Sorry but no way are the govee WiFi bulbs anywhere near hue in terms of performance, responsiveness and ease of use. The govee app is garbage. I have 6 in my eaves and they're garbage compared to the 12 hue interior gu10s.
To not derail the thread down the wrong path, I'm not a Hue hater, I still have just under 30 individual Hue items (bulbs, switch modules, led strips, lamps)..
They aren't perfect though,
- Hub placement and comms routing through devices leads to the same occasional 'lag' that most Zigbee devices can have when not all within range of the main 'hub'..
- Colorimetry differs between products to a larger degree than it should
- They do occasionally glitch and I get the odd bulb in a different state that needs turning off/on again
- They don't have some advanced groupding/syncing options that are available on other platforms.
- They do fail, around 10% of mine have now failed over time, I'm even on my second hub (free as I bought starter packs in the sales)
By contrast, I hated Govee and other brands 3-4 years ago, everything was cheap for a reason and I would not spend my money on them..
However, with a new home office to furnish and iight, I decided (from reviews being positive) to give the newer Govee stuff a go, so GU10's, LED Neon Strips, Hex Pods and desk lights.. I expected a bit of a mess, but for the money and the fact it was just an office, I didn't mind.
I have however had a great experience, the onboarding of products was trivial and no button presses/hub interaction required, all picked up and configured within minutes from the App.
The syncing and responsiveness using the music feature was impressive (even though I don't plan on using that, it just shows how well they coordinate in realtime).
The colour matching was better than expected, and surprisingly, comparing GU10s (my Hue ones are 2 years old), the Govee ones are brighter with a smoother transition..
I also don't like the Govee app, but I only use it for configuration, I use Hue switch units as well as Shelly switch units to trigger each (using HA for the Govee stuff for advanced interactions with existing light switches), but it's got some depth to the configuration not present with Hue and as I've just got their Outdoor lights (90M!) it's all instantly joined in the app and they coordinate in realtime with the effects.
With the way they are working, I'm looking at Hue prices and with over half my house is using Shelly/Wiz/Govee and other brands now, and I'm at the point I've got reliability and responsiveness throughout and think Hue are just exceedingly poor VFM.
In reality setting up a smart home you should be steering clear of WiFi devices where viable alternatives exist such as zigbee and leaving WiFi for WiFi only devices.
I have 4 access points with an SDN controller (Omada), all IoT devices are VLAN'd appropriately and I now have far better direct coverage throughout for WiFi which is proving very reliable with all the modern WiFi IoT devices I have, as long as I fix IPs /for cheaper devices, to an individual Access Point.
I also have a Hue Hub, Smarthings Hub and an USB Sonoff Hub for Zigbee, with Smartthings, Hue and third party Zigbee devices.. I am weaning off Smartthings and pairing them to the Sonoff, so that will disappear shortly, but the biggest issue I get with Zigbee is lag/latency for devices not connected directly to the respective hub, mostly great, generally reliable, but not perfect and I hate turning on multiple lights and they all come on hundreds of milliseconds apart, or worse, one just pauses for 2-3 seconds and eventually turns on.
However, I don't go out my way to get WiFi or Zigbee, or Thread/Matter devices, I think in this day/age you have to mix platforms at some point and so I just try to do the best I can, I don't believe any platform is universally reliable/perfect because my experience has shown flaky crap is available throughout.
