Govee Outdoor Chromatic String Lights Review: A Colorful Way to (Kind of) Light Your Patio

Have you ever wanted to hang up a string of Dr. Mario pills in your yard? Ever wished they were also smart lights and that each one could produce colorful gradients? Me neither, and nobody makes Dr. Mario smart lights anyway, but Govee’s pill-shaped Outdoor Chromatic String Lights will get you close enough.

​The Chromatic String Lights come in 32.8-foot ($170) and 65.6-foot ($300) sets, which were just enough to encircle a square part of my back patio, replacing a cheap string light that I’d had there before. Each LED has a black upper casing that gives way to a clear plastic lower shell, beneath which lies a milky inner surface that, like the plastic cover of the Ceiling Light Ultra I recently reviewed, diffuses light and smooths out color gradients.

Like a lot of Govee’s lights, these are Matter-compatible, meaning they should work with any smart home ecosystem you choose, although they’re still best used with Govee’s own app, which unlocks a deep set of premade behaviors and custom effects. After a week of testing, I found that the Chromatic String Lights create perfect mood lighting for an outdoor movie night or a backyard bonfire. But don’t toss out your old bulbs just yet: Govee’s smart string lights still aren’t bright enough to take over as your primary open-air light source.

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Easy setup

Physically installing the Govee Outdoor Chromatic String Lights is as easy as setting up any other string light. The product comes in three parts: the two string light strands and the control box segment, which contains the lights’ Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, a microphone for music effects, and a power button. There’s also an extra extension cable that I found helpful, as it gave the lights enough length to reach the power outlet I wanted to use.

I did screw one thing up while installing the lights: I didn’t pay attention to the order in which I ran the strings, so it wasn’t until I’d hung the first one that I realized it lacked a connection for the next segment. That was easy enough to fix and was a helpful reminder that the Chromatic String Lights aren’t expandable beyond two strands. Another thing I didn’t do properly (but you should) is use the included T-shaped cable clips meant to keep strain off of the cables’ connections to the bulbs. They also shortened the strands more than I wanted, so I opted not to use them for this short-term review. Over a longer period of time, that decision could weaken the strand and break connections, so don’t be me!

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On the software setup side, you have options. If you like, you can just use the Govee Home app to set them up. You’ll control them with Bluetooth by default, but you can also add them to your Wi-Fi network for when you’re out of Bluetooth range or away from home.

You can also add the Chromatic String Lights to your smart home of choice. For instance, I added the device to Apple Home by scanning the Matter QR code on the control box. Just remember: from your smart home’s app, you can toggle the lights, control their brightness, and even change their color, but you’ll still need the Govee Home app to do anything fancier than that. These lights also don’t work with Apple’s Adaptive Lighting feature, which adjusts the bulbs’ white temperature throughout the day, from cooler in the morning to warmer as the day wanes into night.

See Govee Chromatic String Lights at Amazon

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Neat colors, but they could be brighter

Whether controlling them through the Govee app or Apple Home, I found the Chromatic String Lights to be responsive and consistent. During the day, the frosted inner surface of the bulbs took on a sort of color e-ink effect, making it look as if they were actually dyed with the colors and gradients I chose. By night, that gave way to a fantastic view.

Historically, I’ve preferred the more subdued, natural tones produced by lights from the likes of Philips Hue—Govee’s lighting has, until recently, struck me as garish and oversaturated. That’s changed with some of its recent efforts, and although I still prefer Philips Hue’s color, brightness, and overall performance, the gap is closing. Govee now feels more directly competitive with LIFX, Feit Electric’s smart lighting brand, whose SuperColor-branded bulbs also feature impressive effects, though LIFX remains brighter across non-white colors and smooth gradients.

Speaking of brightness, it is, unfortunately, where the Chromatic String Lights suffer the most. When I used them to display colors and effects, I found it hard to see the patio’s ground and furniture at night. I could see all of that with the bulbs set to varying white-light temperatures, but the non-smart, 14-bulb Feit Electric LED strand I had up before did a much better job.

