Best light switch for Hue smart bulbs? (re: Z-Wave Scene Controller vs Lutron Aurora dimmer)

Where this came from: this question was asked on r/homeautomation — not here. We answered it there, in public, and this is that answer.

These two aren't really competing for the same job, and that's worth sorting out before you buy either.

The Aurora's whole reason to exist is mechanical: it clamps over the existing toggle and physically holds it on, so nobody can ever cut power to the downlights. That is the single failure mode that generates service calls on smart-bulb jobs. A guest flips the switch, the lights go dead to the app, and the homeowner decides the automation is junk. We've been dealing with the same problem in Lutron systems since RadioRA in the 90s, and the fix there is the same idea: the load stays hot forever and you control it from something that isn't a breaker. The Aurora also talks Zigbee straight to the Hue bridge, so it keeps working while Home Assistant is rebooting after an update. That matters more than people expect in a basement where the hub lives somewhere else.

What the Aurora will not do is give you four distinct scenes on four buttons. It's a dial: press to toggle, turn to dim, and it's bound to a room or zone. If your mental model is "button one is movie, button two is bright, button three is cleaning," the Aurora is the wrong shape for that and no amount of multi-tap config is going to fix it. I'd want to confirm exactly what the Hue app exposes for it these days before you rely on multi-tap at all.

If it were my basement, I'd skip the Zooz and put a Hue Tap Dial on the wall instead. Four buttons plus a rotary, binds directly to the bridge like the Aurora does, no Z-Wave hop, no HA dependency, and it's surface-mounted so your stuffed boxes stop being a problem entirely. Then use an Aurora at the main entry so the physical switch is locked on and the obvious wall control does the obvious thing. That combination gets you both halves of what you're asking for and neither one dies when HA is down.

The case for the Zooz is real if you're already deep in Home Assistant and you want the scenes to touch other things besides the Hue lights, fan, TV, whatever. If that's you, wire line and load together so the fixtures stay hot and set the relay to scene-only so the big paddle can't kill the load. I'd check the current Zooz parameter list for exactly which setting does that rather than trust my memory on the parameter number. You're right that press-and-hold dimming through HA to the bridge feels mushy compared to a dial that's talking to the bridge directly, and I don't think you'll be happy with it in a room you use every day.

Either way you don't need to hire anyone for this. It's an afternoon and a coin cell. If you do end up going the other direction later and want the downlights on real dimmers instead of smart bulbs, send me the fixture model and the number of loads per box and I'll tell you straight whether it's worth it or whether you should stay put. Disclosure: I've been a Lutron dealer since 1999 and I do remote Control4 and Lutron work, so weigh the Lutron nod accordingly, though I'd give you the same answer if the Aurora had somebody else's name on it.