As with indoor smart lighting, there are various benefits to be had by integrating your outdoor lighting with a smart home platform. Be it Apple’s HomeKit, Samsung’s Smart Things, or even just connecting a popular digital assistant like Alexa or Google Assistant for voice control, you can gain convenience, remote control, and automation capabilities that can enhance your home entertaining and your home security.

An nice benefit that most integration options will give you is some sort of scene control. This enables you to set up a range of smart lights and appliances to activate with a single command or button press. You could, for example, set a bunch of smart outdoor lights to various preset colors, turn on a water feature and start a playlist on your outdoor speakers.

At the other end of the spectrum you can tie security cameras, motion sensors, or contact sensors on gates or doors to trigger certain smart lights automatically, and then turn them off again when not needed. This can both act as a deterrent to intruders, and provide better lighting for capturing night time activity on security cameras.

Some of the options below will include motion sensors, which is a nice bonus, where others will require a separate device. Depending on your smart home platform you may be able to integrate third party motion sensors to control your lights, use security cameras as motion sensors, or you’ll need to stick with the same brand if they offer a sensor, such as Philips Hue or Ring.