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Updated October 31, 2025

Michael Hession / NYT Wirecutter

Christmas lights bring a unique glimmering warmth to your holiday season—or your backyard, your favorite dive bar, or really anywhere else, for that matter.

After more than 100 hours of researching, interviewing experts, and testing more than 70 different string light sets, we believe the Pro Christmas T5 LED Christmas Lights offer the best combination of light quality, color accuracy, durability, and availability.

Everything we recommend

Top pick

Budget pick

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Upgrade pick

Top pick

With rich colors, tight wiring, and sturdy construction with a reliable warranty, the Pro Christmas T5 LED Christmas Lights are the best of the best of the plain old standard T5-style mini bulb Christmas lights. These LED bulbs are made with a one-piece molded plastic design that’s resistant to water and dust, and guaranteed to last for at least 3 holiday seasons. They also come in a wide range of color options, including the standard warm white, cool white, and multicolor bulbs, as well as several other solid primary tones and Christmas-y combinations. They are typically more expensive than whatever cheap Christmas lights you might be used to buying at the local big-box store, but we think the quality and lifespan are more than worth the markup.

Budget pick

If you just need a big spool of decent-looking Christmas lights for a reasonable price, look for the GE StayBright Mini LED Christmas Lights. GE has been in the Christmas light business since day one, which means these are widely available seasonally, and they do a nice job overall. The wires aren’t quite as rigid or cleanly wrapped as the ones on our top pick, and the light quality isn’t quite as bright or as robust. The multicolor set includes a nice purple bulb—a GE-specific detail that really brings the palette together. The company sells a neutral white light spool as well, with a color temperature that sits right between the warm white and cool white options you get from other companies.

Best for...

The Pro Christmas 5 mm Wide Angle Conical LED Christmas Lights have shorter, stubbier bulbs that seem to project a different level of brightness depending on where you’re standing—an almost twinkling effect that gives the lights a nice sense of texture and depth. This unique design also makes them more weather resistant, which is why we (as well as pro lighting designers and other experts we talked to) think these lights are ideal for an outdoor setting. These lights can work just as well inside, too, though you might want to set them on a dimmer switch. Like our other picks from Pro Christmas, the wide-angle lights are available in warm white, cool white, multicolor, and more, and are protected by a three-year seasonal warranty.

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If you’re not ready to give up the unique warm twinkle of incandescents on an indoor tree, Kringle Traditions Incandescent Mini Lights are our favorites. These mini-light sets emit the warmest overall light, and like our other picks, they have an easy-handling wire. But they use a lot more energy than LED bulbs and don’t last nearly as long—you can expect 2,000 to 3,000 hours of use, versus an average life of 20,000 hours for our pick. That’s just the bulb life, too, not even taking into account how fragile and easily breakable an incandescent filament is.

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If you want a bigger bulb to brighten up your walkway, patio, or eaves, the Pro Christmas C9 Light Line Kit is a reliable and highly customizable choice. These weather-resistant screw-in LEDs are available in multicolor packages, or warm and cool whites, green or white cords, and can be configured in any order or pattern that you want. You can also cut the socket string to the exact length you need, depending on the size of your space, and add a vampire plug on either end to keep the electricity flowing. Don’t worry—it’s nowhere near as daunting as it sounds. These C9 light lines make for an easy DIY project for any season, and the clips, plugs, bulbs, and strings are all available à la carte as well.

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The Pro Christmas RGBW Color-Changing LED Light Set offers a good range of customizable color options without any complicated smart-home setups—simply plug and go. There are bold solid color palettes, including warm white and purple, holiday-themed color pairings, and even some fun effects such as flashing and fading. You can’t customize the color choices beyond the few dozen presets, but that’s a fair trade-off for a plug-and-go variety light show. You’ll also need to buy a separate remote and controller set for around $20, although you can use one controller for up to 10 strands of lights.

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The Govee Smart RGBWIC Christmas String Lights come with more than 100 fun and flashy light presets, with a spread of 16 million colors to choose from. Its physical format is more like a rope light, not studded sockets on a wire. This is a different look from a traditional light set, but it’s one you might prefer for predictable spacing or to help prevent tangles. You can sync these with music, or with other Govee sets around your home. The customization process can get a little tedious, so these might not be the best choice for someone who has a very specific lighting vision in mind, but Govee’s basic options deliver bold, bright colors in a range of patterns.

