We’ll come right out and admit we love Aqara smart home products. The company, which is part of Lumi United Technology, owned by Xiaomi, produces a whole slate of simple and affordable smart home products, all of which integrate with Apple HomeKit, as well as Alexa and Google Assitant. It’s that HomeKit compatibility I really love — it’s tough to find a more cost-effective suite of HomeKit products than those made by Aqara.
We’ll do a whole series on Aqara’s smart home products (including their wireless mini switch, which is a favorite), but for today we’re looking at the Aqara Smart Light Switch, an in-wall smart switch meant to compete with Lutron, Wemo and the rest of this crowded space. is a high-quality and reliable smart switch that offers a wide range of features.

To start off, the Aqara Smart Light Switch comes in two varieties: One with a single rocker, and one with a double rocker. Each of these is available with a neutral wire, or without, depending on your needs.

Pros & Cons of Aqara Smart Light Switch:
Pros:
- Easy installation: The Aqara Smart Light Switch is easy to install and comes with clear instructions. And the ability to support neutral wire setups is a plus, if that’s your situation.
- Voice control: These switches work with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Sire, via HomeKit integration, allowing you to control your lights with your voice. You can also use the Aqara app to control your lights remotely from anywhere, as well as set schedules and automations (though you may want to handle this in your smart home aggregator app of choice).
- Apple HomeKit Compatibility: The Aqara Smart Light Switch is compatible with Apple HomeKit, allowing you to control your lights with Siri voice commands or the Apple Home app. We mentioned this earlier, and it’s a huge plus for Aqara products in general.
- Price: These are some of the most affordable options for those looking to setup a HomeKit-powered smart home system. Your don’t have to use HoimeKit — you can use Alexa of Google Assistant or just use the Aqara app, but we love HomeKit so this is a huge plus.
- Zigbee protocol: All Aqara smart home products use the Zigbee home automation protocol, which gives you flexibility to integrate with other Zigbee devices.
- Safety features: The Aqara Smart Light Switch has built-in protection against overloading, overheating, and short-circuiting, ensuring the safety of your home and family.
Cons:
- No dimming functionality: These switches are simply on/off switches, meaning you can’t dim your lights with them, such as you can with Lutron Caseta smart light switches.
- Limited Wi-Fi compatibility: These switches are only compatible with Wi-Fi networks that operate on a 2.4GHz frequency. If you have a 5GHz network, you may need to create a separate network to use these switches.
- Hub Required: The Aqara Smart Light Switch does require a Zigbee hub, which may be a drawback for some users. But we’ve found the hub to be super reliable and easy to stick in a closet where it quietly does its thing. Also, Aqara hub itself will only run you about $50, which is less than many other smart home hubs, and once you have the hub installed, you can add as many additional Aqara or Zigbee-enabled devices to the hub.
- Limited color options: The switches are only available in white, so they may not match the color scheme of your home.
If you’re like us and you’re looking to fully automate your hoe in a reliable and cost-effective way, Aqara products are definitely worth a look. While Lutron Caseta switches are higher quality and offer the ability to dim your lights (rather than simoly turn them on or off), the Aqara switches are a simple, affordable option to get all your in-wall switches online and start building automations between them and other devices.
The best part is, once you get up and running with your Aqara hub, you’ll open yourself up to all the additional products Aqara offers, like motion sensors, door and window sensors, and wireless mini switches, and more.
For example, we have an automation setup between door and window sensors, Lutron light switches, and Airplay-enabled Sonos speakers, to create a home-grown alarm system. In our setup, the Aware hub “arms” itself every night at 11 p.m. and then disarms at 5 a.m. When the system is armed, if any of the door and window sensors are triggered (such as the one on our front gate), a series of indoor and outdoor lights turn on and the Sonos speakers play an alarm sound to ward off any would-be intruders. This is all configured via Apple Homekit, so even though I’m dealing with three different device manufacturers, everything works perfectly well together. (We’ll do a deep dive on our security setup down the road.)
Best of all, all of the devices in the Aqara lineup are very reasonably priced, so it’s easy to go down a deep rabbit hole of Aqara smart home products.
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