlike the previous Nanoleaf Essentials line, these lights are not HomeKit certified. Although they work with Apple Home through Matter, they do not support Apple-specific features such as Adaptive Lighting. Additionally, they require a Matter controller and a Thread border router (which can be a single device but must be from the platform you want to add them to) to be used outside of the Nanoleaf app. It is advisable to do this as the Nanoleaf app is relatively limited compared to many lighting platforms, such as the highly featured Hue app. For instance, it does not support scheduling for the Essentials bulbs, and Matter bulbs cannot be added to groups with other Nanoleaf lights.
If you are looking to expand or start with smart lighting, the Nanoleaf Essentials Matter lights are a good option. However, Apple Home users, especially those with the earlier Essentials bulbs, may find them a step backward – at least for now. It is possible that these issues will be resolved as the Matter standard matures, if Apple adds Adaptive Lighting capability for Matter bulbs and Nanoleaf migrates its new and existing products to Matter. The company has stated that its old Essentials line will not be upgraded to Matter and has been discontinued but will still be supported.
I tested the Nanoleaf Essential Matter A19 bulb ($19.99), BR30 bulb ($19.99), and 80-inch light strip ($49.99, with $19.99 for a 40-inch expansion strip). Nanoleaf also has a GU10 bulb ($49.99 for a three-pack) and a recessed downlight ($34.99) on the horizon. Although it does not have a vast ecosystem like competitors like Philips Hue, GE Cync, and WiZ, it is a good starting point. Especially considering that with Matter, it is easier to mix and match smart bulbs from different manufacturers.
The Essentials Matter line offers excellent value for lights with full color, tunable white, and dynamic lighting capabilities. Comparable Hue products start at $49 for a single A19 bulb, the same price as a three-pack of Nanoleaf bulbs. Products from TP-Link, GE Cync, and WiZ are more affordable but use Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth Mesh, as opposed to Thread for Nanoleaf and Zigbee for Hue. Thread is a low-power, low-latency, local mesh network designed for smart home devices. The more Thread-enabled devices, such as smart bulbs, you have, the stronger the connectivity will be. Wi-Fi can be less reliable and slower to respond, although WiZ’s Wi-Fi lights also support Matter.
The A19 Nanoleaf (with 1100 lumens) is as bright as Hue’s highest lumen $49 bulbs, with better color clarity and deeper dimming. The BR30 (1000 lumens) and light strip (2200 lumens) are similarly bright and colorful. However, in terms of product range, software, and features, Nanoleaf falls behind Hue in the ecosystem. The app is slow and confusing to use, lacks basic features like scheduling and grouping beyond rooms, and there are not as many accessories to control your lights.
Nevertheless, when paired with a compatible Matter platform, Nanoleaf’s lights perform exceptionally well, making them a suitable choice if you want to build a Matter smart lighting setup. Control through the Apple Home app, Google Home app, and SmartThings app is seamless, even faster than simply flipping a light switch (apart from the fact that you have to pull out your phone and open the app…). Voice control is slightly behind the app but barely noticeable.
You can pair the lights with motion sensors and smart buttons from other manufacturers (including Hue) in any Matter platform. I tested them with a Hue motion sensor and a Wemo Stage Scene Controller in Apple Home, and the lights reacted promptly and simultaneously. This means that they all turned on at the same time without any “popping” or delay. Occasionally, I encountered some brief “no response” issues in both the Matter and Nanoleaf apps, which may be related to Thread network problems; more on this later.
If you already have smart lights set up and want to add to them, Matter devices will work with any platform and with any device already on that platform. So, if you have Hue bulbs set up in Apple Home or GE Cync bulbs through Google Home, you can add Nanoleaf bulbs to that platform and control them all simultaneously in groups and scenes using motion sensors or smart switches.
All three Essentials lights have the same features and color options, including RGB color changing, tunable white light, and dimming functionality. The whites are clear and bright, and the colors are deep and rich. The bulb’s design – a series of triangles, squares, and polygons (technically a rhombicosidodecahedron) – seems to refract the colors better than the traditional smooth shape. However, it is a distinctive look that may not appeal to everyone.
The light strip is also not diffused, so you will have to deal with the pinprick look if it is visible – as it was in my setup, installed under a kitchen counter. But I do like the included controller on the strip that allows you to not only turn it on and off but also adjust the brightness and change the scenes manually.
