I Ran Hue and TRÅDFRI in the Hub Era, and I Quit Both

By Matthew Easterday · Published Aug 4, 2026 First-hand tested

At one point this house had a Hue Bridge and a TRÅDFRI gateway running at the same time, because I had bulbs from both brands, and in the Zigbee era every brand of bulb brought its own hub. Two hubs and two apps, all to turn lights on and off.

I bought the Philips Hue starter kit, two White A19 bulbs and the Bridge, in September 2017. The TRÅDFRI bulbs came from IKEA around the same period. Both worked, in the sense that light came out when you asked for it.

What wore me down

The pairing was frustrating on both sides, and it was never a thing you did once. Bulbs dropped off. Apps lost track of hubs. Every fix started with the same question: which brand’s app owns this bulb?

The TRÅDFRI setup was the worse offender. A few times its configuration corrupted outright, and the recovery was not a reset button. I had to re-pair and rebuild the whole system to get the lights working again. That rebuild took an evening, and the corruption came back more than once.

And the prices were steep for what bulbs are. An LED bulb is a consumable. It burns out. Hue in particular asked premium prices for something with a service life, and adding a room meant buying into the ecosystem deeper, more bulbs, sometimes more hardware, always more cost sunk into a system I already didn’t trust.

So I stopped, because every additional dollar was buying more of the same hassle. The bulbs and hubs went, and the house went back to dumb lighting for a while.

What was actually wrong

None of this was Hue or IKEA being uniquely bad. The architecture was the problem. Zigbee bulbs couldn’t talk to your network directly, so every brand shipped a bridge, and every bridge was another box on the network, another app, another account, another point of failure that took its whole family of bulbs down with it.

The corruption that kept hitting my TRÅDFRI gateway is exactly the failure that design invites: the hub holds the entire system’s state, so a corrupted hub takes every bulb in the room offline at once.

What replaced it here

The bulbs in this house now are cheap Matter bulbs, and the difference is structural, not incremental. My Linkind bulbs paired straight into Apple Home over Wi-Fi, no hub, no brand app, no account. One has run the front door on a dusk-to-dawn schedule since December 2025 without an intervention.

IKEA came back around too. The 2026 KAJPLATS range replaced TRÅDFRI with Matter over Thread bulbs that also skip the brand hub. A Thread bulb needs a border router, but that’s one piece of shared infrastructure for every Thread device in the house, not a box per brand. Six KAJPLATS bulbs are sitting here waiting for testing, and if the pairing corrupts like the old gateway did, I’ll write that up too.

Price moved the same direction. The bulbs I run now cost a fraction of what Hue asked, which matters for a component that wears out.

If you’re still on Hue or TRÅDFRI hubs

Nothing here says to throw out working bulbs. If your Bridge is stable and your bulbs respond, that system owes you nothing.

But if you’re deciding where the next dollar goes, the hub-per-brand model is over. Matter ended the reason it existed, and my experience across both eras in the same house is that the cheap hubless bulb is more reliable than the premium hub-based one ever was.

Matthew Easterday

Runs the homekit.reviews test home, a real mixed Matter/Thread/HomeKit house. Everything reviewed here was set up, paired, and lived with. See how I test →