Hi everyone,
I’m currently setting up my smart home and I’m trying to understand the actual advantages of using an Aqara Hub (e.g. M3/M2) instead of using a standard Zigbee coordinator such as a Sonoff ZBDongle or another Zigbee USB coordinator with Home Assistant/Zigbee2MQTT.
Apart from the convenience of the Aqara ecosystem, are there any technical advantages to using an Aqara Hub?
That’s a loaded question
It’s going to depend on what your goals are, what devices you plan on using and how you prefer to set up your network.
A Hardwired Home Assistant box with Zigbee2MQTT will pretty much cover everything. I would also add a Thread Antenna to it also and keep things tidy.
Manufacturers often implement private encrypted features only visible in their hubs. Be careful with this…
I have a few smart hubs (Philips Hue, IKEA Dirigera and Aqara M3) integrated as hubs to my Home Assistant. The big advantage for me is that I can easy integrate those hubs into other platforms like Homey and Apple Home and all the devices connects automatically. Earlier it was also better with firmware upgrades but HA seems to do that just as good today.
The con is that I have multiple Zigbee networks.
Should also mention that I experiment quite a lot and if something breaks in HA the Zigbee hub devices come back in minutes instead of having to re-pair them.
But if you are not testing too much I would go for Zigbee2MQTT only.