Upgrade pick

If you really want your home to sparkle and shine for the winter holiday—and maybe for other occasions, too—get the Twinkly Smart RGB-W LED String Lights. With the app’s built-in “mapping” feature, you can even single out individual lights to create custom effects that spiral around your Christmas tree, or your railing, or wherever else you choose to set them up. The endless design possibilities and weather-resistant construction mean you can also keep them strung up all year round and customize the colors to go with every occasion. But they are significantly more expensive than other Christmas lights, and the software still occasionally glitches.

The research

Why you should trust us

I’ve been writing for Wirecutter since 2017, focusing on home improvement products ranging from heat pumps to neck fans tokaraoke machines (what’s a home without one?). For this guide in particular, I’ve tested dozens of different light sets and also sought expertise from a number of professionals over the years who live and breathe Christmas and/or lighting. These included Ben Orr, owner of Northern Seasonal Services, who has been professionally installing holiday lighting in the Chicago area since 2005; Jason Woodward, the director of sales and marketing at Christmas Designers, a retailer specializing in holiday lighting; John Strainic, GE’s general manager of North America consumer lighting; and Anthony Krize, vice president of Nicolas Holiday, the brand-management company for GE’s Christmas lights.

I also consulted with several lighting professionals during the testing process, including Susan Moriarty, executive creative director and founder of the Boston-based creative agency The Soapbox Studio, who has 20 years of experience as an art director, designer, and photographer; Bridget Collins, the assistant lighting and projections supervisor at the Tony Award–recognized Huntington Theatre Company (where I was a writing fellow from 2015 to 2017); and Ari Herzig, another professional lighting and projections designer.

Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete independence, in accordance with our editorial standards. I have no knowledge about the business implications of any of my editorial recommendations. I don’t own any stock or have any other financial interest in any of the companies that I cover (or am likely to cover), and I don’t hold onto any “freebies,” always donating products after I’m done testing them, unless I need to hold onto them for long-term observations.

How we picked and tested


Ready to begin testing. Doug Mahoney / NYT Wirecutter

There are many kinds of Christmas string lights available in various colors, shapes, and sizes. Many people already prefer a certain type, even if they don’t necessarily know what that specific kind of light is called. Through our conversations with Christmas decoration professionals, including Jason Woodward of Christmas Designers and Anthony Krize of Nicolas Holiday/GE Brands, we were able to focus our research on a few of the more commonly popular options:

• T5 or mini-lights, the typical small candle-esque bulbs
• wide-angle or 5 mm lights, which are stubbier than mini-lights, with a conical lens that refracts the light, producing a brighter and usually more sparkling character
• C9 lights, which are larger flame or teardrop-shaped bulbs that screw in like a standard bulb, but use a smaller E17, or “intermediate” bulb base

Once we knew what kind of bulbs we were looking for, we limited our search to non-blinking lights, in the three most popular color options: warm white, cool white, and multicolor. We did not limit ourselves to any specific number of lights or spacing between bulbs, as we’ve found that most people have their own needs and preferences, and most light brands are available in a variety of different options anyway.

We also focused primarily on LED sets, which are more common, more popular, and generally safer and longer-lasting, too. We recognize that some people still prefer the analog radiance of a traditional incandescent bulb, however, so we kept an eye out for these whenever we could as well.

Separately, we looked into several color-changing light sets as well, many (though not all) of which relied on smart-home technology. For these, we were less concerned about bulb size than we were about color options and quality and user experience—which, as you can probably imagine, varied wildly.

When it came time for testing, we wound and unwound each set of Christmas lights and arranged them around our home. This included wrapping them around poles, draping them over railings, then unwrapping them and recoiling them and setting them up again—basically, trying to use the lights as they’re intended to be used. Along the way, we took notes on things like:

• Light quality: Were the lights bright enough to be seen in daylight in darkness? Were they too bright, to the point it hurt to look at them? Did any of the LEDs stutter, shake, or blink?
• **Color quality: **Were the whites crisp or warm, or a sickly shade of yellow? Were the reds robust? Were the greens and blues washed out, or did they look just as expected?
• Tangledness and memory: Did the string of lights lay flat on the ground, or did they keep curling up again? Did the wires get knotted when we tried to wrap them up? Did the wires un-twist or get tangled up in themselves, or did they hold their shape, even after being used?
• Durability: Did the bulbs break? Did the wires fray? Did the string lights snap when they got tangled and tugged too tight? Can they survive a splash of water or a bath in a bucket left out in the rain?
• Connectability: Are the plugs stackable? Can you string multiple light strands together, or does each one need a separate outlet?

