Quick answer: the sharpest difference is not price or app polish, it is wiring. The Lutron Caseta Starter Kit runs on its own radio and needs no neutral wire, so it goes into older boxes the competition cannot use; the Kasa Smart Dimmer HS220 wants a neutral and a 2.4GHz network, and in exchange it costs a fraction as much and adds no hub to your shelf.
Bottom Line
Lutron Caseta Starter Kit
The kit bundles two dimmers, two wall plates, two Pico remotes, and the Smart Bridge that unlocks Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and Ring. It needs no neutral wire, and the dimmers talk to the bridge over Lutron's own radio rather than your WiFi, which is why it keeps working in houses where WiFi gear at the far end of the hall does not. The tradeoff is a hub on your network and a $$$ bundle price.
See Lutron Caseta Starter Kit →Kasa Smart Dimmer HS220
One switch, one app, no bridge. It connects straight to a 2.4GHz network and answers to Alexa or Google Home, at a $ tier price that makes a one-room experiment painless. Two conditions apply: your box needs a neutral wire, and the light has to be controlled from that box alone, because this is a single-pole dimmer. Apple Home is not on its list either.
See Kasa HS220 →That is the decision in two cards. The rest of this page is the detail behind it: what the wiring rules out, what the hub buys you, and what happens at a hallway light with a switch at each end.
Start at the Wall Box, Not the Price Tag
Before comparing features, take the plate off the switch you want to replace and look. A smart dimmer has to stay powered even when the light is off, and it needs a return path to do that. The Kasa HS220 takes the straightforward route: it asks for a neutral wire, and TP-Link puts that requirement right in the listing title. Houses wired in recent decades usually have one in the box, often a bundle of white conductors tucked at the back.
Older homes frequently do not. A switch loop wired with only a hot, a switched leg, and a ground is common in mid-century construction, and no amount of app polish fixes it. Lutron designed Caseta around that reality, and it operates without a neutral, which is the single biggest reason it stays on recommendation lists years after launch.
The install gotcha worth knowing: the absence of a white wire in the box is not proof there is no neutral, and the presence of one is not proof it is a neutral. In older work, a white conductor is sometimes used as a switched leg. If the box has two white wires joined with a wire nut and nothing connected to your existing switch's white terminal, that bundle is probably a neutral run. If a single white wire lands on the switch itself alongside a black one, treat it as a switch loop and plan on Caseta. When you cannot tell, that is the moment to get an electrician on the phone rather than a second dimmer in the mail. The same wiring question decides most of the picks in our guide to smart light switches.
Side by Side on the Things That Change the Answer
Both dimmers do the obvious job well: they dim modern LED bulbs smoothly from the wall and from an app. The rows below are where they actually diverge.
| Feature | Lutron Caseta Starter Kit | Kasa Smart Dimmer HS220 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $$$ | $ |
| Neutral wire required | No | Yes |
| Hub required | Yes, Smart Bridge included in kit | No |
| How the switch connects | Lutron Clear Connect radio to the bridge | 2.4GHz WiFi |
| Amazon Alexa | Yes | Yes |
| Google Home | Yes | Yes |
| Apple Home and Siri | Yes, through the included bridge | No, the Kasa KS220 is the HomeKit model |
| Switch configuration | Single-pole, with Pico remotes for extra locations | Single-pole only |
| In the box | Two dimmers, two plates, two Pico remotes, bridge | One dimmer |
| Bridge connection to router | Wired Ethernet | Not applicable |
| Dimmer load rating | 150 W LED or CFL, 600 W incandescent or halogen | Check listing for your bulb type |
| Safety listing | Yes | Yes, UL certified |
Price tiers are approximate. $ = under $50, $$ = $50 to 150, $$$ = $150 to 300, $$$$ = over $300. Tap any link for the current Amazon price.
Read the table as two clusters. The wiring and radio rows favor Caseta, and they are the rows that decide whether a product can be installed at all. The price and hub rows favor Kasa, and they are the rows that decide whether you will bother.
What Owners Run Into After the Plate Goes Back On
The review themes for these two products barely overlap, which tells you something on its own: buyers are judging them against different expectations.
