Smart indoor lights are great, but smart outdoor lights really impress me. You can turn them on and off without braving the elements, and nearly all outdoor lights these days have color-changing LEDs. You can instantly change the color of your lights and create dynamic scenes, all with the push of a button on your phone. However, string lights often perform poorly in the elements, soaking up water, burning out, and, in my experience, not lasting more than a season or two. Professional-grade versions of the same lights can be much sturdier, but the price is prohibitive. The long-awaited Nanoleaf Outdoor String Lights (prices start at $99.99) promise to bridge that gap, bringing rugged, smart outdoor lighting to everyone.

I am a huge fan of string lights, but I have bought them many times over the last 10 years because you have to replace them all the time. There is a big difference between the cheap string lights that are attached to a standard household power cord and string lights that use a commercial grade string light with E26 bulbs that are 55 lumens each. You have probably seen the latter on restaurant patios or other commercial spaces. While cheaper household lights don’t really need any extra support, commercial string lights generally use a support wire. You string a wire between your anchor points and then hang the lights from the wire.

The Nanoleaf outdoor lights are a nice middle ground. They look and feel like commercial lights, and are the same weight, with individual hanging posts on each light, so you can hang them from a wire or simply attach them to your house. They don’t require a support wire, but they are heavy and will need sturdy anchors if you don’t use one. Strung on a sturdy black wire, there is a faceted E26 drop bulb every 24 inches. The drop bulbs themselves are sturdy—they don’t look or feel like the flimsy globes that most LEDs have. Made of sturdy plastic, the facets make them look much more expensive than they actually are. They come in foam, so it would be pretty hard for them to break in the shipping process. You can string multiple strings together, and they have a six-foot hookup wire, with a small controller.

These lights are part of the Nanoleaf Matter line, and as such, they were pretty easy to set up. After plugging them into an outlet, the app quickly found them and then scanned the QR code on the controller to pair them. From there, you add them to a “room.” In the Nanoleaf app, rooms are a way to group lights together so that they can have the same effects, though this is also affected by the product line they’re in. All Matter products can generally have the same effects, and you can definitely use your new hanging string lights to coordinate with the Nanoleaf party lights I reviewed last year . Instead of simply turning these lights on and off, you can choose from millions of colors, but rather you’re choosing a color scheme. Since these are programmable LEDs, you can have the string lights shift from color to color or have multiple colors at once, combined with movement. It sounds clunky, but the reason I like Nanoleaf is that the effect is usually subtle and beautiful, and the app pre-loads some tasteful ombrés. You can download additional schemes from other users or create your own, which is pretty easy to do. Like all Nanoleaf products, these are also sound-sensitive, meaning you can choose color schemes that sync to music. One complaint that users have about the Nanoleaf app is that the products often go “offline” or are inaccessible. While that is certainly true, I have found that closing the app and reopening it is a temporary fix that usually resolves these issues. Another issue I have with the app: I normally want all of my Nanoleaf items to have the same motion/color scheme, but different product groups can only match each other, something that Nanoleaf says they are planning to fix. This isn’t as much of a problem outdoors: for now, all of the outdoor products seem to group together.