Trying to stay vendor-agnostic with my smart home setup
It’s tempting to go all-in on a single ecosystem, but I’m aiming for flexibility over lock-in. My goals are simple: devices that work locally, open standards where possible, and the freedom to swap vendors without rebuilding everything from scratch.
That means prioritizing:
Open protocols over proprietary ones
Local control instead of cloud-only dependencies
Interoperability (today and five years from now)
Boring, reliable automations over flashy features
It’s not always the easiest path—setup takes longer and choices matter more—but the payoff is a smarter home that’s future-proof, resilient, and actually mine.
Curious to see how far “vendor-agnostic” can realistically go in the smart home world.
With all of that said; Aqara has made that challenging. My first Aqara product was the U300 smart lock. My requirements were multi method access, and matter over thread. After my purchase, I realized I needed an Aqara smart hub to unlock the full capabilities. I reluctantly purchased the Aqara Smart hub M3. I already had an Aeotec hub for Smartthings and just built a Home Assistant server on a mini pc. I researched tirelessly to find the path to seamlessly integrate these ecosystems together as well as my legacy Ring cameras and security devices.The rabbit hole went deeper than I imagined. The Eureka moment came when I was able to create a single thread network in Home Assistant and then add my Smartthings hub and Aqara hub to the same thread network.I thought to myself, this was the key to vendor freedom. It would have been the case, but Aqara had a few surprises. The first surprise that somewhat derailed my plan was that all of my Aqara devices added to my M3 hub automatically integrated into my Home Assistant matter integration. It didn’t matter if they were matter or zigbee devices. This was a plus. The second was Aqara’s release of the FP300 Multi-Sensor. This device replaced all of my Ring Security motion sensors, added the temperature and humidity reading to each location, and facilitated the ability to create automations based on the amount of light in those locations.Now Aqara has the new P100 multi-state sensor. I believe this will be another game changer. There are still other devices that Aqara has not created … yet. I still use devices from other vendors such as smart fans, smart washing machines, smart televisions, and smart recessed lights. I will continue to purchase items from other vendors as reliable devices are released.My plans are to still forge ahead with a vendor agnostic smarthome, but Aqara continues to make the endeavor that much harder as they release cutting edge devices for smart home automation.