We also consulted with lighting professionals and neighbors alike to gauge their opinions on light and color quality: Which lights would they prefer to work with, or live beside, or hang on their own homes? (In previous years, we have also set up lights in professional lighting studios or black box theater spaces, using professional tools and expertise to evaluate color temperature and accuracy.)

Overall, we found that the wire quality has a lot to do with the success of a strand of lights. Some of the tested lights had tidy, close-knit strands of wire, while others were loose and messy. Some wires needed untwisting before use, like an old phone cord, and still others continued to accordion back on themselves no matter how we tried to stretch them out and lay them flat. A good wire means good, reliable electrical connections—and that attention to detail tends to carry over into color quality, too.

The best Christmas lights for most people: Pro Christmas T5 LED Christmas Lights


Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

Top pick

With thick, well-twisted wires and a rich color palette, the Pro Christmas T5 LED Christmas Lights offer the best combination of brightness, quality, and durability. It’s a standard that holds across the full range of color options, too, including warm white, cool white, and multicolor. Add in a generous three-year seasonal warranty and a range of customizable color choices, and the Pro Christmas strands are simply the best option for standard T5-style LED Christmas lights.

The Pro Christmas T5 lights offer the most incandescent-like colors, along with all the benefits of LEDs. From rich, ultramarine blues and kelly greens to robust reds and deep yellows that don’t get washed out, the Pro Christmas multicolor lights genuinely shine, while the warm whites have a radiant glow that evokes the burning filaments that light up your nostalgia. Even the cool whites have a crispness that’s not too glaring or fluorescent. Add in a sturdy plastic casing that can withstand (some) weather and a nearly negligible energy use, and the Pro Christmas lights really cover all the bases.

The thick wiring makes them easier to manage, too. Good wiring goes a long way, and the Pro Christmas lights genuinely stand out. They’re tough and sturdy enough that you don’t have to worry about damaging them when you pull them out of the box, and they’re surprisingly good at maintaining their memory, too. When it’s time to store them for the season, you can roll them into a ball without having to worry about annoying knots and tangles. (Though we wouldn’t blame you if you still preferred to wind or coil them up for storage.)

The Pro Christmas lights are available in a wider range of colors than other LED Christmas light brands. While we focused our testing on the standard white and multicolor options, we also appreciate the fact that the Pro Christmas lights come in a variety of color options, all with the same high-quality luster. You can get a string of solid blues or greens, or even go for a Christmas-y combo like red and green or red and white (warm or cool). The company also sells faceted M5 lights, which are similar in size to the T5 lights, in pink, purple, aqua, and lime.

The Pro Christmas T5 lights have rich colors, tightly wrapped wires, and a one-piece molded plastic bulb design that won’t let dirt or water in. Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

The Pro Christmas T5 lights are impressively weather resistant as well. Unlike most T5 Christmas lights, the bulbs on the Pro Christmas strands are made from a single piece of molded plastic, which makes it even harder for dirt and water to infiltrate the bulb and damage the circuitry. During our tests, we fully submerged them in a bucket of water, and they continued working perfectly fine for years after that. We wouldn’t recommend replicating that test with your own lights, and you probably wouldn’t want to leave them out in a hurricane or other similarly precipitous event. But generally speaking, these lights can withstand the elements pretty well. The only downside is that, if any of the bulbs do break, you won’t be able to replace them (though the rest of the string will still work).

They also come with classic stackable “piggyback” plugs, so you can string together multiple strands off a single electrical outlet. Like many Christmas lights, the Pro Christmas strands come with a female/input plug at the end of the line, so you can plug several sets of lights together, all pulling power from a single outlet. But the Pro Christmas lights stand out because they also have a stackable plug on the front end with both an input and an output. This allows you to start multiple strands of lights from the same outlet, or use the back input end of the plug to keep sending power to a lamp, or TV, or laptop charger, or whatever else you were planning to use the open plug for otherwise.

If anything goes wrong, the Pro Christmas T5 sets are protected by a three-year seasonal warranty. “Seasonal” in this context means “90 days or less per calendar year.” You can obviously keep them up all year round, but this will unfortunately void the warranty. Still, this is one of the most generous warranties we’ve seen for a product that’s typically treated like something cheap and disposable. And we think that speaks to the overall quality of these lights.


The stackable “piggyback” plugs on the Pro Christmas lights simplify stringing multiple strands together off a single outlet. Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

Flaws but not dealbreakers

They may cost more than most people expect to spend on Christmas lights. It’s not that the Pro Christmas T5 lights are expensive, per se—it’s that there are a lot of other, cheaper lights out there. Most people will end up paying about twice as much for a Pro Christmas T5 set as they would for other, lesser Christmas light brands. Of course, you also get what you pay for, which is why we think it’s worth shelling out the extra money. If it helps, Christmas specialty suppliers such as Christmas Designers typically offer a bulk discount, which can help you reduce the cost (assuming you need a lot of lights to begin with).

