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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

For people who haven't started their smart home project, my advice is to focus on Thread and Matter. Regardless of growing pains, Thread and Matter work today, have momentum, and are clearly the future.

(Note: The negative article the author linked to under "Matter and Thread are a big mess" to support his position was written by the same person.)

Z-Wave was a pre-IP proprietary standard that was forced towards standardization (Z-Wave Alliance remains a gatekeeper), but its future is unclear at best. Thread and Matter are the spiritual descendants of Zigbee, all of which are based on IEEE 802.15.4.

Also, I've seen posts praising the old protocols because they allow local control, but those concerns are unrelated. Alexa supports Thread and Matter but does not support local control, while HA and HomeKit support Thread and Matter and do support local control.

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HomeKit-over-Thread and Matter-over-Thread has been pretty okay in my experience, using HomePods and an Apple TV 4K as the border routers. I'm using Home Assistant, and the HomePods control everything nicely. Setup is a little weird (you have to set up your devices in HomeKit first, remove and then add again in Home Assistant without resetting) but they work great. My only complaint is that HomePod Software and tvOS updates tend to bork the devices until I reboot HA, but that takes 10 ish seconds so not a big deal.

I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. For that reason I decided to go with what's cheap and works today, which is Zigbee.

> I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts.

When you compare apples-to-apples, there's no price penalty — for example, a Leviton Decora smart dimmer is $56 for Zigbee or $50 for Matter. Kasa's Matter dimmer switch is $27, and I see $3 Matter devices on AliExpress. Matter and Thread don't currently match Zigbee in terms of device diversity, but that's just a matter of time.

> Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them.

Even hundreds of Matter devices using Wi-Fi would collectively use an insignificant portion of your Wi-Fi network's throughput.

Try having more that 40-50 devices connected to your home router and you will see devices disconnecting randomly because your router can't keep up with them.

I have more than that on my ordinary consumer router and have never seen a problem. Worst case, it'd be straightforward to dedicate a Wi-Fi router to your smart devices in the same way that you have a hub (and possibly repeaters) for your Zigbee devices.

That is a super bad advice: most of the matter stuff simply unstable, very few devices. Apple's support is also subpar and unstable.

Yeah, I can't relate to that at all. My Matter devices are more reliable than what they replaced (mostly switches and dimmers so far), and HomeKit support has "just worked". Matter's a 16-month-old baby, though, so YMMV.

Home Assistant: The State of Matter (Jan, 2024) "We believe in Matter: it’s open source, and most importantly, it’s fully local by default... Matter launched only one year ago, compared to twenty years for a standard like Zigbee, so it’s important to account for that in your expectations."

This is very bad advice. You should do the opposite of that. Buy Z-Wave devices and use them. They just work.

Later, your Hub will add Tread/Matter support and you can do that too, but right now it's not worth the trouble.

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