Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Review: Year-Round Holiday Decorations, Just One Trip Up the Ladder

The Govee lights come in roughly 16-foot-long segments that you can string together, using as many as you need to line your roof. The lights then connect to a weatherproof power cord with a plastic box that houses the smarts of the device and a physical on/off button.

Mounting these lights is very straightforward. Each light puck comes with an adhesive strip attached to it. You simply peel off the liners and stick each puck to your roof eaves, stretching out the 15 inches of wire between each puck. The kit also comes with metal mounting brackets that you put over each puck and screw into the eave to keep them in place should the adhesive wear out.

If you mount these lights on the bottom of your gutters—as I did in some spots—you’ll probably want to forgo the metal brackets—putting screws in the bottom of your gutters can make them leak.

Full disclosure: My installation process was a bit different. My wife and I weren’t ready to commit to permanent lights for our house, so I had to find a temporary way to mount them. After some trial and error, I used double-sided adhesive tape that I ran along the entire path of the lights. I then attached the string of lights to the tape. The whole process took me about two hours, but your installation could be faster thanks to the preattached adhesive strips.

With installation out of the way, I was able to get to the heart of why people buy Govee lights, using the app to try different color combinations and looks.

I set up the lights in the Govee app quickly, without hitting any snags—a surprisingly rare feat for a smart home device. You download the app and create an account (a common requirement for smart home gadgets). Then, the app shows you a list of Govee products sorted by type, where you can choose the lights you’ve installed, but it will also automatically find the lights via Bluetooth and show them to you at the top of the screen, under a banner that reads “Nearby New Devices.”

Once you find the lights, you simply tap “Add” to get started. The app asks how many segments you’ve used, and asks you to select a WiFi network and input the network password. The lights joined my home network in seconds and proceeded to update their firmware, which only took a few minutes but required me to keep my phone within six feet of the lights. With the firmware up-to-date, the permanent outdoor lights were ready to use.

When I say that these Govee permanent outdoor lights offer every lighting effect you could want, I really mean it. The controls in the app include premade “scenes” for every holiday big or small, from Hanukkah to Father’s Day, for a total of 42 holiday scenes within the Festival category alone.

And there are four other categories of scenes: Natural, Life, Emotion, and the Dallas Mavericks (yes, really). Those categories combine for another 62 effects, bringing the total number of scenes to 104!

Premade scenes aren’t the only way you can use these lights. You can create effects using a finger to sketch colors over specific sections of lights. You can ask Govee’s AI chatbot to create custom effects for you based on a written description or a picture you upload. There are also DIY effects where you create effects using certain styles (such as gradient or twinkle) that you pair with a palette of colors that you choose. You have so many options that it can easily feel overwhelming and confusing—but that’s still not it.

The Govee app has social features that allow you to share your own custom lighting effects, as well as browse and adopt custom effects created by other Govee users. These social feeds of lighting effects can be found in a few different places. From the page of controls for the permanent lights, they’re listed under the Share Space section as a grid of playable video thumbnails. On the main menu along the bottom of the app, there’s a compass button for the Discover page, which is a Twitter-style feed of posts with effects.

As if that wasn’t enough, opening a video from either of those spots will bring you to a TikTok-style feed of videos that you can swipe through. And they all have a blue Apply button you can click to try them out.

Last but not least, you can also choose effects that sync your lights to music, using either your phone or a Govee music sync box that you buy separately. The sync box has a microphone that listens to music you play on another device you already own, and makes the lights react to the beat. There is an indoor version and an outdoor version, and each costs $40.

The Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights 2 work fine on their own with the Govee app, and that’s how most people will probably use these lights. But if you like, you can also connect the lights to smart home systems or digital assistants. You can then control and automate the lights along with other smart devices in your home, without having to jump between multiple apps. For example, I’ve set up an Amazon Alexa Routine that turns on all my holiday lights at sunset and off at midnight, from the Govee lights to prelit wreaths.

These Govee lights support the Matter smart home standard, which means they can work with any smart home system or digital assistant that supports the standard. Those options include Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant.

I was able to set up the lights with all four major systems (Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung) in just a few minutes. While the pairing process was easy, I ran into some minor issues controlling the lights with Apple Home and Google Home. Apple Home had some preset color buttons that yielded a different color from what the app showed. At first, Google Home showed me a blank page instead of its list of preset colors, but when I tried it again several hours later the menu was finally working.

I purchased the 100-foot version of the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights 2 for $300. (There are also 50-foot and 150-foot versions.) I didn’t use any extensions, but they are available for $50 each. No matter what length you buy, the lights cost about $3 per foot, which seems a bit expensive to me.

You can find some cheaper options from competitors and Govee itself. The predecessor to these lights, the original Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights, costs $280 for 100 feet of lights. The lights are 10 lumens dimmer than the Outdoor Lights 2 and lack Matter support (though they do support Amazon Alexa and Google Home).

Feit Electric makes a 50-foot-long permanent outdoor light set that costs $130, while Enbrighten makes 50-foot and 100-foot sets that cost $160 and $250, respectively. I can’t vouch for how well they work, but they’re worth considering if you want to keep your spending down.