Migrating to Home Assistant for Better Compatibility (Zigbee/Thread)

General
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Hello,

I am facing issues with incomplete support for some of my existing smart devices (particularly within the HomeKit and Aqara ecosystems) and am considering migrating my entire smart home setup to Home Assistant (HA) to gain better control and compatibility.

Specifically, I plan to leverage Zigbee 3.0 and Thread/Matter using the following USB adapters for the HA installation:

  1. SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (P or E model)
  2. Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (for Thread/Matter)

My main question is:

Does anyone have experience with this combination of hardware and Home Assistant?

And specifically:

Will my existing Aqara Zigbee 3.0 devices be fully manageable (pairing, configuration, automation) via the SONOFF Dongle and Home Assistant, or should I anticipate any limitations?

Thank you for any tips and experiences! JS

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Yes, all your Aqara Zigbee devices will work in Home Assistant through the Sonoff dongle, though how the devices work outside of an Aqara hub/app isn’t provided by Aqara themselves but by community efforts.

You’ll have a choice to make about the method of integrating Zigbee devices into Home Assistant, either through Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) or Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M). ZHA is a standard part of Home Assistant and is the easiest route to go down, Z2M is a third-party seperate add-on integration which can be a bit harder to set up.

The advantages of Z2M though are that new devices are often supported quicker and sometimes with more features. But the tradeoff is that it can be harder to set up.

There’s a database of Zigbee devices linked below which can tell you which systems they are known to work with (it can be a little slow in updating information though).

Or the Zigbee2MQTT website can give you more detailed information about which exact features of each device work with it.

3 Likes
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Hello, thank you for excelent and detailed answer. Any recommendation for device? I have good accessibility buy device like - SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus E, AVATTO Zigbee 2MQTT Home Assistant Dongle , Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2. Any other vendor?

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My personal preference is the SMLIGHT series:

https://smlight.tech/

But Home Assistant have just launched their own ZBT-2 which is probably worth at look.

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thank you, for your tips

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If you can keep your Aqara devices connected to an Aqara hub and expose to Home Assistant through matter or Home Kit integration this would be better in my opinion.

This gives your Aqara devices a stable preferred connection along with timely firmware updates.

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I second this. It’s exactly the setup I’m using at home as well.