TLDR; I'm on a Conbee II Zigbee radio now. It does the same thing but much better. Post coming soon.

I like the Hue Bridge well enough. It runs off Zigbee so acts as a layer of isolation between the lights themselves and my Local Network. I don’t have to pollute my Router with IPs for each individual smart light and switch like I would with WiFi solutions. It also receives regular updates from Phillips, a brand I trust for some reason. There are some drawbacks of course, so let’s take a closer look at the bridge, it's features, and its shortcomings.

The Good

Every device you add to your home network becomes one more vector of attack into your home. Your home is your fortress, and the digital world’s manifesto of “Move fast and break things” means there absolutely will be vulnerabilities in your smart appliances. In my own opinion, the added benefit of connecting directly to your lights over WiFi is not worth the increased surface area for an attack against your digital privacy. Using a bridge to connect to your lights means you’re only adding one attack vector to your network.

There’s also a performance issue with adding Smart Lights directly to your WiFi network. The amount of data that each bulb transmits is minuscule, but it does add up to make an impact. WiFi communications are easily interrupted. The radios on the WiFi transmitter and receiver have a limited number of frequencies to communicate over. When two devices are trying to communicate on the same frequency, the receiver cannot make sense of the data and the transmitter will randomly select a new frequency to try to communicate over. This is why your WiFi network is so slow in densely congested areas.

Adding more bulbs to your network won’t eat up a lot of your available bandwidth, but they will increase the likelihood of interrupting a WiFi conversation. The Hue Bridge and lights overcome the WiFi problem by using Zigbee radio standard. This standard does operate over the same frequencies as the older 2.4 GHz WiFi standard, so you may still interrupt your WiFi signals if you’re still on 2.4 GHz (a/b/g). More than likely, you’re using the newer 5 GHz standards (ac/n) and your Zigbee signals are guaranteed to never cross.

Note: If you are on 2.4 GHz WiFI and you’re interested in preventing overlap, try changing the zigbee channel so it doesn't overlap with your wifi channel.

Lastly, the hue bridge generates a Mesh Network between your lights. This isn’t unique to the Hue Bridge, but it is definitely worth noting. Having a Mesh Network means your lights work as a relay for information from the bridge to lights that otherwise would not be able to receive a signal from the bridge.

None of theese features are unique to the Hue bridge, but to the Zigbee radio standard it runs on. There are other Zigbee radios out there, and we'll take a look at those at some point in the future.

The API is quite nice, and considering the breadth of things people (myself included) have made from it, I'd say it works quite well. Asterisks!!!

The Bad

It’s another thing you have to buy. The older Hue Starter Kits come with a bridge and are priced so the Bridge is practically free. If you can find it on sale (very easy to do) then it can actually be cheaper to buy your lights with the Bridge. This is how I got both of my bridges.

The latest generation of Smart Lights don’t require the bridge at all. You can still use a bridge if you like, so this isn’t really a problem. Given the advantages listed above, I find the trend of migrating towards smart appliances that directly connect to your home network a little disconcerting. I imagine my opinion is in the minority however, given the trend.

The Ugly

Each hue bridge can hold up to 50 lights. I recently added my 48th bulb, but I’m finding performance has already taken a not so insignificant hit. I didn’t think this would be a big deal. Just add another bridge when you start hitting the limit. Problem solved right? Not quite.

I was able to install the second bridge physically in my bedroom which was suffering from latency issues due to the distance to the bridge. I wanted to move the lights and accessories residing in my bedroom onto the second bridge. However, there is no easy way to do this from the app. You have remove each bulb from your old bridge and add them to your new bridge manually. Knowing how to use the API helps here a bit, but hopefully you wrote down your serial numbers somewhere, otherwise you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

The app is useless garbage. Do I need to go into more detail? I do? Fine. You can only connect to one bridge at a time. Switching bridges requires going to settings -> Hue Bridges -> then select the bridge a bridge based off a name you gave it. Adding lights is a pain, deleting lights is a pain. Managing automations is fairly intuitive and easy at least, but you'll only get the most basic utilities out of it.

Ok, so remember how I praised the API? Now I'm going to take away that praise. The Bridge only supplies a REST api. If you want to know when something happens, the light setting is changed, or a button is pressed on your very expensive dimmer switch, well you gotta Poll the bridge. It works, but don't expect to get any behviour that feels responsive. At worst I've seen it take 30 seconds for an action to register in Home Assistant (which is polling the bridge on my behalf).

Conclusion

If I had to choose between the Hue Bridge and a WiFi connected bulb, hands down I'm taking the Hue bridge. The added security and keeping the lights off my WiFi make owning smart lights much less painful. However it seems to be the worst zigbee radio you can get, and costs about the same as it's competitors. If you have any technical chops, upgrade to soemthing better. If you don't know where to begin with respect to an upgrade, just hang tight. I'll publish something simple soon.