Hi everyone,
I am reading up on that topic for a few weeks now and the only conclusion I have so far is: There is nothing that works perfect and you need to check for each device if it works with your setup.
So I am asking about your experience so far, what you use, if you plan to change your setup (for what reason?) or what you would do different. Or do you use multiple gateways / protocols at the same time?
I run HA in Docker for a few things, but I have nothing connected yet via one of the protocols mentioned above. Yesterday I came across SkyConnect and thought I found the holy grail of dongles. Zigbee? Check. Zigbee2MQTT? Check. Matter? Check. But then looking at the details… Zigbee2MQTT is experimental and in a few review (although none was younger than 9 months) people report that it works unreliable. Matter support also is not there yet it seems. And to add insult to insury it seems that it officially does not work with a Dockerized HA setup.
So whenever I think I found “my” solution, there is something that does not seem to work, is unreliable or not compatible with all devices. I even ran across reports that said if a device Support Zigbee or MQTT it might still not work with your particular setup because… well… not everything that has a specific protocol stamped on the package seem to work in the same way.
So I feel like running in circles. I wanted to start with a few simple things like Temperature / Humidity sensors and Door sensors like for example the ones from Aqara. But if I throw money at someone my highest priority is reliability. So I want to go a route that (at this moment) is the most stable, reliable and future proof in your opinion.
So I am very curious about your setups and the experience you made with it :-)
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I’m running a Debian Bookworm on a Zotac Tiny PC, plus Docker and Mosquitto with HomeAssitant supervisor installed and a Sonoff usb dongle P. No ZigBee2MQTT. To begin with the Dongle was recognised by HA, natively running ZHA, all worked okay. Then I added ZigBee2MQTT as a add-on in HA, linked it to my Mosquitto account, added MQTT as an add-on as you need it as well. The difference is enormous, as I now have a ZigBee Dashboard, many more options were seen by the ZigBee2MQTT on the devices that I had installed that weren’t seen by the ZHA, I was even able to update certain firmware on my switches.
HA matter support is still BETA
Matter supporting devices are still VERY few and far between (some vendors have back tracked from supporting it)
I am not even considering matter an important feature until HA is out of beta for it, it cant even act as a matter bridge yet. This is particularly important if you want HA to be the master of everything and you want to use matter with other systems directly.
For now my setup is all self run docker… I run the main HA container, zigbee2mqtt for zigbee support, and zwave-js in a docker for zwave support.
By far zwave has the most mature lock / security / control devices
By far zigbee has the MOST / cheapest sensors and other devices (Aqara in particular for sensors)
I would love to consolidate but I am in a complete rebuild of my setup and from the look of it most of my door locks will be going zwave and nearly all my sensors will be Aqara zigbee.
As for which way to go with zibee, I started with ZHA then switched to zigbee2mqtt for a few reasons
- zigbee2mqtt has slightly better device support, seems to get device support a litter faster for new strange devices and has a great online database of supported devices.
- zha restarts with HA, this includes restarting the zigbee dongle AND NETWORK… every time to do a full restart of HA you may cause all your zigbee devices to become unavailable till the network comes back up, particularly sensors. Running zigbee2mqtt as a separate docker it only ever gets restarted when I reload it for updates, the network is always VAST and up. When I restart HA the only wait is for HA to connect to MQTT and bang all the devices are back with the correct states
- Feedback… zha has a better UI integration IN HA, however I found using the native zigbee2mqtt webUI it had more real-time feedback for actions such as inclusion, or advanced stuff like binding devices together which requires some odd timing of you pressing device buttons.
- zigbee2mqtt was very tunable, from setting up the keys / channels to how often it polls to find out if battery devices have gone missing.
Where have you seen that Z-Wave devices are iffy? I’ve never had one that didn’t work with my setup, and I’ve even swapped my controller out (now, that was a pain). I have 51 nodes in my network, from many manufacturers and a 6 or 7 different types of devices. Where are you reading about Z-Wave compatability issues?
