Dreame has established itself as a heavyweight in the smart home arena, primarily known as a top-three maker of robotic vacuum cleaners. Following a firm commitment to the Matter standard for its flagship cleaning appliances, the company is now making a bold step into an entirely different product category: ambient smart lighting.
Having the new Dreame Strip Lights P11 in hand to test feels a bit peculiar at first. Seeing the familiar Dreame logo printed on a lighting product alongside the Matter badge is an unexpected crossover. However, after extensive daily testing, the whole experience feels just as solid and refined as you would expect from a mature hardware maker. Here is my take on this ambitious new entry into the smart home lighting market.
TL;DR
Dreame Strip Lights P11
Best Price
Fors
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High brightness
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Good connectivity
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Rich light effect presets
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Built-in mic for music sync
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Accurate color
Againsts
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Lower LED density compared to rivals
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Occasional slow response and connectivity issues
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High price tag
Unbox and design
The Dreame Strip Lights P11 presents a straightforward unboxing experience that is very similar to most of its direct rivals. The retail package includes the rolled light strip pre-fitted with adhesive backing, a physical controller, a power supply adapter, and basic installation accessories to help route the light strip and cables along your furniture or walls.
The physical strip itself features a very solid build quality with a thick, waterproof outer covering. Unlike the strips that mold the electronic components directly into the plastic housing, this Dreame model is designed more like a flexible silicone sleeve holding the internal light ribbon. This design choice is actually quite practical. If you ever want to repurpose the LED ribbon by pulling it out and placing it inside another half-translucent light case or custom slot, that modification would work easily. But do remember to seal the end, or it would become a dust collector.
The light strip connects directly to the physical controller, which offers a standard DC connector for the wall power supply. The provided cable is generously long, which is pretty helpful if you plan to hide the power brick slightly away from the desired lighting setup, such as tucking it behind a television console or routing it beneath a kitchen cabinet.
The controller itself features a minimal design with only a single physical button used to toggle the power. I have previously used ambiance lights from brands like Nanoleaf and Govee quite a lot, and those usually provide more options for physical control directly on the wire. However, the simplified Dreame controller does not bother me much. I prefer to use wireless smart remotes or trigger the lights via automations with room sensors, allowing me to simply hide the controller and the power supply out of sight entirely.
For users installing the lights in tight spaces, the strip can be physically cropped at designated points located every six LED light chips. This makes it easy to apply the lights to a smaller setting, like a short bookshelf or a specific display cabinet, without having awkward excess ribbon hanging off the edge. If you save your offcuts, you can easily use a standard five-pin solder-free connector to bridge the pieces and reconnect the scrap ribbon when you need that extra length back in the future.
Onboarding and stability
The initial setup experience is overall good.
I tested the Dreame light with IKEA Home smart, Apple Home, Google Home, Home Assistant, and Samsung SmartThings. The light strip commissioned smoothly across the board. Like many modern devices, it has a regular limitation of five Matter fabrics, which includes the Apple Keychain slot.
DIRIGERA
You can optionally use the official Dreame app to customize extra device features, and this process is completely separate from the Matter setup flow. Because the vendor app does not act as a Matter Controller, the best practice is to add the light to your primary Matter platform first, and then link it to the Dreame app later when you need to adjust specific lighting effects.
The light strip stayed connected for most of the testing period in my heavy home networking setup. There were a couple of brief network drops over the last month, but the device successfully went back online automatically without any manual intervention. In rare conditions, I did have to perform a hard power cycle by unplugging the unit to wake it up. This minor instability is somewhat expected given that the strip was aggressively connected to five different fabrics across four distinct Matter ecosystems to stress test the hardware. (And this also makes sense for a dated Matter 1.3 plus Wi-Fi 4 device.)
The actual response speed is just moderate. It is noticeably slower than a Thread device, and the commands can become slightly delayed when you attempt to send multiple brightness or color changes within a few seconds. However, for regular daily use, it catches your commands reliably, performing exactly like most high-quality Wi-Fi smart devices.
Performance and features with Matter
The strip utilizes RGBWWIC tech, meaning it features independent control chips and dedicated diodes for both colors and tunable white light. It can bring both excellent RGB hues and brilliant warm-to-cool white lighting to a room. It is super bright, outputting enough lumens to easily serve as a secondary light source if you install it in a smaller space. The hue color reproduction is also accurate, looking close to the exact shades I selected using the color picker on my iPhone.
However, I noticed it does not support the Apple Adaptive Lighting feature, despite having the high-specification hardware and dedicated white light chips required to pull it off. This limitation is likely due to the device running on the older Matter spec, as Apple is expected to open up this specific lighting feature for devices supporting the newer Matter 1.4 standard (e.g. AiDot lights).
BILRESA Remote Control with Dual Button
When added to Google Home and SmartThings, there are more options for light control, presets, and setting timers. I usually rely on IKEA remotes for my daily lighting, I heavily tested the strip with the IKEA Home smart ecosystem. It turns out the IKEA platform currently has a bug with this specific Matter light. While you can adjust the brightness perfectly fine within the IKEA mobile app, any physical remote you bind to the light will simply refuse to dim it. For power users running Home Assistant, the Matter integration works flawlessly and includes an option to set the default power-on state after a power outage.
Dreame in-app features
The Dreame Home app features a clean and sleek interface that is easy to navigate. It provides dozens of dynamic animated presets designed to add a specific ambiance to your home, ranging from relaxing warm glows to fast-paced party effects. It also includes a brilliant customization tool that allows you to manually paint the color of each specific section of your light strip, taking full advantage of the independent chip hardware.
The physical controller also integrates a small mic, allowing the light strip to actively listen and sync up with environmental music playing in the room. There are a couple of distinct Microphone Effects to choose from within the app, complete with tunable sensitivity sliders so the lights pulse perfectly to the beat without being overly aggressive.
Verdict
With a retail price tag of $76.99, the Dreame Strip Lights P11 is positioned at the higher end of the market. While the LED density is slightly lower than some competing models in this price range, the inclusion of a modern Wi-Fi 6 chip, highly accurate RGBWWIC light chips, and native Matter compatibility make it a strong contender.
The minor control delays under heavy multi-admin setups are easy to overlook given the overall stability of the connection. If you are looking for a super bright, easy-to-modify light strip that plays nicely with almost every major smart home platform, this is a very solid option.
Looking ahead, this debut along with its big show at CES suggests Dreame is likely building out a whole house smart lighting ecosystem like Govee. It will be very interesting to see what the household giant introduces next to expand its lighting portfolio.
(Image: Matter Alpha/Ward Zhou)
