Instead of another “Zigbee vs. Matter” discussion, I’m curious about something more practical.
If you had to rebuild your smart home today from scratch, would you actually choose one protocol for everything?
Or would you deliberately mix them depending on the type of device?
For example, would you still choose Zigbee for simple battery-powered sensors, but Matter/Thread for lights, switches or other newer devices? Or would you now try to make everything Matter where possible?
I’m a HomeKit usre, and already have 3 M2 Hubs with several Zigbee devices and the system is very stable, so I’m not looking for a reason to replace things that work.
I’m more interested in how experienced users would design a new system today.
Which device categories would you choose for Zigbee, and which for Matter/Thread — and why?
Hubs are a smart home friend, they keep your WiFi clean and relatively maintenance free.
Thread is currently overrated and is difficult to manage because there are no settings or options unless you’re a Home Assistant user.
I am a brand new smart home enthusiast and I have given this topic a lot of thought in the past few months and I have decided to go with Matter and Home Assistant only.
I would deliberately keep it mixed. In my Home Assistant setup I use many Aqara devices together with an M100. Aqara temperature, humidity and door sensors provide the context for climate, shading and privacy automations. For those simple battery devices, reliable reporting matters more to me than having every device on the newest protocol. I would not replace a stable Zigbee sensor only to make the network look consistent.
For new devices I would choose Matter over Thread when interoperability brings a clear practical benefit. Home Assistant would remain the coordination layer, so the automation logic depends on room context rather than the protocol underneath. My rule would be simple: keep mature Zigbee devices that work well, add Matter or Thread selectively, and standardize only when it actually reduces maintenance.
No. I would mainly use Thread, but still use Zigbee for some Aqara Devices with an Aqara Hub and some other special stuff from AliExpress with Home Assistant. But I mainly would recommend buying Aqara Products, as they are really reliable and affordable.
So I would mix the protocols, based on what is available for a product. And I have Smart-Home devices with Wi-Fi (except for cameras and devices with Ethernet).
Thread is good, but doesn’t give us all the options, that we have with Zigbee, like switching the mode for the P100, using an Fingerbot with ZHA,…
That’s much smarter than my approach, but I only just started so I am unsure in Zigbee benefits yet. I would have to invest into two ZBT-2 in order to gain the ability to connect my first Zigbee test device. Right now I have 7 smart bulbs, 7 controllers that attach via magnet to the wall, one in-wall switch, one temperature/humidity sensor, one water leak / flood sensor, one door sensor, two smart plugs, one motion / occupancy sensor. All are Matter-over-Thread. I also have one Matter-over-WiFi in-wall switch.
So adding my first Zigbee device will require “antenna” investment as well.
If I had a Zigbee setup in my home already and understood all of the broker stuff, I would probably keep it.
But I am not in that position. I am creating a brand new home auto system now.
So I much prefer matter over thread because I don’t need to understand MSQTT and so much more. But at this point in time, using only matter over thread is tough because the current, established set of users are expert in all things Zigbee (and some Z-wave). So I have found Aqara’s Zigbee translation to Matter via its hub to be useful as a stopgap. If you’re interested, I did find this article to make quite a bit of sense (in my mind):
My decision, before I even started, was to be fully independent from any proprietary smartphone apps, internet connectivity and “clouds”. Zigbee fits in this expectation, but not Aqara hub. So in my eyes there is nothing inherently bad about Zigbee. It’s just that after reading a lot of comparisons and when I heard that Matter works on IP protocol I liked it. Also, IKEA played a role in my choice because they have a small, but very affordable set of Matter/Thread devices whose firmware seems very mature.
After doing a research on wireless scene controllers, such as Aqara H1 Wireless, I haven’t found a better one in the Matter world than IKEA Bilresa. And that one costs peanuts. I think it’s only 3€ extra on top of a smart bulb.
Perhaps I will not stick with IKEA remotes in the long run, but they sure did BOOST me quite a lot in the begining. Investing into a new hobby is financially painful, so having access to affordable devices for testing is nice. Zigbee has affordable wireless controllers too, but not this affordable.
I am aware of the advantage of mature technology and I am wondering if Matter will manager to close the gap.