A rough approximation of how dim my patio was while using Govee’s lights. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except that Govee promotes these as being “high-brightness” lights, which is not how I’d describe them. The company says each bulb outputs 240 lumens, or 2,400 lumens per 33-foot strand. For context, my old Feit string is rated at 70 lumens per bulb, or 980 lumens per 24-foot string, so Govee’s lights should be much brighter, right? But that number alone doesn’t do a great job of describing how well they light an area. That will also vary based on how many bulbs you’ve got, how far apart they are, how they’re arranged, and how big an area you’re trying to light. The Feit has more bulbs per strand, and they’re packed closer together over a shorter length, which lets them light an area more thoroughly. The Chromatic String Lights were bright enough that I could see what I was doing, but I’d have needed to hang them closer together, illuminating less of my patio, if I wanted to, say, sit outside and read on a warm night.

Speaking of sitting outside, Govee says these lights carry an IP67 rating, meaning they should be dust tight and can survive being dunked a meter under water for at least 30 minutes. Rhey should be fine in most rain or snowy conditions. They can also operate across a broad temperature range between -4 degrees Fahrenheit and 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Putting on a show

I have no quarrel with the rest of the experience Govee’s new string lights offer. At night, they created smooth gradients and slick motion effects when I chose various “Scenes” from the lights’ landing page in the Govee Home app. Scenes are split into categories, such as “Natural,” “Soothing,” and “Universe.” These effects work better on the Chromatic String Lights than they do on the Ceiling Light Ultra, which I found had choppy animations. There may have been some of that in the Chromatic lights, too, but it would’ve been much harder to notice in each bulb’s much smaller package.

Apart from Scenes, the Govee Home app has labeled buttons like “Color,” “AI,” “Music,” and “DIY.” The Color button is where you’d go to set single hues, pick the temperature for white light, or choose gradients; those can apply to the whole string or segments, very similar to the Govee Outdoor Lights Prism.

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Under the AI button, you can describe a vibe you want using natural language in a text box, and the software will respond with an AI chatbot-style description of what it made and ask if you want to apply it (and save it for later).

Unsurprisingly, the AI-generated effects suck. When I asked for one inspired by the chaos of Batman villain The Joker, the app gave me purple, white, and green colors that sort of just blinked along the string. When I asked for an effect that evoked a space battle, the bulbs mostly stayed off, with occasional flashes of red or purple light. When I uploaded a picture of my dogs lying in the yard—you can also use images to cue effects—it created a tepid, pastel-heavy version of the colors from the image. I wouldn’t want to use any of these effects, which made the AI section feel mostly tacked on.

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I got better results (and had more fun) when manually creating effects in the DIY section. There, you can choose from premade patterns like simple colors moving along the bulbs, gradients shimmering vertically across all lights, starburst-style gradients that expand from one bulb to a few neighboring ones, or a “Graffiti” option that mimics the look of someone spray painting in a circular pattern. This is the way to go if you want a specific set of colors and behavior. You can edit the AI-generated effects after the fact, but you can only tweak the colors, not speed or behavior.

The music effects are exactly what you’d expect if you’ve used other Govee lighting with that capability. The Chromatic String Lights can use an onboard microphone or your phone to detect sounds and respond with blinking, pulsing, or shifting colors, depending on the preset you pick. Of course, the lights respond to any old sound they hear, so the visual experience can be chaotic and disconnected from the music when there’s a lot of noise, such as chatter and clinking glasses at a boozy party. If you’re sitting alone, getting stoned and listening to some Zeppelin, though? That’d probably be pretty groovy, brother.

Finally, you can also use the Govee Home app to configure lighting schedules, create playlists that switch behaviors at intervals you define, or link the lights to other Govee products for synchronized multi-room effects.

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Unique lights at a solid value

Govee’s smart lights are still kind of hit or miss for me, and the company’s prices feel a little all over the place. I like using the Chromatic String Lights more than I did the Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism, and I definitely prefer the Chromatic’s price. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course—the Outdoor Lights Prism is longer and meant to directly light your house, not a patio—but $240 for a 66-foot strand is a lot easier to stomach than the $540 Govee charges for the 100-foot Outdoor Lights Prism.

The Chromatic String Lights can also offer better value than other companies’ outdoor lights, depending on your priorities. I wouldn’t buy them if I just wanted a well-lit patio—in that case, I’d save my money and plug a non-smart string into something like the Matter-compatible Tapo P430M outdoor smart plug. When it comes to flashy, effects-driven smart lighting, the Chromatic String Lights may not be the brightest—but for now, they’re the only ones where each bulb is a real light show all on its own.

See Govee Chromatic String Lights at Amazon