The best big-box option: GE StayBright Mini LED Christmas Lights


Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

Budget pick

GE has been making Christmas lights since 1882; in fact, the company is responsible for the very first commercially available Christmas string light set. With that kind of pedigree, it’s no surprise that even the company’s lower-tier lights offer top-notch quality for the price. If you’re looking for lights to buy in bulk—or you think the holidays are incomplete without a little purple—the GE StayBright Mini LED Christmas Lights in multicolor and white are your best bet.

The GE StayBright lights are widely available without having to worry about shipping premiums. You can find these lights at all the usual online retailers, usually for half the price of our picks—as long as they’re in season, at least. By contrast, our top pick from Pro Christmas typically has limited availability on Amazon; otherwise, you’ll have to go to a specialty holiday seller like Christmas Designers, which could come with added shipping costs, too.

The cable connections offer an additional level of water resistance. Unlike our other picks, which use standard two-prong piggyback plugs, the GE StayBright sets use coaxial-style cables, with screw-on ends for improved watertight resistance. They can still plug into a standard wall outlet. But with the coaxial cable ends, you can screw together up to 25 light strands (according to the manufacturer) without having to worry about water, dust, or an accidental tug pulling the plugs apart.

The purple light bulb is another nice touch you can only find on GE Christmas lights. We’re not entirely sure why GE insists on including a purple bulb on the company’s multicolor light strands. But we’re glad they do. Not only does it help the StayBright lights (and other GE-branded Christmas lights) to stand out, but it also helps to cool down the overall color temperature of the strand, without making it feel any less vibrant or bright.

Multicolor GE lights like the StayBright stand out from other Christmas lights with their inclusion of a nice purple bulb, which helps to cool and unite the overall color temperature of the strand. Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

The GE StayBright strands also come coiled on a spool, which could be handy for storage and cleanup. The wires on the GE StayBrights aren’t as sturdy as the ones you get with the Pro Christmas lights and are more prone to tangling and tearing (though the wires are still much better than what you’d find on other, cheaper brands). But that cardboard-and-plastic packaging spool can help the lights to keep their shape in the off-season. It also makes them much easier to organize, store, and transport overall.

The company offers a three-year warranty as well. This is similar to the warranty you get with our top pick from Pro Christmas. GE’s history and reputation should give you an added sense of comfort, too—the company actually has resources to support the concerns of its customers.

**But the GE StayBright lights don’t look quite as nice as our other picks. **The colors are crisp and warm enough, but the brightness is more like the sparkling allure of a homey dive bar. Which is to say they’re better for creating atmosphere than actual illumination. These are good, but not great, lights (even with that tasty purple bulb).

They’re not as well-made, either. The wires in particular are thinner than the ones on our top pick, and more likely to tangle and fray. The individual lights don’t look as sturdy, either.


The GE StayBrights are available in multicolor or a neutral white option that straddles the line between warm and cool. The wires tend to get a little frayed though. Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

There’s also no option for warm or cool whites. Most white Christmas light strands usually come in at least two different color temperatures, giving you a choice between a warmer, orange-ish white (around 2700K) or a crisper, bluer cool white (around 5000K). But the GE StayBrights are only available in a standard, neutral white. This isn’t bad, or unappealing by any means, but it is different from what you might expect. Some of the packages or online listings might label these lights as “warm white,” but don’t be fooled.

The GE StayBrights aren’t dimmable either. But, as we mentioned, they’re not as bright as our other picks, either, so you probably wouldn’t want to dim them anyway.

The best Christmas lights for outdoor use: Pro Christmas Wide Angle 5 mm LEDs


Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

Best for...

The Pro Christmas 5 mm Wide Angle Conical LED Christmas Lights give off a bright, warm color that is particularly perfect for the outdoors, whether you’re decorating a window box, a tree, a wreath, a railing, or a roofline. Like the standard T5-style lights from Pro Christmas, the wide-angle bulbs are also available in a variety of color options, including warm white and cool white, multicolor, as well as solid single colors, with different bulb quantities and spacings.

