LIFEX or HUE best for my Living Room?

I'm thinking of putting some color changing lights in my living room but I'm struggling to decide if I would be better off with Lifex bulbs or Philips Hue? I will be using 8 bulls in wall fixtures and 4 bulbs in lamps for a total of 12. This will be the only lighting in the room so I need the white light mode to approach that of standard bulbs which would tend to push towards Lifex. Lifex is also generally reviewed as having the deepest colors.
 
On the other hand Philips HUE has a hub which provides more control options. Nobody in my house is ever going to pull out a smartphone to turn on the living room lights. I will have Alexa control but feel I need some kind of switch as a backup if Alexa is not cooperating for some reason. With HUE I can put a couple of those tabletop switches around as my backup but only at the expense of using the dimmer and less colorful HUE bulbs.
 
I'm kind of annoyed that the wall switch for HUE is an odd size that is not practical to gang with other switches and Lifex doesn't have any physical control options at all. How practical is a lighting system with no option for a light switch? I don't want to over complicate things by translating Insteon switch actions to HUE commands via Homeseer or some such as that goes against the definition of a resilient backup control which should have fewer potential points of failure not more.
 
Is there some simple control option that I am missing that I can use here? Are there other factors that I should be considering to help select between HUE and Lifex?

Googling a bit here someone commented that HUE is more reliable than LIFX and that LIFX are brighter and have truer colors.
 
Here looking at DIYing a Zigbee GPIO RPi remote device similiar to the ZNet device for Homeseer use.

I have LIFX and they are pretty reliable.  LIFX are Wi-Fi/802.15.4 mesh networking.  The bulbs mesh network with 802.15.4 which is the hardware protocol Zigbee uses.  The bulb closest to your Wi-Fi router uses Wi-Fi, so only one bulb connects to Wi-Fi.  Hue, I believe are Zigbee, but they connect through a bridge that converts to Wi-Fi.  Otherwise the bulbs are similar. 

Are you using some way to control the Lifex bulbs besides just your phone? I need them to operate normally enough to avoid instant family rejection... Some kind of switch or hard button remote?

upstatemike said:

Are you using some way to control the Lifex bulbs besides just your phone? I need them to operate normally enough to avoid instant family rejection... Some kind of switch or hard button remote?

Click to expand...

They can be controlled with Amazon Echo and I assume Google as well. I actually use them as a indicator as well.  They support IFTTT and there are lots of actions for them.  If the Dallas Cowboys score, they flash blue. (My wife wanted that one) If we get a call on Ooma from a contact, they flash purple. And we have many other colors as well. They can be controlled by SmartThings, so anything that is SmartThings compatible can control them also. 
 
The colors are neat, but I think they are better indicator lights. Otherwise I use white Zigbee bulbs which HAI/Leviton can control directly.

Makes sense but I want to use them for main lighting and use the colors for various mood situations rather than as indicators. With 12 bulbs I think this will work but the sticking point is that the main lights for the room have to have some sort of straight forward way to turn them on in addition to Alexa control.

I have no firsthand experience with LIFEX, but I've been using Hue for a while now.  Initially just as nightlights in the kids' rooms since I was in a house I owned and had UPB control of all lights.  A few months ago, I moved into a rental, and have since expanded my use of HUE.  I now have the newer bridge and HomeKit control, 4 of the latest generation of color bulbs, a few of the white ambiance bulbs, and one of their wall switches. 
 
First off, I'll say I don't know who the picky people are about color - but even the original bulbs accomplished most of what I could've wanted.  The newest ones have even better color, and I think they do a better job of dimming even lower while keeping good color.  They're great in the kids' rooms.  My 1st gen color bulbs made their way outside as exterior lights - they fade on to a soft color and dim down at night to half brightness, then automatically off again in the morning.   Also, the whites are perfectly adequate whites.  In my livingroom, I have a color bulb that when on white is just as bright as the original bulb I took out.
 
The new wall switch is a neat piece too.  We've been spoiled by phone control and dimming... in this house the switch in the master bedroom is in a terribly inconvenient spot and I'm not changing switches in a rental... so I just leave the switch on and we stuck the wall switch just inside the door.  You can cycle through 4 preset scenes, you can dim up or down, or hit the off.  What I didn't catch at first is that the wallplate is really a magnetic holder - the remote part pops right out as well so I could take it to the bed if I wanted, or mount one bed-side - but we've had no need since we have our phones.
 
