I am slightly (well a lot) biased towards cuelux as I know the owner of Visual Productions. I am actually gonna be helping build their booth at ProLight+Sound/MusicMess show in Frankfurt in two weeks 😀
And I obviously own a copy of Cuelux, which I use with my laptop and a Korg mini-controller (and I mean MINI!). However, for the very small light setup I have, it seems too much work to carry a second laptop and all that to control my lights (I fear I often just leave the lights at home completely LOL).
There is good news though. The Cuety solution (already mentioned on their website) will be using a standalone hardware “black” (well actually their token purple) box. You can use various ways to set it up, but once it is. It can run on its own pretty much and you can use the remote smartphone app or your iPad to control your show. So that phone that is usually in my pocket anyway, has now turned into a handy tool to control my lights without any extra controller or such. Also the black/purple box is small and can easily be stuck somewhere your dj booth.
Finally the pricing for the hardware will be (well) below the budget mark you mentioned I think.
I can tell you more in two weeks once I have seen it work at the show in Frankfurt.
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