I Ran Hue and TRÅDFRI in the Hub Era, and I Quit Both
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I ran Philips Hue and IKEA TRÅDFRI bulbs in the same house in the late 2010s, and each brand required its own hub on the network. The TRÅDFRI gateway corrupted its configuration repeatedly, and every recovery was an evening of work. Between the hub sprawl, the frustrating pairing, and steep prices for bulbs that eventually burn out, I stopped investing. Matter removed the reason all of that existed: current bulbs connect to Apple Home with no brand hub in between.
Jump to where to buy →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.
The recurring failures
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 that eventually burns out. Hue in particular asked premium prices for something with a service life, and adding a room meant sinking more money into a system I already didn’t trust.
So I stopped. The bulbs and hubs went, and the house went back to dumb lighting for a while.
What was wrong
Hue and IKEA were doing what every Zigbee-era brand did. Zigbee bulbs couldn’t talk to your network directly, so each brand shipped a bridge, and each bridge was one more box on the network that could fail.
The bridge also held the entire system’s state, so when my TRÅDFRI gateway went bad, every bulb it managed went offline with it.
What replaced it here
The bulbs in this house now are cheap Matter bulbs, and the hub layer is gone entirely. My Linkind bulbs paired straight into Apple Home over Wi-Fi, with no bridge hardware and no brand 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.
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, keep using it.
If you’re adding bulbs, the new ones don’t have to come from your hub’s brand: a Matter bulb pairs into Apple Home directly, without touching the Bridge or the gateway.
Where to buy, tested picks
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Common questions
Did Philips Hue and IKEA TRÅDFRI need separate hubs?
Yes. Zigbee bulbs could only reach the network through their own brand's bridge, so Hue lights went through the Philips hub and IKEA lights through the IKEA gateway. A two-brand house ran both boxes, each with its own app.
What happens when a TRÅDFRI gateway loses its configuration?
In my case the lights stopped responding and no reset fixed it. Getting them back meant pairing everything again from zero, and each round took up an evening. It happened several times.
Do smart bulbs still need a hub in 2026?
Not for the basics. A Matter bulb talks to Apple Home on its own, over Wi-Fi or Thread. Thread models rely on a border router, a role an Apple TV or HomePod already fills, and a single one covers all the Thread devices you own.
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 →