I absolutely love smart lights for their convenience and versatility, to the point that I don’t use any non-smart lighting in my living room or bedroom in my day-to-day routine.

I’m also a big fan of anything bright and colorful, so naturally, I’ve found myself drawn to some of the more fun smart light offerings on the market. One of the most fun formats you can buy is a rope light, which makes a fantastically flexible feature bound to brighten up the decor.

This flexibility makes them a great way to get creative and create your own neon sign, a prospect that really appealed to me, so I was sold! Or so I thought. Turns out, not all rope lights are made equal. At different price points, this is understandable, but when there’s a noticeable difference in performance and the price isn’t worlds apart, spending a little more, or less in some cases, means you’ll be getting better value for money.

As I test smart lights for a living, I’m able to try different products and make a direct comparison, something that would be time-consuming and expensive for most people to do. Without the opportunity to do this, many people could be left with a mediocre or impractical smart light when a far superior alternative was also in reach.

After my testing, I concluded there were four key reasons why the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Multicolor Rope Light couldn’t hold a candle to the Govee Neon Rope Light 2. These pitfalls could also prove enlightening if you’re checking out options from other brands, too.

If you’re a smart light fan or you’re looking to explore the other options that are out there before jumping in, I suggest taking a look at our guide to the best smart lights to see our top recommendations.

1. Hardware

Nanoleaf should have taken a leaf out of Govee’s book when it came to designing their rope lights’ mounting clips. The Govee Neon Rope Light 2 comes with two types of mounting clips: small plastic rectangles with the clips running down the entire length, and bendable metal corner mounts with one of the aforementioned clips on each end. This design meant that curves could be more controlled and lead to less tension around tighter curves.

In contrast, the Nanoleaf Smart Rope Light just comes with little plastic rectangles, which only have a clip on one end. This short clip is presumably meant to allow for more flexibility, but the result is less support when trying to shape the rope light, and visible sections of the mounting clips around the bends of the design.

2. Difficulty recreating designs

I always opt for one of the pre-existing designs when testing a smart light format like this, as this should guarantee that the design I’m attempting is achievable. Or at least, that’s the theory.

Some example designs are available on the rope light’s product page on the Nanoleaf website. Each has an associated image showing the recommended positions of the clips, and specifying the area the design should cover, e.g., 45.4 x 19.8 inches / 115 x 50cm. To recreate one of these example designs, one is supposed to measure out the coverage area before attempting to copy the design onto the wall in pencil.

This proved to be a laborious and frustrating way to recreate the designs, especially when we encountered problems getting the curves to run smoothly along the path they were supposed to.

Recreating one of the many Govee designs was a completely different experience. After choosing the design I wanted to go with, the rope light lit up red where the clips needed to be placed, with different lengths signifying whether it should be a standard clip or a bendy one. This made things so much simpler for us and meant it was far easier to arrange the rope.

Perhaps I’d already been spoiled by the intuitive method offered by the Govee rope light, but having tried both, there’s no question which one was the easiest to wrestle into shape.

3. Disappointing design mapping

Both rope lights have the option to use your phone camera to capture the layout of the design once it’s in place. This process was a breeze with the Govee Neon Rope Light 2, as it was a case of photographing my design, and the app cleverly recreated the design for me.

This feature on the Nanoleaf Rope Light is far more basic, however, as instead of the app figuring out the design for itself, I had to trace my finger over the design, which turned out to be far more difficult than it sounds, despite it just being a fairly loose arrangement of curved lines when I tested it.

The main problem is that it was so hard to see the next part of the design from under my finger; I ended up using a stylus in the end, but even then, it was hard to stay really accurate. I imagine it’d be even more difficult to stay on track if it were a more complex design, like the skyline arrangement in Nanoleaf’s marketing imagery.

Shape mapping features prove very useful if you want to get really specific and have a clear visual representation of your design, but it proved to be a lot more time-consuming and frustrating to use this feature from Nanoleaf. That’s a stark contrast to the Govee feature, which took mere moments to recreate the design of a woman’s face it was arranged in.

4. Mounting concerns

I didn’t experience any issues when mounting the Govee rope light, as the bases of the clips have a good-sized surface area, allowing the 3M adhesive to hold everything in place, with screws provided as extra support, if required.

Due to the slightly slimmer profile of the Nanoleaf rope light, there’s limited surface area on the base of the mounting clips. This, combined with the extra tension that occurs due to the short clip, meant the 3M adhesive backing wasn’t as reliable as I’d have liked when trying to recreate bends that were even remotely tight.

This explains why screwing each clip into place is stated as a requirement in the user manual, but I personally wouldn’t want to be screwing up to 30 holes in my wall for a lighting feature when I could opt for a slightly wider rope light with enough surface area for the adhesive to do the job on its own.

It’s also stated in the FAQs that the adhesive backing is only for temporary positioning to get the design into place, before screwing them in to secure them, as the adhesive cannot support the rope light over time. The thing is, I found that the adhesive alone couldn’t handle the tension from any form of tight bend, so it wasn’t even adequate to get some designs laid out in the first place.

Despite the concept of the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Multicolor Rope Light being very similar to the Govee Neon Rope Light 2, they are worlds apart when it comes to ease of use and feature sets. The Govee mounting clips were the best by far, plus it was so much quicker and simpler to use their layout mapping feature and form the rope light into one of the pre-existing designs.

Taking into account that the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Multicolor Rope Light is available at a list price of $69.99 / £79.99, and the list price of the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 is $99.99 / £99.99, it could be considered acceptable that the $30 / £20 cheaper Nanoleaf alternative couldn’t hold a candle to it. However, I’ve spied regular price drops on the 16.4ft / 5m Govee Neon Rope Light 2, with the price reducing to just $66.99 / £55.99 at Amazon on occasion, so if I were you, I’d hold out for one of those delightful discounts instead.

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Cesci is a Reviews Staff Writer for TechRadar. She writes in-depth reviews based on her real-world testing across a variety of categories, but has a particularly keen interest in home tech, and has written features and reviews about gadgets ranging from headphones to smart lights to graphics tablets. She also has a broad range of experience from working in different industries, from sustainable materials and packaging to skin care.