Ikea Dirigera review: A smooth smart home onramp for newbies

Price When Reviewed

$69.99

Best Prices Today: Ikea Dirigera

The Ikea Dirigera is a small hub that, together with the Ikea Home Smart app, lets you control all the gadgets in your smart home. Or at least, some of the gadgets in your smart home.

Because unlike some competing product, such as the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, the Ikea Dirigera and the Ikea Home Smart app are primarily intended to be used with Ikea’s own smart home products.

However, Ikea Dirigera does support the new Matter standard, which will make it easier to add smart home gadgets from other vendors. Or rather, the Dirigera will support Matter in a future update (there’s a beta program, but it’s limited to lighting products). The problem at the moment is that this standard is so fresh that in practice there aren’t many such gadgets to choose from. But it is welcome news that helps to future-proof the Dirigera.

That said, there are many reasons to invest in the Dirigera now. Ikea has invested heavily in the smart home, and it has plenty of its own smart home products. In addition to smart lights, there are speakers, cellular shades, smart plugs, motion sensors, and even air purifiers to choose from. Ikea’s hub is also already compatible with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems.

Very easy to use

Simplicity is one of Ikea’s hallmarks, and both the Dirigera hub and the Home Smart app are very user friendly and easy to use. The installation of the hub itself is quick and painless. The same then applies to the various Ikea smart home products that it can control.

Just click on the little plus sign in the top right corner, select the product type and then follow the very clear and educational instructions, often via a short video clip.

The simplicity is also there when it comes to organizing your home into different rooms or adding so-called scenes. These scenes allow you to automate many events or create shortcuts for them, so you can start them manually.

For example, you can program the Ikea smart lights in your bedroom to come on at a certain time in the morning, at the same time as a Ikea smart shades are raised. Or your can dim the lights in a particular room and start playing calm music from a speaker when the sun goes down.

Limitations

The Ikea Dirigera is very easy to use, but with simplicity comes limitations. Support for gadgets other than Ikea’s own is in the works via the Matter standard, but there are plenty of comments on Reddit from people who’ve connected third-party devices to their Dirigera hub, but Ikea itself has made no third-party-support claims ahead of its Matter support update.

The scenes that can be programmed are also not very advanced. Basically, you can only add a time for start/stop, follow sunrise/sunset or use a shortcut button. There’s none of the “if XX then YY” that competitors have.

Last fall, Ikea updated the Dirigera with a feature called Control Anywhere, that enables users to control the hub when they’re away from home, via the internet. That makes it possible to do things like switching off a smart light you forgot to turn off when you left home. Prior to that, the hub and the devices connected to it could only be controlled locally, when you were home and connected to your own network.

We hope to see more of these types of improvements with future updates.

For now, the bottom line is that the Dirigera hub is inexpensive enough–and Ikea’s smart home product line is broad enough–for us to recommend both to readers looking for an easy entry into the smart home.

Ikea Dirigera Specifications

• Dimensions: 1.125 x 4.38 x 4.38 inches (HxWxD) (2.86 x 2.86 x 11.13 cm)
• Color: White
• Radios: Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Thread (dormant, pending update to Matter)
• Ports: Ethernet, USB-C (for power)
• Ecosystem support: Ikea Home, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home (Matter in beta)

Editors’ note: This review was originally published by M3.se, TechHive’s sibling site in Sweden. It has been translated from Swedish. M3 recently updated this review in connection with Ikea’s announcement that it was discontinuing its Trådfri-series of smart home products, and that the Dirigera is now the manufacturer’s only supported smart home hub. TechHive’s Michael Brown contributed additional reporting, but was not involved in product testing.