I have 3 Hue light bulbs + 3 IKEA Tradfri light bulbs ( + bunch of other zigbee stuff, in total ~40 devices in my mesh network)

I started home automation with a Philips Hue starter kit but built my own zigbee network with Home Assistant later on. I'd say IKEA light bulbs, being around half the price of Philips, are pretty much on par with them.

The worst lights I had were OSRAM, they kept losing the zigbee connection and were PITA all the time.

I’ve found the IKEA bulbs to be significantly worse than the Philips ones, so I would definitely say the price difference is warranted.

The IKEA bulbs aren’t as bright, get overwhelmed if you send a lot of commands quickly (so you can’t implement a dimmer for example, without the light jittering as it dims), and don’t have the “turn power on-and-off quickly to reset to full brightness” feature (though this is nice if that’s what you specifically want).

Not entirely relevant here, but Zigbee supports sending a duration to take for changes in configuration, which tends to lead to much smoother dims than brute forcing it. If applied to a group of bulbs it’ll also synchronise over the entire group.