What is xLights?

Per their website, “xLights is a free and open source program that enables you to design, create and play amazing lighting displays through the use of DMX controllers, E1.31 Ethernet controllers and more” . What does this mean to you? It means that xLights can control a whole bunch of different types of lights and devices (including DMX, which is what they use for professional stage lighting, fog machines and other crazy stuff). xLights can control WS2811 and WS2814 Pixels. It can also control most consumer grade Twinkly devices natively right out of the box (this wasn’t true several years ago – you had to use 3rd party solutions to make it work).

xLights is free to download and use for everyone, and is heavily supported by the holiday lighting community. This is serious software that can do some astounding things. If you ever have watched the Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC, xLights is usually what they are using to control those shows with hundreds of thousands of lights. It is more than powerful enough for your show at home. It runs on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. Random fact: If you’ve even seen a Tesla or group of Teslas put on a synchronized light show, xLights is the software behind that.

If you’ve ever used video editing software like Adobe Premier Pro or similar, xLights user interface will feel familiar. After setting up all of your devices in xLights, you will have created a visual model of your light show, You can import a photo of your house/yard so you can see what it’s going to look like (either in 2D or 3D). You basically have layers of “models” which each represent lights in your show (like center tree, or a snowman prop) on the Y axis and time (or a music track) across the X axis at the top. You apply effects to each of the layers for whatever time period in the software, and it will render it first on the screen then in real life by controlling the physical lights.

Here’s a 3D view of my show rendered by xLights, plus an actual video of our most popular sequence of 2025. The software will even let you move around and look at this from different angles.

Link to website and downloads (will open in new tab): https://xlights.org

Per their website, “xLights is a free and open source program that enables you to design, create and play amazing lighting displays through the use of DMX controllers, E1.31 Ethernet controllers and more” . What does this mean to you? It means that xLights can control a whole bunch of different types of lights and devices (including DMX, which is what they use for professional stage lighting, fog machines and other crazy stuff). xLights can control most consumer grade Twinkly devices natively right out of the box (this wasn’t true several years ago – you had to use 3rd party solutions to make it work).

xLights is free to download and use for everyone, and is heavily supported by the holiday lighting community. This is serious software that can do some astounding things. If you ever have watched the Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC, xLights is usually what they are using to control those shows with hundreds of thousands of lights. It is more than powerful enough for your show at home. It runs on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. Random fact: If you’ve even seen a Tesla or group of Teslas put on a synchronized light show, xLights is the software behind that.

If you’ve ever used video editing software like Adobe Premier Pro or similar, xLights user interface will feel familiar. After setting up all of your devices in xLights, you will have created a visual model of your light show, You can import a photo of your house/yard so you can see what it’s going to look like (either in 2D or 3D). You basically have layers of “models” which each represent lights in your show (like center tree, or a snowman prop) on the Y axis and time (or a music track) across the X axis at the top. You apply effects to each of the the layers for whatever time period in the software, and it will render it first on the screen then in real life by controlling the physical lights.

Link to website and downloads (will open in new tab): https://xlights.org