The Hatch Restore 3 arrived at the start of 2025, replacing the popular Hatch Restore 2. The Restore 3 has everything the previous model had, but with much better physical controls. Instead of just two buttons like the 2, the Restore 3 has four buttons (one of which doubles as a dial to adjust volume) and an alarm toggle, allowing you to better interact with the routines you create in the Hatch app without needing to touch your phone.

I really love this device, especially since you can create bedtime routines with multiple layers—mine starts with a moody red light and some folky music for 10 minutes before switching the light off and switching to ocean sounds. The new buttons are also a game changer, making it easy to adjust the volume, switch between steps in your routine, turn on the Hatch’s bedside light mode, and even switch off your wake up time for the next morning without needing to change your settings in the app. It makes the app less necessary once you’ve set up your routines, which is a huge relief.

The only bummer is that this light doesn’t get as bright as others. The bedside lamp mode is more of a reading lamp, and I find it too easy to go back to sleep; the Philips and Lumie are more effective at actually getting me up. Make sure you choose good sounds to force you to wake up if you’re the type to roll back over and try to sleep a little longer. You’ll also need a Hatch+ membership ($3 a month) to get access to all of the sound content Hatch has to offer and more routine options.

The Casper Glow Light is one of the smallest lights I’ve tested, but it managed to be plenty bright to wake me up in the morning. Not only is this little light incredibly bright, it’s also super simple to use with both physical controls and app setup. Within the Casper Glow app—which is unfortunately iOS only—you set up your wake-up time, and the Glow Light will start to brighten 30 minutes before that set time. You can also set how long you want your Glow Light to dim for, which it will use both in the evenings and after it finishes waking you up.

But the real fun comes from the physical controls and flexibility. The Glow Light is a battery-operated, stand-alone lamp that you can pick up and move around to use, and you turn it on and off by flipping it upside down onto the other side. When you turn it on, it will immediately activate its highest brightness and will dim for the amount of time set in the app (default is 45 minutes). You can also press the button on top of the Glow Light to pause the dimming, and twist the light to either the left or right to make it brighter or dimmer. It’s so easy that my two-year-old thought this thing was a light toy rather than my personal alarm clock. The immediate wind-down light is plenty of time for me to lie in bed and read, but I love rotating the light to get my perfect level of brightness as I relax in bed.

It has a little charging base it can sit on and is supposed to last around seven hours of brightness on a charge. That should be about three days of use if you have it bright for about an hour before bed and in the morning. Some nights I keep it on the charging pad, while others I just leave it on my bedside table. It’s a really handy little light, and one I plan to travel with since it’s so compact. The only downside of this adorable lamp is that there are no sound options.

The Loftie Lamp is a beautiful lamp to have on your nightstand. The entire body of the lamp is the light itself, and there’s a mesh metal lampshade that’s mostly there for decoration while the rest of the lamp does the real work. Using the Loftie app, you can set an alarm that will signal this sunrise lamp to light up, and what the app calls a “wind-down” to signal the lamp to dim.

Both of these work well enough, but if you want an actual audio tone to go off, you need to pair the lamp with the Loftie Clock. The time for both the sunrise and sunset is only about nine minutes, which is a really short window compared to other options, and you can’t customize it to take longer like you can with our other picks. Having the clock and lamp go off at the same time didn’t make me feel as gently roused as other sunrise lamps because of the short time window, but I found that I had a similar experience if I set the Loftie to light up 15 minutes before my alarm went off. It’s also a good option if you don’t want audio cues but just want your room to brighten, and it does make for a fantastic bedside lamp. It tends to always stay on my bedside, even if I’m testing another sunrise lamp.

The price of this lamp initially went up significantly due to tariffs, rising from $275 to $450, but now it seems to consistently cost $300. We’ll keep an eye out to see if the price changes any further.

This petite sunrise lamp is smaller than the Hatch and a similar size to the WiiM below, but the Dreamegg Sunrise 1 is cheaper (often for close to half the price of the Hatch), still gets surprisingly bright, and has a range of colors. It’s usually on sale, too. It has all the basic features you could want: simple sunrise programming, six sound and nine color options, and easy access to activate those colors as a small bedside nightlight. There’s no sunset option, but for this price you’re still getting a nice range of features.

There are several buttons on the top to control the clock, alarm, and light features. I also really like the two dials on the side: One controls the brightness of the clock face, so you can brighten it to see the time and easily dim it so it doesn’t bother you while you sleep (a feature of most digital clocks that I hate!) and another dial on the other side to quickly brighten or dim the light itself. It’s really easy to control, and the small but powerful light really has helped me wake up in the mornings.

I prefer it without sounds, though, similar to how I use the Loftie Lamp, but especially since snoozing the Dreamegg will turn both sound and light off. Most others only turn the sound off and leave the light on so you can keep rousing. I also found the sounds a little too relaxing, so just having the light blast my face until I got out of bed was the best method with this sunrise lamp.

The WiiM Wake-Up Light is a small device, but it turns out to be surprisingly powerful. It has a companion app where you set up the sunrise and bedtime routines and can access a huge range of sounds—from the classics like white noise, thunderstorms, or a forest stream to more specific options like Healing Music for Insomnia (a gentle piano piece) or Santa Giulia Beach, which I can only assume was recorded on the French shore it’s named after. There’s also a big range of colors the WiiM can show, and it reminds me of a smart light bulb since it has color combinations and light shows to choose from. Even with the clock’s small size, I found the reading light mode is a nice brightness to read a book by, though it didn’t fill the room like the Lumie above. It also has one of the bigger sound libraries, with just over 100 sound and radio station options you can choose in the app to wake up or fall asleep to.

I really liked the app controls for the WiiM, which made it easy to set up my routines and even turn on relaxing sounds on a timer to enjoy before bed. The WiiM requires an active Wi-Fi connection to work, though, so if your Wi-Fi isn’t stable, you could miss your alarm. It also offers Alexa integration and has a built-in microphone so that it can double as a smart home assistant (which, again, needs that stable Wi-Fi). I also don’t love that when I go to quiet the alarm, both the sound and the light turn off. You can easily hit the light button to switch it back on, which I do to stay awake, but if you’re a chronic snoozer you might want to set up backup alarms.