New to Hubitat and looking to add some colored bulbs. From a quick look around the compatible device list and the forum it looks like the Philips Hue is maybe the best option. Wanted to see what the options are and get opinions on what works best. Also, if going with Hue is a Bridge necessary to work with Hubitat?
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If you are going to use Hue, it is recommended to use the Hue Bridge integration. If you want to pair directly to Hubitat, Sengled bulbs are recommended as they don't act as repeaters and won't foul-up your Zigbee mesh network.
I have looked at both and I am not a big fan of Hue simply because of the cost. I don't think the high price is justified. If you are going to go with Hue, make sure you get the Gen 3 bulbs. The color of the Gen 1 or 2 bulbs is awful.
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First rule of Hue club. Never pay full price. Agree with Ryan, they are very overpriced (mostly quality 3rd gen for color), but wait patiently for the sales to give you what should be the normal pricing.
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I have had very good luck with OSRAM RGBW bulbs, and they are often on sale. They are ZigBee, but the only "problem" I have run into is how they come on if there is a power failure (come home, a bunch of lights are on, but all the clocks need to be reset also...).
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You have?!? These are generally panned here and the ST forum as being TERRIBLE bulbs since they are ZHA (in the US) but terrible repeaters. Personally, I have avoided them.
This is true of all bulbs connected to HE directly, not just the Osram. There is no way to set the power-on action like in the Phillips Hue architecture. I don't know if you first pair a hue to the Hue Bridge and then move it to HE if it will retain that setting or not. It could but I doubt it.
But on a second HE hub...no problem with the routing issue if there are only bulbs on that hub.
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A Hue bridge is half to 1/3 as expensive. And a cleaner solution for bulbs only if that's what you want it for. You then don't run into the problems with hub connect and whatnot.
Regular price is $59.99 for Hue Bridge. Regular HE price is $99.95, so, no not 1/3 the price. Plus you then have distributed horse power and a place to try community apps without risking messing with your primary hub database. And besides, why wouldn't you want Hubitat to make money selling more hubs? It's not like the purchaser is getting a bad deal out of it and the platform gets the financial support it needs. We all win from that.
What's wrong with HubConnect? I don't run it, but others seem to say it's quite good and you have suggested it in other posts.
Not even joking, they have been good. Easy to pair, easy to reset, work great with the generic driver... Heck, they even respond well to me messing with them using a custom ZigBee driver (see the Halloween thread). But... I do not EVER worry about them as repeaters. I have a ton of Securifi Peanut Plugs around, pretty much every room in the house has one. So repeating is not a concern for me with ZigBee.
That's a refurb. I'm talking regular stock items, not limited stock or sale prices.
Until your hub is down for over an hour and all of your zigbee devices to into panic mode and rediscover routes through your Osram. I'm glad you've had good luck with them. But that has not been the typical experience with those bulbs. Your experience is very, VERY atypical from what I have read about them.
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And I'm talking what you can actually get them for. If you really wanna talk sale prices, hows $15?
Interesting to hear. I guess I have to hope the luck continues. I keep my hub on my PoE (which has UPS backup) to the only time it goes down is reboots or when I move it around or such.
Maybe I will plug a Peanut into each UPS I have as a backup there as well.
Thanks for the warning!
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Today, but not tomorrow perhaps. That won't be helpful for someone reading this in the future, and we'll all be better off if more HE hubs are purchased. Philips doesn't need help with sales.
I'm going to keep my mouth shut because I've promised to be nice. My tongue is bleeding practically but I'm going to just let that one go.
Hey....I hope you never run into problems with em! Maybe you have just the right house and just the right combo of devices that make em work perfectly. They must work for somebody or else they'd stop selling them after this long, right? I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya! 
Wow, appreciate the lively discussion and all of the feedback.
Maybe if I describe my use case for the bulbs it also might help with a recommendation.
For this specific case these bulbs will be in fixtures that are (will be) controlled by Z-Wave switches. I'm slowly transitioning all of the X-10 stuff in my house to HE controlled devices. I'm really only interested in being able to change color and not control on/off for these particular bulbs.
You cannot use smart bulb with smart switches. Bulbs have to be powered 24/7, otherwise you can't control them from Hubitat. And if you first turn on the z-wave switch, the bulb will come on to it's normal white power-on setting first...take a couple seconds to connect to the hub and then be controllable. This doesn't work from a practical sense.
I have had good luck with them as well, since I got all but 2 of the older Osram bulbs replaced under the 2 year warranty. I haven't had issues with the newer Sylvania branded version since updating the firmware and you can find the recessed full color ones on amazon for $10-$12 a piece, which is a crazy good deal and something that you can't even get with Hue. I have had the best longevity from the recessed lights as I have had none of them fail in almost 2 years now. I would definitely recommend getting the Osram gateway to update them as the update fixes the flashing (and sometimes resetting) they do when using the "ramp up" command with button controllers and enables their color temp to go from 1500-7000 K. I also use the Sengled color plus driver for all of them which fixed the reporting issues.
