Govee Neon Rope Light 2 review: Around the bend

Govee makes a good thing even better with its Neon Rope Light 2, a lighter, more flexible version of its original smart “rope” light that arrives with Matter support out of the box. 

Now (thanks to Matter) capable of working with Apple HomeKit and Samsung SmartThings as well as Alexa and Google Home, the easy-to-install Neon Rope Light 2 is perfect for bending and curving into an endless variety of designs, while more than 60 light animations will keep your eyeballs entertained. Music syncing, scheduling, and other automations round out the feature set. 

But while we’re glad the Neon Rope Light 2 works with Matter, it should be noted that its best features—including all its eye-popping animations—can only be controlled using the Govee app, which comes saddled with a colorful but frequently bewildering interface.

Colorful, flexible, easy to install, and–best of all–fun, the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 is a terrific way to add decorative light to any room.

Design and specifications 

The Govee Neon Rope Light 2 comes in both 9.8-foot and 16.4-foot lengths, the latter of which is the same length as Govee’s original Neon Rope Light. The newer rope light also comes in black and white flavors. 

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

The “rope” itself is best described as a thick, LED-illuminated flexible tube that’s sitting on an opaque, squared-off base. The base of the rope can slide into a series plastic, roughly “U”-shaped brackets with a peel-and-stick adhesive backing (mounting holes are also available). Inside the box you’ll find 10 of these plastic brackets, as well as six “bend” clips (new for the Neon Rope Light 2) that consist of twin brackets connected by a flexible metal strip. 

Govee says the Neon Rope Light 2 is 14-percent more flexible than the original; I can’t verify that exact specification, but after handling the ropes one at a time, I can say that the newer rope does feel significantly bendier than the first.  

The new Neon Rope Light is also lighter, with the 16.4-foot version weighing in at 1.5 pounds, versus 1.77 pounds for the equivalent 16.4-foot successor. (Oddly, the black version of the 16.4-foot Neon Light Rope 2 is, at 1.67 pounds, slightly heavier than its white counterpart; I’ve asked Govee about the disparity.)  

The light rope itself comes with either 252 (for the 9.8-foot rope) or 420 (for the 16.5-inch version) embedded LEDs, good for a density of 84 LEDs per meter (same as the first-gen Neon Rope Light). The rope also boasts 14 LED controllers per meter, with each controller managing 6 LEDs; do the math, and that gets you 70 addressable LED segments for the 5-meter (16.5-foot) Govee Neon Rope Light 2, or 42 segments for the 3-meter (9.8-foot) rope. 

At one end of the Neon Rope Light 2 is a short captive cable with an in-line, three-button controller that has a peel-and-stick backing. The controller cable, in turn, plugs into a roughly six-foot power cable with a chunky power adapter at the other end. All told, that gives you about seven feet between the end of the rope light and the location of the nearest wall outlet.

It’s worth noting that you can’t daisy-chain two Neon Rope Light 2’s together, although you could group two or more of the ropes using the Govee app. 

The Matter-enabled Govee Neon Light Rope 2 has Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) and Bluetooth radios, but not Thread, the low-power, high-reliability wireless protocol that’s a pillar of the Matter standard. The light can still do Matter over Wi-Fi, but it can’t take advantage of the benefits of Thread, which include the ability for Thread devices to connect to each other rather than needing to connect directly to your Wi-Fi router.  

Wi-Fi, smart home, and Matter setup 

The first step to getting the Govee Neon Light Rope 2 up and running is powering it up and connecting it to your home network, and there are a couple of ways to do this. 

If you’re in an Alexa or Google Home household, you can go ahead and pair the rope light using the Govee app, as the light supports both Alexa and Google Home natively. Just launch the Govee app, tap the “+” icon in the top-right corner of the screen, and follow the prompts. The app will ask you to enter the login credentials of your Wi-Fi routers; once that’s done, be sure to enable the Govee integrations for Alexa or Google Home, and you’re set. 

Want to use the rope light with Apple HomeKit or Samsung SmartThings? Then you’ll need Matter, the new smart home standard intended to act as the glue between the major smart home ecosystems. You can also use Matter if you want to control the Neon Rope Light 2 with a combination of ecosystems–for example, with Alexa and HomeKit.