To be honest, I might have mixed something up reading up on all those standards. After researching a topic, my browser usually ends up having a hundred Tabs “just in case I need that information again” and honestly… in all that information I can not find it specifically. My consensus reading all that information was: “Make sure for each device you buy that it works with your specific gateway, even if it says it works with protocol X”.
Ignoring Matter, Zigbee and Zwave are the two radio protocols while Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA are your two options in Home Assistant to interface with Zigbee radios (pick one or the other).
I used to use a HUSZBZ dongle which had both Zigbee and Zwave radios integrated into a single dongle, but it’s older now and didn’t support newer devices. I’ve now switched to the Sonoff 3 Zigbee dongle and a separate newer Zwave dongle (can’t recall which brand).
As far as which integrations to use, I’m running Zigbee2MQTT (switched from ZHA when I added the new dongle to try it out) with little issues and running the default ZWave integration in HA.
As for devices, I’ve ran into some issues with Ikea Zigbee devices which is what lead to me buying the new Zigbee dongle and switching to Z2M, but those have all been resolved in the switch. Zwave devices have been pretty rock solid since day one but are generally much more expensive to buy.
I’d personally run both protocols so that you have more options when buying devices. I have numerous Aqara Zigbee devices and they’ve all worked without issue.
I use zigbee2mqtt myself and I’ve been very happy with it. I haven’t tried ZHA, but I believe z2m supports more devices. (I use z2m’s supported devices list to choose which ones to buy.) The downside is that it’s a bit more work to set up initially, as you need an MQTT broker as well. But in return, I feel like z2m is more reliable since it runs (and is updated) separate from HA core. I use it with a zzh! dongle and even though I got one of the bad ones with a faulty amplifier chip, it’s been rock solid.
As for Thread(+Matter), I’m waiting for things to settle down. Support in HA is still experimental and there are very few products out yet that use Thread. I’ll probably prefer Zigbee for as long as they sell them so all my devices will share the same mesh. Also, unlike Zigbee, Thread devices are not guaranteed to be local-only, which is my biggest worry. Thread/Matter won’t free us from having to check a device compatibility list before buying.
Thanks for your input! MQTT is not an issue, I have Mosquitto running on both my installs (one with HA + Frigate on a remote location, the other one HA for me which is also used by Owntracks), so MQTT is not a problem. I will even set up a second one and connect them together to have 2 Brokers for the setup where I need Internet access (Owntracks) to MQTT and I do not want to share this MQTT instance with the devices for my home.
My impression about Matter was too that it is not “done” yet and device support is poor. On the other hand you read at every corner that it will be the future. This is why the SkyConnect Adapter looked very interesting to me at first, but since most of the features I would use now (Z2M probably, Docker compatibility) do not seem to work yet, or at least not reliably.
I migrated from Samsung Smartthings when they did their big change I guess late last year. I am using zwave and Zigbee2mqtt as I had both zwave and zigbee devices already installed all over.
I went with z2mqtt because I wanted to integrate a few other things into HA like my weather station, and Blue Iris. It’s been working great for me.
I run HA on a Rpi, and the only ‘problems’ I had were because of radio interference from USB 3.0. I bought a cheap usb 2.0 port (HUB) and extension cables to move it away from the pi, and it’s been pretty solid since.
May I ask what Gateway / Dongle you use? Oh and that weather station sounds interesting, if you happen to have a Manufacturer / Model for me I would like to read up on that too :-)
I am leaning towards MQTT too because of other solutions that already integrate into that. It looks like a great way to throw different Data into a single pool to make them accessible in the same way, no matter if it is a switch, temp sensor, Camera, GPS Data etc.
Conbee Ii for zigbee and Aeotech z-stick for zwave.
As for weather, I use ecowitt devices that run through their GW1000 (gateway 1000). This is integrated with a weewx install (also on an rpi) that has an mqtt module installed. So once that’s all setup I configured the sensors on comfig in HA to look at the ones I wanted access to.
That is cool, thank you very much!
