If you’re looking for a smart bulb or 4, for your home look now further than LIFX. I have 10 of these in my home and they are wonderful. easy to set up; no hub required. huge color range; works with alexa, and apple home kit; as well as google smart assistant. I had a much better experience than with the Hue bulbs.
While I do like Philips Hue as well, LIFX definitely has some advantages over Hue. These bulbs are 1100 lumens, and no Hue bulb currently available is higher than 850. In general I’m not a fan of wifi bulbs eating up a bunch of IP addresses in my network, but for larger homes it can be a solid workaround for the short-ish range of the Zigbee protocol used by Hue.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to in terms of short range on ZigBee? The huge adavntage of ZigBee is that the devices them selves help to expand the network, so as long as you have something in range of your new hue bulb it can connect. The big disadvantage of WiFi bulbs is that they need significantly more power when off than hub based systems to be able to communicate with your router in the basement (or wherever it happens to be). This negates a lot of effecincy benefits of smart lights compared to something like hue.