The best LED units for planted tanks in 2025

Tank above lit by Week Aqua p900 and Chihiros Vivid2 LEDs.

What differentiates cheaper vs higher end LED lights?

The images above were taken on the same day with similar camera settings - the colour differences are even more pronounced in real life than in the images above. While generic LED floodlights or even desk lamps can grow plants well, the visual colour rendition of such units is not great.

LEDs are now widely used in aquariums. They are more energy efficient than older fluorescent bulbs and many come with customisable spectrum and programming. However, not all LED kits produce the same quality of light - there is a huge difference in both output and colour rendering depending on the type of LED used and the arrangement of the diodes;

Budget LEDs tend to produce washed out colours. This is not a universal rule, but a generalisation that applies to many cheaper lights, as shown above. This means that visual colour saturation is less appealing - reds and greens are less vibrant. Plants can still grow well under such lighting, but the visual presentation of the colours is less than ideal.

This is largely due to the use of cheaper white LEDs, which generally lack a red spectrum. Most white LEDs have a fair amount of blue and significant amounts of green/yellow, but lack red. A sample 6500k LED spectrum curve is shown below -  it has a large peak in blue and lots of green and yellow in the spectrum, but not much red.

To improve the situation, many LEDs that claim to be full spectrum or 'RGB' use a mixture of white and red/blue LEDs in addition to white LEDs. Although this adds extra red spectrum to the light, much of the spectrum is still dedicated to large amounts of green/orange.

This type of LED has a better spectrum than the one above. However, it is still not ideal. Having a broad spectrum dilutes the overall visual saturation of plant colours, even though it looks like the light has good coverage across the entire usable light spectrum. Again, such a spectrum will grow plants perfectly well, but will not give the best colour rendering/saturation. Common brands that use this type of diode arrangement include Hygger and Ai prime.

A more ideal LED arrangement?

In recent years some LED manufacturers have made use of Red Green Blue diodes to replace most or all of the white diodes. Using only Red, Green and Blue diodes to produce white light gives a spectrum curve more like the one below. We see high saturation in the 3 peaks; Red, Blue and Green with large gaps in between. This narrow spectrum approach seems counter-intuitive to people who think that we need to mimic the broad spectrum of sunlight to grow plants well, but not only do the LEDs that use this spectrum grow plants very well, they also give much higher visual colour contrast than broader spectrum LED models, and render richer looking colours for green, yellow etc as well.

This colour saturation is much more apparent in real life than in pictures. For the best experience, visit an aquarium shop to see the colour rendering differences of different lamps in real life.

Such a LED  diode arrangement gives high color saturation, enhancing red and green tones but still maintaining a neutral white background color tone. As shown below:

Good saturation of colors without an overly purplish back cast - Week Aqua a430 above, and Chihiros vivid below.

The LEDs that make use of the narrow spectrum bandwidth approach include:

• ADA Solar RGB
• Chihiros WRGBII and VIVID Series
• LEDstar
• Netlea AT6 and newer
• ONF Flat one
• Twinstar S series
• Week Aqua Series 
  
  

These are the fixtures we recommend for folks looking for LEDs with diode arrangements that give higher color saturation and contrast.

Some more examples:

This tank above is lit by an LEDstar unit.

Photo from Viktor Lantos, Green aqua showing ADA solar RGB.

Comparison of ADA solar RGB and some other fixtures:

Comparison of Chihiros Vivid and other Chihiros fixtures (the WRGB 2 has same spectrum as the Vivid):

Differences between the different brands

The Chihiros vivid is programmable with custom spectrum tuning and timing, and the app has improved from earlier versions. The ADA solar RGB is a no-frills unit (no custom spectrum, no timer function) but carries the ADA brand name. There are also slight differences in visual colouration - the ADA solar RGB has a slightly deeper green tone compared to the Maxlite and Chihiros vivid. ONF Flat one and Twinstar S have more rounded spectrums with less contrast compared to the rest; it may look more 'natural' but less saturated. Week Aqua has recently entered the market and their lamps have a good spectrum choice with the addition of UV diodes that other LEDs lack and are programmable (both spectrum and timer).