The Best Permanent Outdoor Lights (2025): Govee, Eufy, Lepro

If you’re wondering how your neighbor got such a lovely glow under their roof eaves, it’s probably a set of permanent outdoor lights. The name suggests exactly what they are: a type of string lights designed to stay up year-round, instead of coming down after the holiday season. Permanent is subjective in the sense that you can choose to anchor these to your home with screws or just stick them on with adhesive, depending on your home’s design and how much drilling you want to do. But either way, the intention is that you install them once and can use them all year.

These lights are similar to smart lights in that you control and customize them with an app to display relevant colors for whatever you want: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or even your favorite sports team on game day. No more hauling the orange lights up and down for Halloween and replacing them with your Christmas string lights, only to have to take them down at the start of the new year. You’ll install these once and should be done for at least a few years, depending on your installation style.

Unlike traditional string lights, they’re not installed on the outside of your roof and eaves, but underneath, so they’re hidden when not in use (and HOAs are happier with them year-round)! Our favorite options are from Govee ($440, 100 ft) and Eufy ($325, 100 ft), both of which make great sets you can cut and splice to fit your home perfectly. My favorite affordable set is from Cync ($143, 100 ft), which are easy to use and install and come with lots of great color options.

The tricky thing is that these lights don’t always work for every style of home. Read on to find out if your home is a fit, what you should look for in a good permanent outdoor light set, and what sets we recommend (or don’t recommend) and why. Looking for more lighting and outdoor smart home ideas? Don’t miss our guides to the Best Smart Christmas Lights, Best Smart Lights, Best Smart Outdoor Security Cameras, and Best Smart Locks.

Updated December 2025: We’ve added the Cync Dynamic Effects Eave Lights as the new budget pick for this guide, added a new More Outdoor Lights We’ve Tested section, and ensured updated pricing information.

Permanent outdoor lights are exactly what they sound like: outdoor lights meant to be permanently affixed to your home, so you don’t have to go up and down a ladder every Halloween and Christmas season. They’re similar to smart Christmas lights like those from Twinkly ($120) and Philips Hue ($220), and other smart lighting options like Philips Hue’s smart bulbs ($143), in that they connect to an app and have custom color control.

The lights we recommend below are all DIY-friendly, but you can also hire a pro installer to put these on your home for you, and there are some options out there that are pro-installed only. Hiring an installer is recommended if you have harder-to-reach eaves or a trickier home design, but as these lights aren’t cheap, it’ll add to the cost. Still, it’s something to consider, and part of what makes these lights different than a simple string light.

The most important thing to check is if your home is even compatible with permanent outdoor string lights. If your home has any of these features, installation should work for you:

• An accessible roof or roof eaves, often found on one-story or two-story homes
• An outdoor ceiling, like a porch roof
• Flat, smooth materials, including glass, cement, wood, or metal, under the eaves (or other spots on your home’s exterior that would make sense for lights to live permanently, like a porch covering, pergola, or other exterior features)
• An outdoor outlet, ideally at least partially covered to safely power these lights and protect the control box

Most one- and two-story homes are designed in a way that will work with permanent outdoor lights, since they typically have roof eaves that are accessible on both levels. Govee, for example, claims its permanent outdoor lights ($460) will work on everything from cottages and tiny houses to large homes and even mansions. (I’m sad to report that no, I did not have a mansion available for our testing.) Eufy (another set we recommend!) warns that paint could be a deterrent for secure adhesion of its permanent outdoor lights ($500).

Most permanent outdoor lights come with multiple options for attaching them to your home, ranging from sticky tabs to more permanent options with screws, though some brands may require you to buy anchors separately. Some of our testers used sticky options with success, while others chose to use the included screws to ensure the lights wouldn’t move. It depends on your home style and your own comfort for what style you’d like to use. We’ve tested sticky adhesion for a little over a month so far in the Midwestern US with great success, but obviously tape isn’t as permanent as drilled anchors.

Here are the home styles for which installation of permanent lights will be a struggle:

• Homes and properties with a stucco exterior
• Homes with no roof eaves of any kind
• Homes with cross-style eaves that don’t allow for flat adhesion
• Three-story homes with no eaves on the lower levels
• Townhomes and condominiums that don’t allow for permanent changes, or have roof styles to fit these light styles

I live in a three-story townhouse covered in stucco, which disqualifies me from installing most permanent outdoor lights. The stucco makes it impossible to stick anything to it, and I have an HOA that forbids “permanent changes” to my exterior, so they frown upon me drilling. And, most importantly, I don’t have the right eave design with my townhouse to hide the strip of lights when they’re off.

But that doesn’t mean I have zero options (more on what I can do instead below). Still, if you want the full-home look, you’ll need a home with a more standard roof or roof-like securing options.

Most permanent outdoor lights look pretty similar, with puck lights on a string. How different can they be, right? Well, we’ve found a couple features that really make a set stand out.

Cut-and-splice abilities. WIRED reviewer Kat Merck has tried two different sets of permanent lights on her home, and she’s found the ability to cut and splice the lights together a key feature. Especially since many homes have varied architectural features like peaks, gables, and sections without eaves, the ability to cut, shorten, or extend the lights as needed for even spacing can turn these into a perfect fit. Our favorite sets from Govee ($440, 100 ft) and Eufy ($500, 100 ft) both include this ability.

Weatherproofing. Every model needs a weatherproof rating to survive outside, so if you don’t see one, don’t buy it. There’s usually a lower rating for the control box compared to the rest of the lights, so be sure you can put that somewhere that’s a little less exposed to the elements. (As mentioned above, make sure you have an outdoor outlet, and check if there’s only one on a certain side of your home in case it limits your installation options.)

