The 8 Best Christmas Lights of 2025
Upgrade pick
With 16 million color choices and a library of customizable animations and effects, the Twinkly lights are incredibly versatile. But they are expensive, and the app could use some work.
The Wi-Fi–enabled Twinkly Smart RGB-W LED String Lights are the most robust and versatile Christmas lights we’ve ever tested. They’re also the most expensive. But if you’re truly serious about Christmas—and maybe other holidays, too—a Twinkly set is worth the cost. With one tap, you can set your lights to mimic the glimmer of falling snow or the swelling of a fire or even the Italian flag (the company is based in Italy; but you can easily sub in a different flag). While the technology isn’t absolutely perfect yet, it’s still pretty impressive and offers much wider versatility than standard Christmas lights or even other smart options.
Twinkly offers simply the most customizable smart Christmas lights out there. It’s hard to get into specifics, what with 16 million different colors to choose from, but suffice to say that the color fidelity on these lights is generally phenomenal. You can choose just about any color you can fathom—or at least any color you can pick out from the color wheel with a carefully pointed finger. There are also pre-programmed light animations that mimic falling snow, fireworks, sliding doors, spirals, and even crazy lines and snakes (a single off-color trail of lights moving through an otherwise solid-colored sea); depending on the effect, you can even customize the speed and brightness of the movements or changing colors, and whether or not the lights stay lit, pulsate, flicker, et cetera. There are some holiday-specific offerings, too, such as pulsing hearts, prancing reindeer, countdowns and fireworks to ring in the New year, and a roving Bat signal for Batman Day (though you’ll probably need several Twinkly sets with perfect spacing and ideal viewing angles if you truly wish to strike fear in the hearts of any superstitious or cowardly criminals).
The setup process is also surprisingly simple and straightforward (inasmuch as any smart-home device can be). The Twinkly app has an option to “map” your Christmas lights by holding up your phone camera to them like you’re taking a picture. You can do this two-dimensionally (if your lights are on a railing, for example), three-dimensionally (all around the Christmas tree, for example), or not at all. The app intuitively identifies which bulbs are where and uses this information to plot customizable animations across your light display; you can even choose one individual light to make a different color from the rest. As professional lighting/projection designer Ari Herzig told us, “You’re not paying for the lights—you’re paying for the software.” They also told us that a similar process on a standard professional lighting board would probably take about four to six hours. But in case, the app walks you through it all step-by-step.
You can even connect multiple Twinkly sets together to create more intricate light shows. While the Twinkly strands don’t have the same single-outlet piggybacking setup as the others we tested, you can still sync several of them to make one big image or duplicate the same image across your yard. Imagine Santa Claus’s sleigh racing across three trees on your front lawn or the striped pattern of a candy cane swirling in unison across every railing.
Like other smart lighting sets, you can also sync the Twinkly lights to music. This option uses the built-in mic on your phone by default. But the company sells a separate music dongle that lets you sync multiple strands with the use of an algorithm that learns the rhythms of a song in real time. Like the rest of the Twinkly software, this is simultaneously imperfect and yet far more impressive than it has any right to be. You probably don’t need to invest in this feature, however, unless you’re really into serious multimedia displays.
Customer service, from Twinkly itself and from specialized retailers, tends to be better. Christmas Designers even has a dedicated Twinkly team to walk you through any setup issues you might encounter. If you do end up purchasing through a big-box store like Amazon, however, Twinkly also has a robust support section on its website. Granted, most other Christmas lights don’t have the same kind of complicated technology that might require more attentive technical support. But it’s still a nice perk.
But the Twinkly lights are wired differently from other sets. Unlike most Christmas lights, the Twinkly lights can’t piggyback on one another to create longer strands. They’re also wired in a Y shape, with the plug extending from the center and the lights split evenly to the left and right from there. This is different from what most people have come to expect with Christmas lights, and it might actually help them fit better on some houses. But it can be difficult to ball them up for storage without tangling the two arms together. If you remember to wrap the two ends separately you should be fine.
The only other downside of this wiring setup is that a truly robust light display will require more outlets. You’ll also need to do something with that chunky power brick.
The mapping technology is so advanced that it can be frustrating. We’ve seen tremendous improvements in this feature since we started testing the Twinkly lights in 2020, but they still glitch out sometimes. For example, the in-app camera gets confused if there are other lights nearby—including other Twinkly sets—and sometimes misinterprets reflections on the glass on a light bulb. Space restrictions might force you to map at awkward angles, too, which also disorients the software. If you map your lights in landscape mode, then turn your phone vertically again, the app sometimes compresses the map into a confusingly squished portrait mode view. You also can’t zoom in to get a closer look at the individual bulbs in a cluster of lights, either. Even with these glitches however, the Twinkly technology is still quite impressive, and it’s likely to keep getting better with each successive firmware update. And once your Twinkly lights are set up, you don’t have to do it again; Wirecutter product manager Samuel Roth has been using the same mapping setup for five years, despite some initial frustrations.
Though the Twinkly lights are rated for outdoor use, they might not hold up in the most extreme conditions. These lights are only rated IP44, as opposed to the IP65 or IP67 ratings that you find on most outdoor-specific lights. While this means the Twinkly strands have some resistance to splashing water and solid objects larger than a millimeter, they’re still susceptible to the elements. Over the course of long-term testing, ours survived for nearly three years outside before they finally succumbed to a tropical storm that short-circuited the adapter plugs. The lights themselves were fine, and we were able to buy a new power supply. But we generally recommend keeping the plugs as far away from water as you can. If you’re really committed to having a cool outdoor light show, you might want to consider the company’s permanent outdoor light set instead.
Some of the animated effects require more lights, or specific shapes, to really work well. Think of each light as a pixel: More of them will give you better resolution and a clearer image. While you might technically be able to apply a moving witch or reindeer animation to the Twinkly setup on your Christmas tree, it might end up looking less like a light cartoon and more like a glitchy internet video from 2003. Some of the preset animations such as “Santa’s Magic Sleigh Run” also work better when they’re arranged on an actual Christmas tree, rather than spread out on railings or walls. (If you do need a Twinkly design for a flat surface or other setting, the company also sells smart lights in other shapes such as square blocks, curtains, and icicles, which otherwise use the same technology.)
The “pure” white color on the Twinkly lights might also leave you with a headache. Tonally, the color looks fine. But it’s also glaring at full brightness, and it flickered or buzzed occasionally when used in conjunction with certain effects (notably with the horizontal flag effect). Luckily, this is easy to avoid: Simply open the color selector in the app, pick a shade of yellow or blue (depending on your preference for warm or cool white), then drag the black-white slider down so it’s almost all the way to the white portion of the spectrum, but not quite. Think of it like making your own custom white tone at whatever color temperature you prefer.
The Twinkly sets are significantly more expensive than other Christmas light options, and only come with a one-year warranty. If you want the most out of your Twinkly lights, you’re likely going to need to invest a few hundred dollars. But we think the cost is worth it for the happiness these lights can bring—just ask the nice old man who lives around the corner and stops by my house every winter to thank me for our ever-changing light display. Still, with that kind of investment, we wish they were guaranteed to last a little longer.
