As the title says I was wondering what the preferred connection method is to connect an Aqara Hub to Home Assistant. Do you use Matter or the HomeKit integration the get your hub and child devices into Home Assistant?
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I had trouble trying to get my hub to connect directly to home assistant through matter. I ended up going the HomeKit route and it has worked well. Most of my Aqara devices are connected to my hub through Zigby and the hub updates everything into Home Assistant.
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I use the matter connection. There was no issue. It works fine. Unfortunately, sorry measures of e.g. plugs are not shared via the matter connection so far using the matter bridge functionality. On the other hand, of you use a thread device like the Aqara Motion and Light Sensor P2, you can share it via the Thread network and every measure is available in both Aqara App and Home Assistant.
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To connect my Aqara Hub M3 to Home Assistant (on RPi 4), I use a Matter over Ethernet connection. It is my primary Matter Controller with two sub-controllers. I have a mix of 15 devices in almost every room, including door and window sensors, presence sensors (FP2) and outlets. All Aqara devices except the outlets use Matter and the connections have been very solid. The Matter connections were super easy to set up, but it did take a few days for the network to reach a stable connection. I’m very pleased with the reliability of the Aqara devices, individually and working together.
Good Luck!
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I have tried both routes, and I found HomeKit works best for my setup (Homeassistant running on RPI4.) Not sure why but for some reason my door sensors and motion sensor are more responsible when integrated via HomeKit than via Matter. Good luck!
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Same boat. I found the way that works 100% of the time is to adopt devices into Apple HomeKit (I have multiple Apple TVs in a large house), with an Aqara hub and a Unifi IPV6 wifi system as alternate transports.
From there I get a code from HomeKit and add the devices into Home Assistant. And ignore HomeKit from then on 
I think there’s a slight delay caused by HomeKit being the primary controller, but it’s not noticeable if that’s true.
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Thank you so much for your input. At the moment I’m using the HomeKit integration myself but was wondering if it’s worth to change standards. The setup is working pretty fine so far and I’m not sure if I should try the switch. Maybe I’ll setup a matter „test environment“ to see if it’s beneficial for me or leave it as is.
WiFi is based on Unifi and having multiple HomePods and two Apple TVs
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I don’t know if I am doing something wrong, maybe someone can help? I have several mini switches and one H2 light switch all connected via Zigbee to the Aqara M3 Hub. When I connect the M3 Hub to Home Assistant via matter I don’t see the full functionality of the devices. For example, I cannot create an automation based off of a double press etc… But when I connect the Hub as a HomeKit Device everything works as expected.
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I use the matter connection and works well. No issues so far.
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I use the direct matter / thread connection on Home Assistant with OTBR activated and a Sonooff usb key dedicated for thread protocol. I have another key for Zigbee protocol.
All works fine and is very stable now. This was not the case 1 year ago.
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thanks for the tip
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idk if relevant, but i have two smart locks and HA – i ended up getting the matter hub (adding which dropped all my existing matter devices, that was fun), adding that to HA, and then also added both to Homekit so I could unlock w/ my iPhone. I’m still not sure if the hub was even necessary – but i couldn’t figure out a way to add locks to HA otherwise; after adding them as matter devices, all i can do to this day is lock/unlock (no user management, passcodes, etc)
I agree. I use HomeKit with a series of HomePod Mini’s throughout the house as thread over matter hubs. They work to integrate the Aqara products, and they also serve as hubs for my few “matter only” products.
I often use Matter integration though there’s really not a wrong answer.
Homekit
I’ve used both methods. I typically default to matter nowadays
HomeKit as well, cause it allows me to expose non-Matter devices either