Using either the Apple Home or Samsung SmartThings app (or Alexa or Google Home, for that matter—and no pun intended), simply begin the Matter pairing process (the method varies depending on the smart app), scan the Matter QR code that’s tagged on the controller cable, and the app should take care of the rest, including adding the rope light to your home Wi-Fi router.

In the past, I’ve had major headaches getting Matter devices connected to my home network, but I got the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 working with Alexa, Apple Home, and Google Home in just a few minutes, and without any hiccups.

Physical setup 

With the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 powered up and online, it was time to install it on my wall. Sticking the brackets onto a surface and then snapping the rope segments into the clips is the easy part; the hard part is coming up with a design that’s suitably creative.  

Thanks to its new flexibility, the Govee light rope can be curved and arranged into any number of designs, from lightning bolts and rainbows to light bulbs and rocket ships. I settled on some abstract–and admittedly boring–curves and squiggles. But with help from the “bend” clips, you could create truly elaborate designs with plenty of hairpin turns. 

Once your rope design is all set, you can use the Govee app to take a photo of your creation; the app will then use that image to ensure its various lighting animations—such as, say, a waterfall that’s flowing from top to bottom—will be properly aligned with the shape of your installation. As with the “bend” clips, this “photo recognition” feature is new for the Neon Rope Light 2.

App control

Once connected to a smart ecosystem (or ecosystems) either natively or via Matter, you can control the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 exclusively with that ecosystem’s app, if you wish.  

Indeed, using the rope light with the Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, or Samsung SmartThings app allows you to group the light with other, potentially non-Govee smart devices in a room, as well as use the Neon Rope Light in schedules and automations. But Matter exposes only the bare minimum of the light’s capabilities, such as adjusting the brightness or picking a solid color. To take advantage of the light rope’s groovy animations, you’ll need the Govee app. 

Open the app and you’ll find 64 preset lighting effects in six categories, ranging from the aforementioned waterfall to rainbows, sunrises and sunsets, snowflakes, volcanoes, holiday lights, fireworks, rippling water, you name it. Besides adjusting the brightness, some of the animations allow you to control the direction of the effects—for example, you can have the waterfall flow from bottom to top, or from left to right—as well as dial the speed up or down. 

Besides picking a preset animation, you can create your own by tapping on a diagram of the rope light’s various LED segments (which should be arranged according to your design, provided you snapped a photo during setup) within the app. Again, you can pick the speed and direction of your animations, or you can create static color designs if you wish.  

As with other Govee lights, the Neon Rope Light 2 can sync with nearby music sources, with the light listening for tunes via either the built-in microphone on its controller or over your phone’s mic.  

When in Music mode, you can choose from a dozen different animation styles (when the rope is listening from its controller) or from three music sync modes (when your phone’s mic is doing the listening), as well as adjust the sensitivity of the light syncing.  

Pretty neat, but it should be noted that Govee’s Music DreamView feature, which allows a music-syncing Govee light to sync its pulses with other Govee lights in the room, doesn’t appear to be supported on the Neon Rope Light 2 yet. We’ve reached out to Govee for more details. 

The Govee app will also let you put the Neon Rope Light 2 on a schedule, or it can trigger a lighting mode at sunrise, sunset, or when a Govee motion sensor detects movement. 

If that sounds like a dizzying array of options, it is, and I haven’t even mentioned Govee’s AI Lighting Bot, an AI-powered chatbot that will–eventually–let you control the Neon Rope Light 2 with (typed, not voiced) natural-language commands. I’ve tested the AI Lighting Bot on Govee’s M1 light strip with Matter, but the bot isn’t enabled for the rope light yet. (Govee says March, which is now; I’ve asked for an updated timeline). 

Aside from the dizzying number of features, the Govee app itself is something of a hot mess, with a thicket of multicolored buttons and tabs nested within tabs nested within yet more tabs. At least the Govee interface is pretty and eye-catching, but there’s a definite learning curve, and I still find myself getting confused about how to navigate from, say, the automations tab to the animations tab. 

Should you buy the Govee Neon Rope Light 2? 

Colorful, flexible, easy to install, and–best of all–fun, the Govee Neon Rope Light 2 is a terrific way to add decorative light to any room. Now that it works with Matter, the new Neon Rope Light can work with more smart home ecosystems, including Apple’s HomeKit, while the bendier design and inclusion of flexible brackets makes it easier to go wild with your creations. The Govee app itself could do with a redesign, but overall, the Neon Rope Light 2 is a blast to use.