The Nanoleaf app comes with several preloaded scenes that you can use to transform the Essentials into mood-setting lights. My two personal favorites are Blaze, which sets the lights to a sort of flickering firelight, and Cocoa Beach, which is a mod-ish pink, blue, and apricot melange that blends well with my mid-century modern home. There are hundreds of options, which need to be downloaded to each bulb – a somewhat laborious process. You can also create your own and even dial in the exact RGB value if you are a true color enthusiast. Once you create a scene – which works across all Nanoleaf lights, including its LED panel products – it can also be synchronized to other apps, such as Apple Home, via the cloud. However, it will only work with Nanoleaf lights.
Nanoleaf also has its own circadian lighting feature that automatically adjusts the lights from a gentle glow in the morning and evening to simulate sunrise and sunset to a brighter, more energizing daylight tone during the day. This is a feature that I look for in smart bulbs as it is one of my favorite smart lighting functions.
However, Nanoleaf’s implementation of this feature is quite basic and rather fiddly to use. I also found it to be unreliable, only sometimes successfully transitioning to the correct hue. Nanoleaf only allows for three time periods – morning, daylight, and evening – which I find to be rather limiting. Philips Hue’s similar Natural Light function breaks the day into five customizable time periods – including a night light setting so that you do not stumble around in the dark.
Nanoleaf’s previous line of Essentials bulbs worked with Apple’s Adaptive Lighting feature, but the Matter bulbs do not support it. Nanoleaf founder Gimmy Chu told me that he hopes Apple will allow Matter devices to use Adaptive Lighting. In the meantime, the circadian lighting feature in the Nanoleaf app is better than nothing.
A major promise of Matter is easy setup and cross-platform compatibility. With the Essentials lights, at least one of these aspects is true. Setting them up with one smart home platform was straightforward, whether I did it directly on the platform or through Nanoleaf’s app, as the company highly recommends. However, pairing it with a second or third platform was where difficulties arose.
To set up the lights in Apple Home, I opened the Home app, tapped the plus button, and selected Add Accessory. I scanned each device’s Matter QR code and went through the standard onboarding process for Apple Home – naming the device, adding it to a room, and so on. I did need to have an Apple Home hub that supports Thread – which includes all current Apple HomePods and most Apple TVs.
I also tried setting the lights up from Google Home initially to see if the process was as easy. It was – even easier. After resetting the bulbs, I simply brought my Android phone close to each one, and the phone detected that there was a Matter device ready for pairing. An alert popped up right on the home screen – meaning I did not even have to open an app. After tapping the notification, I scanned the device’s QR code, and the phone presented me with available apps to pair with – in this case, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings.
I chose Google Home, and the system checked that I had all the necessary requirements (including a Matter controller and Thread border router – in this case, a Nest Hub Max). Once past this approval process, the setup proceeded just like adding any device to Google Home, allowing me to name it and assign it to a room.
In both setup scenarios, the initial pairing process in the app took a good couple of minutes as the software and hardware worked behind the scenes. But I did not have to do anything – no account sign-up, no linking of clouds, no Wi-Fi password entering, no switching between apps or the phone’s settings. None of that fiddly setup that you are accustomed to when setting up a smart device. I just sat and watched some colorful animations.
From here, I could add the bulbs to the Nanoleaf app if I wanted to access Nanoleaf-specific features – such as the color scenes and adaptive lighting – and for firmware updates. For this, I had to download the Nanoleaf app, create an account (or choose Apple or Google sign-in) and grant the app network access.
The compatible bulbs then appeared as available for setup in the Firmware Update section of the Nanoleaf app, and I scanned the bulb’s QR code to add it to the app. Currently, you need the Nanoleaf app for firmware updates. It is also possible to set up the bulbs starting in the Nanoleaf app and then pair them to any available Matter platform from there. This is also the way to go if you do not have a Thread border router, as the lights can pair to your phone using Bluetooth.
The only hiccup I encountered in these two setup flows was with Google Home. The bulb paired fine but then became unresponsive in the Home app. Troubleshooting revealed that my Google Thread border router was not close enough – and I did not have enough Google Nest Thread devices between the bulb and the Google Nest Hub Max to establish the connection. I have five Thread border routers in the same room as the light bulbs, but none of them are from Google, so none of them work with Google Home. (It worked fine once I moved the Nest Hub closer.)
