Osram Lightify bulbs - Connect to Hue or Smartthings?

I have 4 hue bulbs and 3 osram lightify bulbs. Currently all the bulbs are connected to the hue hub which is connected to Smartthings.

Are there any advantages and disadvantages of connecting osram lightify bulbs directly to the smartthings hub?

I don’t know about the bulbs, but I have added an Osram Lightify Plug to my Hue bridge, and even though it shows up in the ‘add devices’ wizard of the Hue Connect app, they do not get added to SmartThings.

So I guess I have to find another way to add these


I have Osram lightify bulbs for a while now. They work well with Philips hue without any issues and they are also detected as hue bulbs in Smartthings. I really don’t have any reason to change this, but just checking if there is any advantage of doing so.

Osram bulbs are sold with different profiles.

The ones using the ZLL profile, which are typically sold in Europe, can be connected to a hue bridge.

The ones using the ZHA profile, which are most of the ones sold in the US, will not connect with a hue bridge.

This Difference is why you see so many threads with the “but it works for me” or “but it doesn’t work for me” comments – – typically they are posters from two different regions talking to each other.

It is possible to flash the firmware on the Osram bulbs and switch them to the other profile, but not easy, and may require the Osram Gateway, I’m not sure.

https://developers.meethue.com/content/osram-lightify-philips-hue

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If the bulbs are working well with the hue bridge, leave them on the hue bridge.

There is a known problem with some zigbee lightbulbs when connected directly to the smart things hub, including the Osram, where they will identify to the smartthings hub as zigbee repeaters but they get a kind of buffer overflow condition where they drop some of the messages given to them to repeat. This can cause people to think that a sensor or other battery powered zigbee device is not working, when in fact the problem is the bulb not passing along the messages. :disappointed_relieved:

See the note at the end of the official support article:

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/214191863

Bulbs connected to the Hue bridge will not have this problem, because they only repeat for other devices connected to the same bridge.

(BTW, for technical reasons, the Hue device is a “bridge,” not a “hub,” hence the name.)

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Worth adding to this that Philips and Osram are blaming each other for compatibility issues. You often see Osram bulbs classified as “unreachable” on the Philips bridge. This basically means it cannot get an update from the bulb as to it’s current state eg. on/off or colour. It is frustrating as neither connecting direct to smartthings or indirectly via Hue is perfect for these bulbs.

Thanks for the info Wayne. I have seen that this happens with my osram bulbs from time to time, but even when they are listed as un reachable, they still work fine for any commands sent to them.

Now that I have added my hue hub into smartthings, I never open my hue app anymore and don’t even realize if they are in reachable or unreachable state.

I have also tried Osram color bulbs (three in total) and all of them had problems with the Hue Hub (randomly change to warm white), so I returned the colour bulbs. The three bulbs I have now are the tunable white ones which work well with Hue.

Osram A19 white bulbs were a real thorn in my side. HOWEVER since ST has added the ability to do OTA firmware updates to them the number of failures has dropped dramatically and they are working fine.

I am a firm believer in limiting the possible points of failure. So since Osram can connect directly to ST hub, are now officially supported and ST can update their FW, why add the possible failure point by adding them to Hue and then adding them to ST as Hue devices ?

Because of the dropped messages problem. :disappointed_relieved: That one still exists. It doesn’t affect everyone, as it depends on the exact configuration of your network and the amount of traffic on it, but it does still occur.

I was the biggest complainer about that, but since the last couple ST hub updates I haven’t seen the problem. Now it is Cree & GE bulbs dropping. LOL That reminds me I need to go down cellar and play with GE bulb that wouldn’t wake up after just a power cycle the other day.

Makes sense. I will add 1 bulb to smartthings for now and see how it goes. Also I have a feeling that some of the Philips hue bulbs may not work well if I remove the lightifiy bulbs from the hue hub as that zigbee network will lose some repeaters.

I too get the random unreachable thing with lightify but commands still work.
The problem with connecting directly to ST is that one presumably wouldn’t be able to link the bulbs to hue switches. I like to have all the bulbs controllable by switches as well as Alexa / app (and sensors where appropriate). Unfortunately, hue switches don’t list as ST devices