I never thought I'd be comparing night lights, but here I am, after many hours of frustration with both products, putting down some thoughts about what would be a good design, and (spoiler alert!) why neither of the two that I bought is any good.

My main use case is simple: I want to my kid to have a red light with white noise during sleep time, and a green light with no sound once it's time to wake up. The night sleep is from 8pm to 7am, and the nap is roughly between 12:30pm and 1:30pm.

It all falls apart at the "roughly" defined nap time... Because who would expect that a 2 year old might not always start napping exactly on schedule, or might need a longer nap on some days? Apparently, not the makers of these night lights.

Below, I'm going to walk you through what I tried to set up, and how it worked (or didn't work) with each of the lights.

Creating a schedule

For setting up the initial schedule, Hatch has a much more polished flow.

It lets you create a routine with one or more steps (more on the steps later), and add it to the touch ring, the schedule, or both.

You can select the color, the sound, and the duration — just as you would expect.

I included 2 screenshots below since the flow did not fit on a single screen.

Here is what my Nap routine ended up looking like:

As far as the creation experience goes, I thought this was great. Even though multiple steps can be complex, I am reasonably confident I set things up exactly how I wanted.

With Nanit, the experience is a lot more fragmented. You start on the Favorites screen, but if you add a new favorite, there is no way to schedule it (at creation or at a later time). That's a bummer, because the first thing I did was create the 3 types of routines I would like to use in my schedule.

The "New routine" flow has the settings for color, sound, and duration, but it doesn't give the ability to chain multiple routines, so "nap" and "wake up from nap" have to be scheduled separately.

I found it very difficult to scroll this screen without changing values (especially after the time dropdown got expanded), and also almost impossible to slide the brightness and volume to the exact levels I wanted. As soon as I would lift my finger off, the bar would shift just a bit (to a frustrating 12% instead of 10%).

The "end time" interaction was very weird. My initial thought was to create a "nap" routine that goes from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, and then a "wake up" routine that starts at 1:30pm. When I tried to do that, the app showed a warning about "overlapping" routines. I dismissed the warning, and when I tested the sequence, the first routine ended, but the second one never started.

I figured I'd be clever, and set the "nap" to end at 1:29pm, and have the "wake up" start at 1:30pm. That was equally bad — the first routine ended, the light turned off completely for a minute, and then the second routine started.

Neither of these behaviors was suitable, so I ended up with an "infinite nap" followed by a "wake up" that effectively terminates it.

Here is what it looks like on the schedule (the wake up time is different because my kid is taking a very late nap as I am writing this):

In the end, I got the schedule I wanted, but I had to make "test schedules" and verify the behavior around the end time overlap, which was very frustrating.

To sum things up, for the task of scheduling a nap followed by a wake-up:

Side quest: Disabling the buttons

I don't want the buttons on the devices to do anything when pressed by a curious toddler. Period.

Early nap today!

This doesn't happen often, but sometimes my kid is just tired early, and needs a nap before it's 12:30pm. At that point, I want him to keep sleeping until his usual wake-up time of 1:30pm.

This is where the flawless Hatch world starts to fall apart... While it is possible to start a routine early by tapping on it, it will also end early, which is not what I want. A routine that is already in progress cannot be edited (the app says it will interrupt the routine).

With Nanit, because the schedule for the "wake up from nap" is not chained, this actually works just fine. I tap on the "nap" to start it early, and the "wake up" happens at the usual time.

Running late, need a later wake-up!

A more common scenario with naps is that kids are never quite on schedule. Even if I aspire for the nap to begin at 12:30pm every day, it's simply not realistic. If we are 5 minutes late, it's no big deal. But if we are 30 or 45 minutes late, then the wake-up time needs an adjustment.

Again, unfortunately Hatch is not able to handle this gracefully. Once the routine has started, it cannot be edited without causing it to stop (which would be awful; I just got my toddler to go down for a nap, and I need zero interruptions). The only work-around for extending the nap time I found is to click on the "night sleep" routine (which is exactly the same, but at a different time), and then click back on the "nap". That causes the timer to get reset, and the "nap" routine will last a full hour after this "hack".

With Nanit, all I have to do is edit the "wake-up" routine to start at a later time. And then not forget to put it back to the correct time for next day...

Summary

I don't understand why neither product has an "Edit the routine that is currently running just this one time" button. Having the ability to do one-off modifications is a must with a toddler, and this feature would address all of my pain points. Want to add 15 more minutes to today's nap? No problem!

While Hatch has a much better interface for setting things up, it's just not usable when things don't go according to schedule. The "routine will be stopped if you modify it" warning is befuddling.

Nanit has a much worse interface, but at least it works in a predictable way, and can be adjusted when needed. But then it needs to be adjusted back.

I'm not loving either of them.