Well folks, it’s the holiday season and there’s no shortage of smart light companies hawking bright, deeply saturated RGB string lights. And if you’ve gone hunting for that sort of thing in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly encountered Govee, increasingly one of the most visible names in smart lighting.

Govee makes smart lights for almost any situation you could imagine, from A19 RGB bulbs to light-up LED sticks meant to stand up in corners to netted string lights that let you paint your hedges with pixel art. You can make your home a total Lisa Frank fever dream using this company’s products.

One new entry in its vast catalog is the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism. Yeah, that’s Lights Prism, not Prism Lights. It’s a modular set of soffit lights with tri-color lamps that you can use to accent your home’s roofline and illuminate walkways around it, or to spray your walls with obnoxiously vibrant gradients of color, Homeowners Association busybodies be damned.

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It seems like there are a million smart soffit lights available from countless alphabet soup brands on Amazon, ranging from the very cheap to the fairly expensive. The reason you may have heard of Govee and not, say, Letianpai or Poofzy is that Govee is a real company with an app that’s actually nice to use. Also, thanks to the Matter protocol, most of its newer lights are compatible with every major smart home platform, which doesn’t hurt.

After a week of testing the Lights Prism on my garage, I’ve found them to be responsive, reliable, and even fun to use. Getting them set up is easy enough. The lights are modular and come in manageable 6-lamp segments. Each of these lamps comes with a sticky 3M backing that bonded quickly with my garage’s wooden soffit and makes it easy to secure them with screws or, if needed, anchors that Govee includes. (For the purposes of this review, I only used the adhesive.) You’ll connect the lights to the generously long cable of the controller that contains all the lights’ connectivity and smarts, and that in turn to the power adapter.

See Govee Outdoor Lights Prism at Amazon

One issue I had is that the controller’s cable, which is around 12 feet long by my hasty measurement, was still too short to reach the point where I wanted to start the lights. That’s a problem because without an extension cable, I couldn’t make them wrap around my garage without doubling the lights back on themselves. It would’ve helped if Govee had added a splitter, as I could have sent one segment in one direction, and the rest of them in the other.

The Lights Prism’s lamps are its big differentiating feature. Unlike all of those generic soffit lights I mentioned, Govee’s RGB lamps can blast three colors at once, each at different brightness levels, making for much more nuanced—or potentially garish!—lighting. The lights themselves are bright, at least when using the single segment I set up for testing.

These triple LEDs aren’t quite as gimmicky as it might sound. For one thing, they let you direct the light. Combined, they all make the full light cone that you see when all are illuminated, but each of their beams points in a different direction and, with only one or two of the LEDs lit, can be used as a spotlight of sorts. I could see turning off most of the lights at night but keeping specific beams shining on doorways and windows. I’d even be tempted to try to use it indoors to highlight some of the large pieces of artwork I have in my basement, although that would be tricky to pull off well.

Ignoring the triple LED thing, Govee’s Lights Prism makes for good ground illumination, at least from eight feet up on my garage’s soffits. Whether the same would be true if I’d mounted them beneath my second-story roofline, I cannot say.

The big thing that I imagine will keep most people away from these lights is the price: starting at $540 for a 100-foot kit, they are expensive. Sure, it would cost potentially thousands of dollars for a fully integrated soffit lighting setup if you factor in professional installation, but you can get similar lights to these for less. Even Govee’s own Permanent Outdoor Lights Pro, which use single LED lamps, are $100 cheaper for the same length of lighting.

The trouble is that Govee’s lights feel cheaply made and that leaves me with questions about their longevity. If I wanted something that feels cheap, there are a lot of options that actually are. And if I wanted to spend more money, I don’t think I’d be tempted enough by the triple LEDs of Govee’s lights not to just get the cheaper Festavia Permanent Outdoor String Lights from Philips Hue, a company generally known for its high-quality and long-lasting products. After all, even the Hue bulbs I bought nearly a decade ago work as well now as the day I bought them.

Semi-pro lighting show

Govee’s known for its fancy lighting effects, and the Lights Prism is no slouch here. The Govee app is fat with options for different looping effects—you can go with premade ones, roll your own looping effects and light gradient combinations, choose from effects made by other Govee users, and more.

Unsurprisingly, you can also ask AI to make mediocre effects. For instance, when I asked the lights to mimic forest lighting, the app created an effect that made light slowly creep across the string, to mimic daylight cracking through the leaves in an overhead canopy. It was okay, but lacked the sort of simulated random swaying of trees I might have tried to build in.

I found other effects a lot more compelling. The plethora of premade ones fit into categories like “Festival,” “Soothing,” or “Universe.” They might be as simple as a gentle pulsing light or be more complex, with the individual LEDs of the lamps winking and flashing. There are also some licensed effects, like for Zootopia 2, but you’d need Govee’s net-style lighting to actually get any benefit from them.

I especially liked the music synchronization effects, probably because at my core, I’m just a simple ape who wants to be entertained. Govee’s effects really shine with the three-light lamps as they allow for more detailed gradients, or for the individual lights of each lamp to flash on and off in a more lively display than you might get with single light sources. It’s cheesy, all of it.

Of course, neither of the ways Govee makes this work—using the microphone on the lights themselves to pick up cues from external music or using your smartphone—is good enough to be more than cheap entertainment. The onboard mic is more precise but susceptible to other noises screwing it up, while syncing using your smartphone’s microphone introduces so much latency the effect might as well be totally random.

I could see using the music effects for a backyard karaoke party or something. But I would never subject my neighbors to what amounts to a Temu version of those Christmas light shows that go viral every year when some stage lighting professional goes hog wild with Disney soundtracks or whatever.

Matter matters, but you still need the Govee app

The best thing Govee has going for it these days is that, since 2023, this company has gone hard on supporting Matter. That’s great for a couple of reasons. One is that any Matter-compliant smart light you buy from Govee will work with any smart home platform you use, assuming you haven’t found some obscure, non-Matter-supporting one.

Also, Matter-certified devices are required to function even when your internet goes down. So, if you’re savvy enough to have the Lights Prism on your local network but closed off to the broader internet, they’re still controllable.

All that said, you won’t be able to ditch the Govee app if you want to do anything more complicated than turning the lights on and off or setting the whole string’s brightness or color at once. Matter just doesn’t support that granularity, and none of the major smart home platforms has any sort of easy, built-in support for lighting effects.

Nice lights, but wait for a good sale to buy

The Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism is a very slick alternative to more invasive, integrated installations that would require professionals to cut holes in your soffit and install lights that they then wire up directly to your home. And with three LEDs per lamp, it makes for much more detailed lighting effects than just about any of the other permanent string lights on the market right now.

The trouble with it all is price. Sure, the Lights Prism is cheaper than those professional installations I just mentioned, but the physical product just doesn’t feel like it’s worth its at-least-$540 price. That’s hard to get over, especially when Philips Hue has a cheaper version of this concept, minus the triple-LED gimmick. It’s wild to see Philips Hue lights outprice anything even remotely similar, but there it is.

Still, the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism are very neat, they work with all major smart home platforms, and I wouldn’t be sad if I owned them. So it’s a good thing that Govee never keeps its products at their street price for long, especially around the holiday season, when prices plummet as everyone competes for your gift-giving dollars. If you’re in the market for fancy outdoor smart lights and you see a really good deal on the Lights Prism—I mean cheaper-than-Hue good—go for it.

See Govee Outdoor Lights Prism at Amazon