Lutron Caseta Starter Kit
Owners talk about Caseta the way people talk about plumbing that works: rarely, and with mild surprise. The recurring positive theme is response time and reliability, with dimmers answering the app and the Pico remotes instantly and staying connected long after installation. The common complaints are about cost rather than function, specifically that expanding past the starter kit means paying Lutron prices for every additional dimmer, and that the bridge wants a free Ethernet port on a router that may already be full.
Kasa Smart Dimmer HS220
Owner feedback here splits along the two conditions in the spec sheet. Buyers whose boxes had a neutral and whose fixtures run from a single switch describe a painless swap and dependable Alexa control. The persistent frustrations come from the other group: people who discovered the neutral requirement mid-install, and people who bought a single HS220 for a light wired to two switches and had to return it. A smaller recurring theme is dimming behavior with cheap non-dimmable LED bulbs, which flicker or buzz on any dimmer, not just this one.
Jacob’s read on this category
I have pulled both of these out of walls, and the pattern is consistent: the failures are wiring and bulb failures, not brand failures. Decide in this order. First, is there a neutral in the box? No neutral means Caseta and the conversation is over. Second, is the light controlled from more than one spot? A single HS220 cannot do that job, while a Caseta dimmer plus a Pico stuck to the wall at the far end can, with no wire pulled. Third, do you plan to smarten more than one or two rooms? Caseta's per-dimmer cost adds up fast, but so does the aggravation of a dozen WiFi switches each holding their own connection. One more thing worth doing before you order either: check that your bulbs are actually dimmable, because a buzzing fixture gets blamed on the switch almost every time.
What the Hub Costs You, and What It Buys
A bridge is the part people resist, and the resistance is reasonable: it is one more box, one more power outlet, one more thing to fail. With Caseta, the bridge is also the only path to Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and schedules, and it is the reason the dimmers themselves stay off your WiFi. The dimmer sends a short radio message to the bridge, and the bridge handles the internet side over a wired Ethernet connection to your router. A congested 2.4GHz band, a far-corner bedroom, or a router reboot does not reach the switches the same way.
The Kasa approach inverts that. Each HS220 is its own WiFi client with its own firmware and its own connection to maintain. With one or two switches, that is simpler in every way: nothing to set up beyond the app, no hub to find a home for. Scale it to eight or ten switches and you are running a small fleet of WiFi devices, each of which can go offline on its own schedule. People who keep an eye on their energy-monitoring plugs and other WiFi gadgets already know how that inventory grows.
Neither model is wrong. Buy the hub when you intend to keep adding lighting; skip it when you want one smart dimmer in the room you actually sit in.
The Hallway Light With a Switch at Each End
This is the scenario that generates the most returns, so it is worth being blunt. The HS220 is a single-pole dimmer. If your light is controlled from two boxes, one HS220 is not the part for the job, and Kasa sells a separate three-way kit built for it. Buying the single-pole version for a three-way circuit is the most common mistake made with this switch.
Caseta handles the same wall differently, and it is a genuine advantage rather than a spec-sheet one. You wire a single dimmer at one box and put a battery-powered Pico remote at the other location. The Pico needs no wire, no neutral, and no box; it clips to a wall bracket and can be moved later, or carried to the couch. In an older house, where opening a second box might reveal the exact wiring problem you were trying to avoid, not touching that box at all is the cheapest fix available.
If your house runs on Apple devices, note the split in the Apple Home row above before you decide: Caseta covers Siri through the bridge in the kit, and the HS220 does not cover it at all. Our roundup of Apple Home gear covers the rest of that ecosystem.
Which One Fits Your House
Match your situation to a row and stop there. Most of these are decided by the wall, not by preference.
Prices and availability reflect Amazon listings at time of writing. Confirm on the product page before purchase.
Frequently Asked Questions
Behind This Comparison
Smart dimmers are usually compared on app screenshots, which hides the two things that actually decide the purchase: whether the switch can be wired in your box, and whether the light is controlled from one location or two. We checked each product's own spec sheet and listing for the neutral-wire requirement, pole configuration, radio type, hub requirement, and voice-assistant support, treated a missing feature as a claim that needed its own source rather than an assumption, and then read the owner-review themes for install problems rather than star counts. Specs and listing details were re-checked on 2026-10-01.
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