The fact that Thread border routers from different manufacturers do not communicate with each other yet is a major issue for Thread devices and Matter in general, especially for more mature smart homes. I currently have five Thread networks in my home – one Apple, one Google Nest, one Eero, and two from SmartThings – and I do not foresee an easy path for merging them all into one.
Theoretically, they are not competing with each other, and Matter devices on one Thread network can still communicate with Matter devices on another – at one point, I had the BR30 bulb on the Google Home Thread Network and the A19 bulb on the Apple Home Thread Network, and everything worked fine. However, one Thread network will be more robust and reliable than five separate ones.
In the above setup scenarios, I paired the bulbs to two platforms separately. But a major promise of Matter is Multi-Admin – controlling your devices from any platform and with any voice assistant, thanks to an easy, local sharing process between the platforms. All you need to do is generate a code from one app and enter it into the other, and your gadget will work regardless of which voice assistant or app you use to control it.
When I tried adding the bulbs to a second or third platform from Apple Home and Google Home, I encountered problems – just as I have with every Matter product I have tried.
While you will still enjoy many of Matter’s benefits in a single-platform household – better security, local control, and faster response times – using multiple platforms is useful. If I pair the Nanoleaf bulbs to Apple Home initially, I should then be able to add them to Google Home, so my daughter can turn on the light using her Android phone or Samsung SmartThings and I can turn it off from my Samsung smart fridge. But Multi Admin is inconsistent and difficult to figure out, and most of the time, it simply does not work.
I could pair the Nanoleaf bulbs from Google Home on an Android phone to Apple Home on iOS by generating a QR code in Google Home and scanning it with my iPhone. I could share a bulb from Apple Home to Google Home on Android by manually entering a pairing code generated by the Apple Home app. (When the Google Home iOS app supports Matter, this process will be easier.) But I could not add devices to SmartThings from either platform.
Although I eventually managed to get all three Nanoleaf lights working on all three smart home platforms (I did not test on Amazon Alexa as the feature was not yet available), I was only successful when starting from Samsung SmartThings on an Android phone using a SmartThings Station as a Matter controller and Thread border router, and then sharing to Apple Home or Google Home.
The common failure point here is SmartThings, and although it is likely an edge case that anyone would want or need to pair a light bulb to three different platforms, the fact is that it should work and it does not – not without going through a lot of hoops in a specific order.
Another major promise of Matter is mixing and matching Matter-compatible lights from any brand and using them in any smart home ecosystem without creating a bunch of third-party user accounts and connecting them to the platforms in the cloud. And here, the Essentials line excelled.
Nanoleaf’s inexpensive bulbs can perform all the functions allowed by Matter – which are limited by the Matter specification to turning on/off, dimming, and changing color. If you do not fully utilize Nanoleaf bulbs, then the cool extra features in the Nanoleaf app will not be of much benefit to you, but this is the case with any other smart lighting line, including Hue’s.
Mixing and matching will make it easier to equip your home with smart lights but at the expense of some of the more interesting features of smart lighting – color scenes, circadian lighting, and so on. Each smart home platform can enable some of these features, but there is a tension here. Manufacturers like Nanoleaf risk becoming commoditized by allowing their signature features to be accessible to any old light bulb with Matter certification. This is why Wemo recently decided to withdraw from making Matter devices.
There are numerous companies offering color LED lighting, many with features similar to Hue and Nanoleaf: GE Cync, WiZ, Wyze, Meross, and TP-Link Kasa and Tapo, to name just a few. However, only a few of these have promised Matter support, and only one has delivered – WiZ, whose bulbs can be purchased as low as $8.50 each, started rolling out its update last week.
Nanoleaf is currently the only option that works over Thread. In terms of brightness, color quality, dimming, and response time, the Nanoleaf Matter bulbs are as good as Hue’s for a much lower price, although they lack several Hue features such as scheduling and grouping. And while many Wi-Fi options are cheaper, in my experience, Wi-Fi-connected bulbs are slow and unreliable. While Thread still has issues to be resolved, its speed, solid performance, and comparative reliability are three aspects that I definitely want to see more in my smart home.
