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I regard the ritual of putting up holiday lights with curiosity and fascination. The amount of time and energy people put into risking life and limb to climb all over their homes in extreme weather to put up lights they will only take down a month or two later puzzles me to no end. And why just Christmas lights? Why don't we all put up lights for Valentine's and St. Patty's Day and Pride month?

Permanent outdoor lights are a way to enjoy all the holiday hoopla with none of the danger or annual labor. You install them once, and leave them up all year. They don't look exactly like normal holiday string lights, but the effect is largely the same: a festive, colorful display.

The lights are installed under your eaves or gutters and project light back onto the house. If you like, you can face them out like standard holiday lights—on your roof, for instance; they'll work fine that way too. Moreover, the impact made by permanent lights puts most incandescent or LED lights to shame. I can light my house up like a disco ball visible from space. If that intimidates you, it shouldn't: The added benefit of these lights is that you can adjust the brightness, color, motion, and timing of the display, all from an app on your phone.

Create a custom light show

The lights, once installed, are fully adjustable. You can leave them white most of the year, and then change them up on holidays: Flashing oranges and purples for Halloween, a range of softly glowing pinks for Valentine's Day, and A moving rainbow for Pride.

As recently as 2023, only a few companies offered these lights, and I installed the Govee version all over my roof. This year, other brands have entered the space. I tested four of the most popular, including Govee's latest version. (I have also tested a set of the highly touted Everlights, which tend to come up a lot in online discussions of permanent light systems, but I left them out of the comparison below because of their cost—the sets start at $1,700, versus $99 for the other options.)

I found that while the design of the lights themselves certainly matters, in most cases, the quality of the app is a key factor. Some apps are better at offering subtle, beautifully designed preset scenes you can choose between. (At least one app was really bad at it.) Some apps made switching things up easy, while others required digging through manus to find the right settings.

The sets I reviewed all attach to your home with 3M tape or something similar, while some units are designed with holes so you can also use hooks or nails to attach them if you prefer. Last year I was wildly impressed that the tape remained up throughout a truly terrible Pacific Northwest winter, and yet came off easily when I was ready to remove them in order to test another unit.

In the past year, the Govee app has received an overhaul to improve the interface and refine the selection of preset options, which I found to be tasteful across the board. There's also an AI engine, so you can just say a word and the AI will create a scheme for you. It works OK, if not as well as the Eufy's: I asked for a rainbow and the entire light string flashed from red to orange to yellow to green to blue, for example.

Where Govee shines, however, is in terms of customizability. There are two options allowing you to hand-color the light strings and assign motion. You can use DIY options, or a "Finger Sketch" option; both allow you to create precisely the color string you want. Govee didn't just overhaul the colors schemes, the motions you can assign are now far more thoughtful. "Twinkle" brings the string to life with realistic, random fade in and out. "Breathe" is an undulating motion that causes the color to feel like it's part of the landscape. With gradient tools, I was able to achieve a gorgeous sunset that went from purple, to red and pink, to orange, displaying tens of shades of each color.

By comparison, Govee lights aren't the largest physical LED of the group, but I have found them quite sufficient to achieve a plentiful display. At $299 for 100 feet, I think they're a reasonable value.

Physically, the Eufy LED is the biggest bulb of all the lights I tested, and has a hole drilled for securing via nail or hook in addition to the tape. The light string is white, and there is no option for black wire, which other brands do offer.

The app experience is fantastic. The lights use the Eufy Life app, and pair easily. Once in the app, you'll see four options: Presets, of which there are many; Daily, which gives you your choice of cool, warm and medium white; AI, which allows you to ask the app to to create a scheme based off certain parameters; and personal, which allows you to DIY your own design. A feature only Eufy offers is that their strings can pair to Eufy security cameras to perform different functions when people are detected around the house.

The AI option is decent: I asked for a rainbow and got a rainbow. I asked for a sunset and got an orange, red, and purple sunset. The presets are not as organic and subtle as Govee's, but they are plentiful and can be altered easily. The DIY option allows you to assign a color to each light in the string, and then assign a motion effect, though there aren't as many motion options as Govee and configuring gradients can be time-consuming.

While I'd still choose Govee for the additional configuration options and choice of wire color, the Eufy app experience is better, and the lights are $100 cheaper. Updates could also add more customization options in the future.

This is the first product I've tested from the Hubspace line. Hubspace is Home Depot's attempt to get all of the brands it sells on one standard, all run from the Hubspace app, which I wrote about back in January. Given that, I expected an app experience that was simplified, with an exceptionally easy to use interface and a clear path to support.

Indeed, the app is quite simple, and connecting the lights is easier than any other brand: Scan the QR code on the lights and the app needs no more configuration to start working. The downside is that the simplification means you don't have many options for light schemes. There is one scheme for Christmas, one for Halloween, etc. You can configure your own to some degree, but doing so is quite difficult. One feature that this app has the others do not is a gradient tool that allows you to set a start and end color for the gradient, but it's buried within the app and hard to use.

This brand offers a larger LED light, and each light has a hole so you can physically attach it to the house with a nail or hook instead of tape.

This is the least expensive of the all the lights, but the strings are only 50 feet long. A starter kit for $99 isn't bad value, but I think the lack of functionality and options is a major shortcoming.

Enbrighten's schtick is charitable—half the profits for each product sold go to charity. If I hadn't tested all the lights and were choosing on vibes, that might be the compelling reason to buy these. Unfortunately, I found the app experience and the lights themselves disappointing.

It began with the pairing experience, which was the most painful of any lights I tested. Though the app could find the lights easily, actually pairing them took a few attempts, with the app timing out a number of times. Once paired, your options to alter the lights are very limited. There are just a dozen or so preset schemes, and while you can add your own, doing so is clumsy. I was only able to change the entire string to one color with a movement effect. The whole point of these LED strings is that they can achieve millions of colors, so if I wanted purple, why not allow me to create an ombre or gradient? Instead, I could choose from just 64 colors, change the brightness, and select the movement.

These are quite clearly a dupe of lights from Govee and Eufy, and at $249.99, I didn't find enough value to choose them over those other products, no matter how much I admire the company ethos.

If I was someone who put up holiday lights each year (instead of throwing a Menorah in the window and calling it a day) this would be a "take my money" situation: Install lights once and never have to worry about winding, storing, untangling, and replacing burned out bulbs again.

There's also the delight factor. While you can just leave the lights on white all year round or not use them at all (they more or less disappear into the roofline when off), the ability to spin up a lighting scheme for a birthday party or get-together is irresistible. And because these are smart lights, more functionality will certainly come with future app updates (some of the lights can react to music on their own, for instance).

My top pick

After testing all of these brands, I think Govee lights remain the best choice, with the Eufy lights in close contention. While not the cheapest, the Govee lights offer the most configurations, the most extendability (you can link up to 16 strings), and are available with both black and white wires.

Freelancers cover news, tech, and entertainment for Lifehacker.