Hey , Share my hands-on experience after going down the smart home rabbit hole the past few months. I’ve tried a bunch of hubs (yeah, probably too many) — from SmartThings to Hubitat, and even messed around with Home Assistant a bit. But in the end, I landed on the Aqara M3. And honestly? No regrets.
Main reason? Thread + Matter support out of the box. I didn’t wanna be stuck with purely Zigbee when everything is moving toward local-first and interoperable setups. The M3 plays nice with my existing Aqara sensors (of course), but also works smoothly with third-party Matter devices I’m slowly adding.
Setup was surprisingly chill. It detected most of my existing stuff without complaints. And the local automation feature is a win — no cloud delays at all. Walk into a room, light’s on. Just like that.
One big plus for me: the sleek design. It just looks better sitting on my shelf than some clunky black box. Very Apple-store vibe.
Curious to hear from others — what hub are you all using, and what made you pick it? Anyone else rocking the M3 and found any cool use cases I might’ve missed?
Cheers!
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Originally, I used a set of Philips Hue light bulbs and LED strips together with some TP-Link P115 smart plugs.
Due to missing features on the P115s, such as turning off the smart plugs when the power draw drops below a user-defined level, I added all of the aforementioned devices to Home Assistant to remedy the situation. Caught by Smart Home fever, I soon acquired a whole range of different Zigbee Aqara sensors (motion/light sensors and temperature/humidity sensors), radiator thermostats and smart plugs.
A future use of Matter over Thread devices would have meant the purchase of an additional Thread Border Router (~50 bugs) and so I decided to test the Aqara Hub M3 (~80 bugs) which can serve both worlds.
In my opinion, setting up automations is much more intuitive than via Home Assistant. My personal energy balance is much more positive, as I now only have to run my Proxmox server for 12 hours a day instead of 24.
Of course, Home Assistant offers much more than the Hub M3, but I would never have used much of it anyway. Home Assistant can, if desired, map a complete Homelab via Docker containers. However, I have been using Proxmox (VMs/CTs) to implement this and much more for a long time and will not change this.
The Hub M3 consumes approx. 2 - 5W (24/7), my Proxmox server 10 - 25W (12/7).
With the imminent purchase of some Aqara FP2s, I would have
- had to purchase the Hub M3 anyway to be able to configure the areas to be monitored
- had to buy a TBW to handle the FP2 via Home Assistant
The Hub M3 currently offers me everything I need to operate my Smart Home.
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