Ikea Dirigera Review: Fluid Smart Home for Newbies

At first glance

Expert assessment

Advantages

• Inexpensive
• Easy to use
• Supports Amazon Alexa, Apple Home and Google Home
• Content support during implementation

Defects

• For now, device support is limited to Ikea smart home products
• Must be connected to router by wire
• Limited feature set

Our verdict

The Ikea Dirigera smart home hub offers an easy and affordable way to make the leap to a smart home, provided you don’t mind being limited to Ikea’s extensive smart home product lineup or are willing to experiment with third-party Zigbee devices that won’t be officially supported until Ikea releases firmware that makes the hub compatible with Matter.

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

Because unlike some competing products like the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, the Ikea Dirigera and the Ikea Home Smart app are designed primarily for use with Ikea-branded smart home products.

However, Ikea Dirigera does supports the new Matter standard, which will make it easier to add smart home gadgets from other vendors. Or rather, Dirigera will support Matter in a future update (there is a beta program, but it is limited to lighting products). The problem is that the standard is so new that in practice there are not many such gadgets to choose from. But it is good news and helps future-proof Dirigera.

That said, there are plenty of reasons to invest in Diriger right now. Ikea has invested heavily in the smart home and has a number of its own smart home products. In addition to smart lights, there are speakers, cellular blinds, 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. Installing the hub itself is quick and painless. The same goes for the various Ikea smart home products you can control.

Simply click the little plus sign in the top right corner, select your product type, and then follow the very clear and educational instructions, often in the form of a short video clip.

Simplicity is also present 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 that you can trigger them manually.

For example, you can program Ikea smart lights in a bedroom to turn on at a specific time in the morning, at the same time as the Ikea smart blinds go up. You can also dim the lights in a specific room and play soft music from a speaker as the sun goes down.

Limitations

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

The scenes you can program aren’t very advanced either. Basically, you can only add start/end times, track sunrise/sunset, or use a shortcut button. There’s none of the “if XX, then YY” that competitors have.

Last fall, Ikea updated Diriger with a feature called Control Anywhere that lets users control the hub while they’re away from home, over the internet. That lets you do things like turn off a smart light you forgot to turn off when you left home. Previously, the hub and its connected devices could only be controlled locally, when you were at home and connected to your own network.

We hope to see more improvements like this in future updates.

For now, to sum it up, the Dirigera hub is inexpensive enough, and Ikea’s smart home product offering is wide enough, that we can recommend both devices to readers looking for an easy way to get started with a smart home.

Ikea Dirigera Specifications

• Dimensions: 1.125 x 4.38 x 4.38 inches (H x W x D) (2.86 x 2.86 x 11.13 cm)
• Color: White
• Radios: Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Thread (dormant, waiting for Matter update)
• Ports: Ethernet, USB-C (for power supply)
• 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 sister site in Sweden. It has been translated from Swedish. M3 recently updated this review in light of Ikea’s announcement that it is discontinuing its Trådfri smart home product line and that the Dirigera is now the only smart home hub the manufacturer supports. Michael Brown of TechHive contributed additional reporting but was not involved in testing the product.