Another thing I like about Hue is it's add-on products.  You can add on wall washers, permanent fixtures, LED strips (above cabinets; under bars, etc) and more.  It's really easy to just keep expanding.  The white ambiance bulbs are pretty cheap and let you do the whole white to blue light spectrum.  They've also got motion sensors available, and they'll let you do things like set different brightness levels depending on time of day (late night bathroom trips, etc). 
 
I don't know how LIFEX handles events, but another thing I kinda like about the Hue is that all your created scenes, timers, etc - all live on the hub. You can even go into 3rd party apps and create special scenes, animations (including multi-bulb animation sequences), etc - and store them on the hub itself.  This means once you've set up your rules, they function even without internet.  Of course you can tie in IFTTT as well and have the lights do a chase sequence every time the broncos score, or set the color of a light to match the temperature outside.
 
All in all, it just seems like you can take Hue a lot further.

Yes I am leaning towards HUE at this point although I still wish the switch was sized to fit standard decora wall plates the way Caseta etc.are, but at least they do provide a standard light switch experience. I also like the local control aspect of the hub but am a little concerned about the limited range of Zigbee. Alexa will only support a single hub so if I want to expand my system to a location that is out of range of my first hub I can't just add a second one to do it. Is there such a thing as a Zigbee repeater? I need to make my final decision pretty soon because I want to leverage Black Friday pricing to get started on this project.

My best understanding is that the Hue bulbs create a mesh network.  Not every bulb has to be able to reach the hub - it just has to be able to reach another Hue bulb.  Granted from your other post, I gather you have a rather large residence to contend with.  What I don't know for certain is if this is a single hop sort of arrangement, or if it's a true mesh.  I'm also not 100% sure that the protocol reevaluates the path often.  I moved a bunch of lights around and I have one unreliable bulb despite it being 10' from another... the repeater functionality SHOULD keep it working, but I wonder if it has its "next hop" remembered from the way it used to all be set up; or perhaps it's just a defective old bulb.
 
A 4-bulb + hub starter kit is reasonable enough to test out and it's about the same price no matter where you get it from - so you could buy from a place like Best Buy and return if you don't like the results.

Hue uses Zigbee Lightlink which is true mesh networking, but the number of hops does have a limit (typically 10 but can be up to about 30). LIFX uses 802.15.4 which is also true mesh networking also with a hop limit. The coordinator is either the bridge in Hue's case or the bulb itself for LIFX.  When devices are rearranged, they should compensate for that, but running a full Zigbee network in my house I can tell you its a slow process and can take hours but it eventually figures it out. Zigbee probably isn't the best protocol if you have lots of device movement. Hopefully they will fix that.
 
I don't know how LIFEX handles events, but another thing I kinda like about the Hue is that all your created scenes, timers, etc - all live on the hub.
 
I do not know how the Hue Hub compares with the LIFX bridge in each bulb, but the LIFX bulb does in fact contain a way to set timed events, but this may be performed in the cloud LIFX account and not the bulb.  I'm not sure if ultimately its the bulb or cloud that is doing it.
 
Here is how to add schedules in LIFX bulbs:  https://support.lifx.com/hc/en-us/articles/202472110-Schedules-in-the-LIFX-app
 
From what I read, the Hue hub also seemed to rely on "the cloud" but maybe newer versions don't.

The original Hue bulbs cannot produce green or  good blue. I have four of them and an Iris which uses different LEDs but with not much power.
 
As a consequence the colours do not match given the same colour comands. I have turned to MiLight bulbs and Ledenet / MagicHouse RGBW controllers and strips at less than a third of the price and much bettter lights levels and colours.
 
I use Insteon wall switches to control all the different varieties of lighting but typically only white. For colour selection I use Amazon Alexa products. This is all done using ISY994 as a bridge and automatic switching controls, as well as some HA.

I think I have a plan now. I am going to go with HUE in the Living Room and probably expand it into two adjoining rooms eventually. If I later want some color farther away in the Dining Room I will probably use Lifex because there are 2 chimneys between that room and the location where the HUE hub will be that would block the Zigbee signal but I have already solved the coverage challenges there with Wi-Fi access points. Best Buy has the HUE 3 bulb starter kit for $109 and Amazon has additional bulbs for $32 so I'll start with those.

January 2016 video... are you sure he was testing with Gen3?

Also, you can put Hue on a standard wall toggle switch for local control. If you switch it off it will go off, but drop off the network without power. Switch it on and it goes to a natural white (always, no way so far to control color in this case.)

The down side is if someone turns them off from the switch frequently, you'll be running to turn them back on to get them networked again. Bonus is that you can just turn off the hub and they will behave like 65W-ish standard incandescent bulbs. (Rough default color comparison)