Looking for advice/suggestions (apologies in advance if this is wrong area for this). New home, and I want to finally get smart switches for various things.
I see that the Matter over Thread (White Series) still doesn’t have a presence sensing switch, is there any official timeline I couldn’t find via search that says this product is still going to happen? I want to ideally go full Matter over Thread, and this switch is something I’d deem pretty critical to buying into these switches.
If not, is Zigbee still a sane direction to go in 2026 since the blue series has the presence sensing switch and the fan canopy modules I need. I was worried about 2.4GHz interference which is why I currently use Z-Wave in the old home. Zigbee created a lot of meshing headaches in the past.
I’d bet that a White mmW will come eventually, but AFAIK, it’s not anywhere close to being imminent.
Thread operates in the exact same radio spectrum as zigbee and 2.4 wifi, so you’re not solving any potential congestion issues by avoiding zigbee in favor of Thread.
Heyo! I just bought a new home and filled it with smart switches. Hope I can help!
In a prior home I had a mix of Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter devices (door sensors, alarms, motion sensors, switches, outlets, you name it) working together on SmartThings. The switches and dimmers in that house were a mix of GE/Jasco Zigbee, Zooz Z-Wave, and Inovelli White Series that I had collected over time to varying degrees of success. I’ve been doing the smart home thing since before that house, when I lived in an apartment… so roughly been in the game futzing with these things since, say, 2011.
A couple things I learned from that experiment:
Z-Wave low-key sucks ass.
Z-Wave is more expensive, across the board.
Z-Wave LR doesn’t do meshing, so you have single point of failure if the hub goes down.
Z-Wave firmware updates are a nightmare unless your controller supports them natively, because…
Z-Wave inclusion and exclusion routines are slow and tedious and frankly very bad.
Communication with the hub is not ultra-reliable, as one would expect. Especially for battery-powered Z-Wave devices, sometimes you need to mash the button before it does the thing. Fuckin thing.
There was no scenario where I had two sensors of similar use case, one in Zigbee vs. one in Z-Wave, where I preferred the Z-Wave.
Matter high-key sucks ass.
Matter joining requires QR codes or join-codes, which are a pain in the ass.
Matter joining is fickle AF, even with Thread. The hours I wasted trying to make Matter-over-Thread work when the real reason it wasn’t working was because THE DEVICE’S FIRMWARE WAS BROKEN or because there was a competing Thread network it conveniently saw instead is non-zero and that’s time I’m never getting back and nobody’s stepped up to compensate me for it.
Thread meshing and range is an absolute joke compared to Zigbee. You’ll have a Matter-over-Thread lock (i.e., Nuki) right next to a Matter-over-Thread outlet (Eve, i.e.) and the Nuki will IGNORE the Eve outlet and connect instead directly to the hub several rooms away, then repeatedly go offline because it couldn’t hold a connection. Brilliant! Bonus: SmartThings can’t reliably draw the Thread connection path, for reasons.
Matter is lacking features that Zigbee and Z-Wave have had for ages. Bindings? LOL. “GFY,” said the Matter alliance.
Competing Thread networks are a real PITA and are virtually unavoidable. NO, I DO NOT WANT TO USE THE GOOGLE NEST HUBS’ THREAD NETWORK, FFS.
Despite the hype about “Thread” networking, I could not name a single scenario where Matter over Thread was obviously better than Matter over WiFi–they both depend on having a 2.4 GHz SSID. Bonus: that SSID can’t have standard UTF-8 characters in it, either. Fun! If they’re both 2.4 GHz and WiFi dependent, then what’s the fucking point?
Firmware updates are pretty unreliable, even with Inovelli White Series dimmers. SmartThings correctly tells me I’ve got an OTA to run, which is nice, but then doesn’t seem to actually push it unless the device is very, very close to the Thread border router. So then it keeps nagging me that it has a firmware update but won’t fucking update. JFC.
Relative to even my Z-Wave devices, Matter device control is unreliable, even with Inovelli Whites. Sad.
Matter, as a standard, is an early adopter product. It’s so unfinished, EA tried to publish it. “It’s fucking raw.” Truly–it’s only good when the alternative is proprietary horseshit (Bluetooth- or WiFi-only connectivity–looking at you, Kasa/TP-Link/Tapo).
Zigbee is the least bad by a mile.
First, joining is ultra-reliable and easy. It requires no QR codes. Just tell your hub to “search nearby”, plug in a brand new Zigbee device, and shit just joins. Done!
Joining is ultra-fast, compared to Z-Wave and Matter. Shit connects in seconds, there’s no Z-Wave-style ‘inclusion mode’ rigmarole, no Matter-style searching for 2.4 GHz WiFi networks, etc.
Zigbee is ultra low latency. Shit responds in milliseconds rather than seconds. Energy usage updates are faster with my Inovelli blues and Zigbee outlets than they ever were with Matter devices.
Has bindings, and they work! Zigbee bindings could be easier to set up (depends on your hub) but when they are done, they feel like literal magic and work accordingly.
Doesn’t require WiFi.
Meshing works extremely well, and relatively predictably. I’m rarely surprised. SmartThings has no issue at all drawing a connection path for Zigbee devices, and that path is rarely surprising.
It’s cheaper than Z-Wave! Nice. Especially obvious if you look at the Inovelli store: Red Series is stupid spendy compared to Blue.
Inovelli already has the mmWave pseudo-presence sensor you want for the Blue Series. (It works for some use cases, but it’s not as capable a presence sensor as the Aqara FP2, so don’t be fooled. It really will turn on the lights randomly when you’re sleeping).
I ended up going with Inovelli Blue Series for the new house and I have no regrets. Now, I will warn you:
Do not spin up a secondary Zigbee network anywhere in range of the original one. The same ‘easy join’ nature of Zigbee means some Zigbee devices are going to randomly hop to that other network, without explanation.
You cannot do Zigbee OTAs for Inovelli switches over SmartThings. Inovelli claims it’s a SmartThings limitation but I don’t buy it. Others have figured it out.
Configuring the extra settings for Inovelli Blues over SmartThings (the ones you pick from the device page > Settings menu) is iffy. When it works, it’s fast, but you may need to send the setting several times for it to save them, and you may need to power-cycle certain Zigbee devices for the settings to take effect.
Some “Zigbee”-marketed devices (especially from Aqara) are queah. They use a proprietary Zigbee driver-what-ever so they don’t really work right with hubs from other vendors. So you need to know the difference between “hub required” (normal, fine) and “hub from same vendor required” (not normal, fuckoff annoying, fucking criminal waste of my time).
So, take it from me: do not bother with Z-Wave, and don’t try to standardize on Matter for devices that need to work like infrastructure.
Matter bindings are a thing now, at least using the Matter Server in Home Assistant… I just set them up on my White on/off switches to control the light from the White Canopy.
That said, it’s certainly still an evolving standard… I flipped a coin and decided to start trying to get more things into the Matter/Thread ecosystem (just moved and won’t be using a large portion of my existing Zigbee lights as most of the fixtures have integrated lighting). We’ll see if that pays off in the long run.
“what’s available when you need it” is definitely a big consideration. We moved into our new house about 18 months ago, before all the Inovelli switches were available. I pre-ordered Zigbee ones, then when they came I changed out every switch in the house with the Zigbee ones. I’ve not had any problems with the switches related to Zigbee. The presence ones seem to need a hard reboot by pulling the power gap every once in a while, but that’s not a Zigbee thing.