Best Outdoor String Lights of 2025

There are a lot of practical reviews that go into this product category. One of the main reasons for this is the LEDs themselves. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use product specifications or pictures to get a sense of how durable you can expect bulbs to be. Sometimes, you’ll be lucky to have a “break-resistant” tag in the description, but not always.

Another aspect to consider is physical contact. Some of these items are pre-installed and you cannot replace them yourself. Some are pre-installed and can be removed. Most lights, in my experience, come packaged separately so you can install them yourself. Most of the time, this is not a problem. Sometimes, since these products are all trying to have a waterproof seal, it can be difficult to install the lights. Several times I found myself grabbing the small lamps and twisting them hard enough that I was worried they might break in my hand. None of them did, but it might be helpful to have 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 standard light bulb tests, we used an integral ball. This type of equipment can give you a lot of information about the light source, including brightness in lumens, color rendering index, and more. Read more about We have a light bulb testing laboratory.

For this category, I was particularly interested in brightness. Unfortunately, these string lights cannot be tested in our integrative field, but with some great math skills, 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 a rough estimate of each bulb’s light output in lumens.

Looking at the chart above, you can see the brightness of one individual bulb from each strip, as well as the overall brightness of the entire strip of solar and battery-powered options. The lights of real life were dim. Hampton Bay has the brightest single bulb, while Coleman says the bar is the brightest in the series overall due to the higher number of bulbs.

In the AC-powered options shown below, Brightech carries the brightest single bulb at around 196 lumens. Multiply that by 15 bulbs and you get to roughly 3,000 lumens. The Magitec wins for brightest overall with 30 165-lumen bulbs, for a total of nearly 5,000 lumens. To be fair, Magitec offers two strands for the price of one, so one single strand would be around 2,500 lumens; About 500 less than one strand of hair.