The best outdoor string lights of 2025

There are many practical evaluations that fall into this product category. One of the main reasons for this is the bulbs themselves. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to use product specs or photos to get a feel for how durable you can expect the bulbs to be. Sometimes you’ll get lucky with “shatterproof” in the description, but not always.

Another aspect of the light bulb to consider is the physical connection. Some of them come pre-installed and you cannot replace them yourself. Some are pre-installed and can be removed. In my experience, most bulbs come packaged separately for you to install yourself. Most of the time this is not a problem. Sometimes, because all these products try to have a waterproof seal, the bulbs can be difficult to install. Several times I found myself squeezing and twisting the little bulbs hard enough that I was worried they might break in my hands. No one did, but it might be worth having a pair of gloves on hand if you find yourself in the same situation.

In general, the main concern with most lights is how much light they put out. In the past, for some of our standard light bulb tests, we used an integrating sphere. This type of equipment can provide you with a lot of information about a light source, including brightness in lumens, color rendering index, and more. Read more about our light bulb testing lab.

For this category, I was specifically interested in brightness. Unfortunately, these string lights can’t be tested on our integrating sphere, but with some fancy math magic I changed the calculations we needed from a sphere to a linear path and came up with a working solution. Using a standard digital light meterI was able to get an approximate value of the luminous flux of each bulb in lumens.

Looking at the chart above, you can see the brightness of an individual bulb from each strand, as well as the total brightness of the entire strand from the solar and battery options. Real live bulbs were dim. Hampton Bay has the brightest individual bulb, while Coleman says the brightest filament in this series overall due to the larger number of bulbs.

In the AC-powered options shown below, Brighttech carries the brightest individual bulb at around 196 lumens. Multiply that by 15 bulbs and you’re almost at 3,000 lumens. The Magitec wins brightest overall with 30 bulbs at 165 lumens, for a total of almost 5,000 lumens. To be fair, Magitec offers two filaments for the price of one, so a single filament would be around 2500 lumens; about 500 less than a Brighttech thread.