New user - What kind of light bulbs

Hardware
1

I just discovered Home Assistant and it looks like just the thing for me.
Plan to start with a Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB that I have on hand.
First thing I want to start with is control some lights.
I have a few Cree Connected bulbs (Zigbee I think) formerly used with a Wink Hub. I don’t want to use the Wink because it requires internet connection, which is not sufficiently reliable.

So are the Cree Connected bulbs suitable? What is required to communicate with them?

If not the Cree bulbs, which ones are recommended and how does communication work.

As mentioned above, I want my system to be local. It has to work without an internet connection for reliability. Also, I don’t want my system to get bricked if some company goes out of business or decides to no longer support some equipment.

Thanks for any recommendations.

2

If you want smart bulbs, ZigBee is a good choice. Use it with zigbee2mqtt, zha or deconz for local control. WiFi bulbs are hit and miss. You never know before if they will be local controllable.

3

I just found the RaspBee, which looks like it might be a reasonable way to interface to the Zigbee bulbs.

4

Or if you want to possibly run some zwave stuff in the future then you can get the HUSBZB-1