Our Mission
Real Data for Real Growers
The grow light market is flooded with marketing hype. Every brand claims to be the best. Every product page is optimized to sell — not to inform. For home growers trying to make a smart purchase, it's nearly impossible to compare lights on a level playing field.
The Problem: Grow light specs are scattered across PDFs, product pages, and spec sheets — all formatted differently, all designed to make their product look best. There's no single place where a grower can compare real numbers across brands without bias.
The Solution
CI Lighting is an open dataset of 132 LED grow lights across 10 brands, built from manufacturer-published specifications. Every value comes directly from product pages, spec sheets, or PDF datasheets. Nothing calculated, nothing assumed, nothing sponsored.
We built the tools that growers actually need: a cost calculator that shows real electricity costs per grow cycle, a side-by-side comparison tool with total cost of ownership, and a tent-size recommender that ranks lights by efficacy — not by who paid for placement.
What is Cannabis Intelligence?
Cannabis Intelligence (CI) is the practice of collecting, verifying, and organizing actionable data about the cannabis industry. CI Lighting is one piece of a larger ecosystem — alongside CI Seed Map and CI Strains — all built to give growers the information they need to make better decisions.
In a market where every brand has a marketing budget but few publish honest comparisons, independent data is power.
Our Principles
Data over opinions. Every metric on this site is derived from manufacturer specs or user inputs. We don't rank lights based on feelings — we rank them on efficacy, cost, and coverage.
Grower-first design. No pop-ups, no paywalls, no clutter. The tools are fast, mobile-friendly, and built for the person standing in front of their tent trying to decide what to buy.
Open data. The entire dataset is open source on GitHub under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it, build on it, improve it.
Transparency on money. This site contains affiliate links. We earn a commission when you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. Affiliate relationships never influence data, rankings, or inclusion in the dataset.
Who We Are
CI Lighting is a product of Loyal9 LLC, built collaboratively by a human researcher and Amazon Q Developer. We believe that access to honest, comparable data is a right — and that informed growers make better purchasing decisions.
Have a correction, feature idea, or partnership inquiry? Get in touch.