I've landed on a mixture of MQTT and Zigbee communicating devices, the latter being much easier to set up and maintain. There's an integration for just about everything I've wanted, some better than others, but all in all just a great project.
Almost everything I use is ZigBee, but at first, I used the built-in Zigbee support for it, not realizing what I was missing out on.
After a move, I setup everything again, but this time via ZigBee2MQTT instead and the compatibility is miles ahead of the built-in integration.
Just a word of advice to others who are using the built-in integration atm, not realizing the big difference between the two :)
It had all been working wonderfully, until I had a problem recently that meant I had to redo the entire Zigbee setup.
I run HAOS on a VM, with the Zigbee radio being passed through from the host. Recently I wanted to play with Thread so I added a radio and passed it through to the VM as well. All was fine, though I wasn't having a lot of time to experiment and the Thread dongle was connected in an awkward position so I decided to yank it out. At this point all hell broke lose. Z2M wouldn't start, throwing cryptic error messages. After a lot of trial and error, I removed both USB passthroughs, rebooted the VM, shut it down again, re-plugged the Zigbee dongle and re-added the passthrough. At this point the hardware side of things was fine but my Zigbee network was gone. To make it worse, a new one couldn't be initialised because it was trying to use the same ID as the previous one. I had to manually change the ID in the config YAML, restart everything, then re-pair all devices.
I really feel like this stuff should be more resilient to failures. Otherwise, it's pretty good!
How come the hardware was ok but the network was gone? Did some Z2M config files go wrong because of two dongles? Did you try to restore VM from snapshots?
Losing the network and having to re-pair everything would be a nightmare for me given the number of Zigbee devices I run (~35) and that some of them are mounted in switch boxes in the walls.
But if you only have Phillips and Ikea devices for example, probably won't be much difference with Z2M.
I use MQTT but for me it's only a tool for getting a certain device integrated in HA. I don't see why I would want more devices to communicate that way.
Plus, from my development background, I have grown to really dislike event buses. And mqtt sure feels like a weird big non-strict event bus with some persistence.
Meanwhile, a standalone MQTT broker like Mosquitto is rock solid, had 2 minor updates this year, and could run on the most minimal of hardware/LXC.
Initially (7 years ago?) I refused to use HA because I've all too often had the issue that then projects become stale and I need to migrate to something else.
But lately I've gotten the feeling that HA is really here to stay, with a community big enough for this project not to die and maintaining very good hardware support.
What I'm missing out on is an (Android) app, and I think that this would be a good reason to think about moving over to HA.
There is! The Home assistant companion - it brings you a lot of functionality in terms of location, notifications, sensors and what not into the HA world.
Home Assistant never “clicked” with me. It makes some hard things easy, but some easy things hard. I just don’t love YAML enough to write logic in config files…
I also hate that HA pushes you to run their whole OS. The docs usually assume you’re running HAOS.