A range of installation options. You’ll want a set that comes with plenty of options for your own installation, including adhesive and drilled mounting options. What you need will vary based on your home design and materials; e.g., you’ll want adhesive for homes you can’t drill into. WIRED reviewer Kat Merck, who tested a couple different permanent lights, especially liked sets that had holders you screw onto your home that the puck-style permanent lights can slide onto.

Controls for individual lights. This should be a no-brainer, but some cheaper lights won’t give you this ability or have more roadblocks for customized control. Make sure you’ll have easy individual controls, or you might find yourself frustrated with the design results of these lights. It’s similar to design controls that you’d see on smart bulbs and smart string lights.

A great app. This goes hand in hand with the need for individual light control—a good app determines whether that and other features are accessible. Govee and Eufy, two of our favorite permanent outdoor lights we’ve tried, both have good apps that are easy to use and come with preloaded designs. These tech companies make more than just outdoor lights and make other favorite gear of ours, so they’re a good brand to trust to make a usable product and app. We also like Lepro’s more affordable lights, though the app had some extra hoops to jump through to get to controls, while Lumary’s app was a brutal experience for our tester.

We’ve tested a handful of permanent lights on different homes, and have a few clear favorites. These options are all ones we recommend, provided your home exterior meets the constraints mentioned above.

This model from Govee has been one of our top picks in our smart Christmas lights review for a reason, and it’s still one of our favorite models at this price point for everything you’ll get with it. WIRED reviewer Simon Hill tested the 100-foot string that came with six sections, plus an extension code. He used adhesive and screw clips to secure the light pucks and cables, and found installation easy. This is a set that you can cut and splice, but he says that isn’t a task for the faint of heart. It has an IP67 rating, and an IP65 rating for the control box. The busy companion app has everything you could want within it: color controls, tons of Scenes (Govee’s lighting effects), scheduling abilities, and even a music sync option (though that felt a little gimmicky). There’s Matter support, and Govee can connect to Alexa and Google’s ecosystems for voice control. Simon says he’d like these lights to be closer together and the design to be a little more subtle, as you can see the cords pretty easily.

WIRED reviewer Kat Merck has tested two different sets of permanent outdoor lights on her home, and Eufy’s S4, incorporating RGB with both warm and cool whites, is by far her favorite. She’s found the app incredibly easy to navigate and find the features she wants, from preset holiday scenes (120!) and colors to schedules and brightness adjustments. There’s even an AI feature that lets you create customized light shows based on moods and scenarios. They were relatively easy to install on her home, which has nonstandard architectural features, as this set has extensions and can be cut and spliced. She says the lights aren’t quite as bright as the Lumary Max set below, but the brightness is adjustable. There’s also a radar motion sensor included, which she’s still testing. The Eufy S4 set also works with the Matter protocol, so it will work with Apple, Google, and Alexa’s smart home ecosystems. It’s got a waterproof rating of IP67 like the Govee set above.

Cync, which comes from appliance maker GE, makes affordable smart bulbs and other smart lights I like, so it’s not a huge surprise that I also liked the brand’s Smart Eave Lights. They were easy to install with 3M sticky strips already installed on the individual lights, and since my eaves are out of safe reach on my townhouse, I used the lights on my balcony railing with great success. One piece of the 100-foot set (it comes with four strings, plus an extension) was the perfect length to loop around my 9-foot-long railing. The set quickly connected to the Cync app, and the power cord is nice and long to make it easy to reach wherever your power outlet is. It has a waterproof rating of IP65.

Not every home is a good fit for these types of lights. I haven’t yet found a permanent light set that works with my home, so here’s what I’ve used instead for a similar result.

Courtesy of Twinkly

Twinkly

Strings Multicolor

$120

Amazon (66 Foot)

$120 $84 (30% off)

Twinkly (66 Foot)

These lights are photographed on a tree, but they have a weatherproof rating of IP44 (for both the lights and the power supply) to be used outside. I love how much you can customize these lights. You’ll use the app to take a photo of however you’ve set up your lights, whether that’s around the tree, around your balcony’s railing, or along the front of your house, and then you’ll be able to customize the lights and pattern based on how you arranged it. There are tons of fun light designs already in the app, and you can make your own. It’s a good option if you can only do string lights but want smart capabilities. These lights are also compatible with Amazon’s, Google’s, and Apple’s ecosystems. Twinkly also makes an icicle-style smart light string ($110), which I love using outside too; they’re currently hanging above my garage door.

• Cync Outdoor Light Strip for $154: I was really hoping this would be a good solution for outdoor lights for my balcony, but this light strip is heavy and tall, and better designed to use to line a yard versus sticking onto the side of a railing. It comes with grass stakes to line it.
• Lepro’s E1 AI for $153 (50 ft): These permanent outdoor lights are completely sold out right now, but they are another more affordable option. However, they aren’t as cheap as Cync and you will have to get around the app’s AI to really get the most out of it.
• Lumary Outdoor Permanent Lights Max ($260 for 105 ft.): Lumary’s lights were frustrating and limiting for our tester. The app wasn’t intuitive or easy to use, and our tester actually had to have the power box replaced after she tried to connect the lights to a different phone. She liked how bright the lights were, and the fact there’s a physical remote, but the app, power box shutdown, and installation limitations compared with other sets (no splicing ability, installation recommended from the left) make this one we’d skip. Lumary has since released an updated version of its outdoor permanent lights, the Permanent Outdoor Lights 2, which includes a completely redesigned app, including the addition of custom-scene saving, but we haven’t tested them yet.