The Pro Christmas wide-angle LEDs are even more brilliant than standard Christmas lights. The odd, stubby shape of these wide-angle bulbs gives these lights a distinctive appearance that can really make your tree and yard pop. In addition to the fact that they’re already brighter than many regular LED mini lights, the inverted cone-shaped lens can also emit a different level of brightness depending on the angle from which you view them. Some might even say it creates a natural “twinkly” effect—a nice touch for the winter holiday season.

They’re more durable, too, which makes them a better choice for outdoors. Like the T5 lights from Pro Christmas, the wide-angle LEDs use fully sealed and molded bulbs. There is no separating the bulb from the wire, and thus no way for moisture or grime to work into the socket. The downside of this design is that you can’t replace a bulb if it breaks (although the rest of the string will keep working). Fortunately, the short, stubby design of the wide-angle lenses makes them even harder to break by accident. Combined with the brighter output, the Pro Christmas wide-angle lights are an ideal choice for outdoor string lighting.

The stubby bulbs on the Pro Christmas wide-angle LEDs are brighter than other Christmas lights we tested, and the conical lens makes it look like they’re sparkling. Thom Dunn / NYT Wirecutter

Like the standard Pro Christmas LEDs, the wide-angle lights also have stackable plugs, tightly-wound wiring, and a three-year warranty. In our tests, the Pro Christmas lights were easy to unravel and didn’t get tangled up like other, lower-quality lights; in fact, some string sizes might arrive at your home packaged and shipped in a balled-up clump. (We still suggest you show some care when you wrap them up for storage at the end of the season.) And because the LEDs use so little energy, you can connect a whopping 43 strands and run them on a single outlet without having to worry about extension cords or tripping a breaker. Finally, if anything does go wrong, Pro Christmas offers a seasonal 3-year warranty (again, assuming three months of use per year).

But some people might find them too bright, especially for indoor use. These wide-angle lights could be a little overwhelming on a Christmas tree, but we still think they’re a great choice for your railings or other outdoor decorations. If you do want to keep them inside, all of the Pro Christmas LEDs we recommend are fully dimmable with a smooth, steady arc, so you don’t have to worry about stuttering, skipping, or sacrificing color fidelity.

The best Christmas lights for classic incandescent warmth: Kringle Traditions Incandescent Mini Lights


Kringle Traditions

Best for...

If you refuse to lose the distinctive and traditional look of incandescents for indoor use, we recommend Kringle Traditions Incandescent Mini Lights. These lights offer a noticeable difference in color quality—they’re not the brightest, but they have a certain warmth and radiance that even the best LEDs struggle to match. Incandescent lights might not be as durable or long-lasting as our LED picks, but they do have that je ne sais quoi that immediately sparks memories of cold winter evenings by the fire (or the dive bar).

The Kringle Traditions strand is the best choice for capturing that analog warmth of an incandescent bulb. There are a lot of great things about LED sets, but they will never be able to perfectly replicate the starry sparkle of a heated filament inside a bulb. And that’s what you get with an incandescent light like the ones from Kringle Traditions. The color quality has this ineffable analog warmth, thanks in no small part to the fact that, well, it’s literally a heated wire floating in a glass vacuum.

They’re surprisingly well-made, too, with a rigid wire that won’t get tangled. The wires on the Kringle Traditions incandescents were tight and organized, and once we stretched them out, they remained flat and straight with no issues.These lights will never last as long as LED bulbs, but the wiring and the wrapping on these feel sturdy and resilient enough to last for several seasons.

The Kringle Traditions strand is also easier to fix if something goes wrong. If anything does go wrong and a bulb breaks or dies, incandescent lights are easy and affordable to replace: At this writing, you can buy 25 replacement bulbs for about $10. By contrast, most of the LED strands we recommend use one-piece molded plastic lights—which means when they break, they’re broken for good.

But this type of bulb won’t last as long as an LED can. Incandescent bulbs are literally designed to wear out over time, to the point of self-destruction. While an LED bulb can last a decade, you’ll be lucky to get a few seasons out of an incandescent. And that’s assuming that the fragile glass casing doesn’t pop or smash before the filament burns out.

They also use more energy than LED bulbs. Incandescent bulbs use up to 50 times more electricity than their LED counterparts. A lot of that energy gets wasted, too, burning off as excess heat. That might offer some physical warmth to the winter, but it’s not great for your fingers, or those dried pine needles falling off your Christmas tree. And while you can still technically string multiple strands of incandescent lights together (thanks to those handy piggyback plugs), the higher energy use means you’ll be able to connect only about five strands of the Kringle Traditions lights, as opposed to 20-plus strands of any of our LED string light picks.

The best Christmas lights for bigger bulbs: Pro Christmas C9 Light Line Kit

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