ZigBee or Thread/Matter for switches and bulbs with home assistant

Howdy,

I’ve been using Home Assistant for years, but only for very basic things. I have a driveway sensor that sends me an email with a picture from an outdoor camera any time someone drives up/down the driveway.

I want to start adding smart switches and smart bulbs. I don’t have any ZigBee devices or any Thread/Matter devices. I curious if there is common wisdom about which path to go down in 2024.

I am waiting for the Inovelli switches with presence detectors to be available. I plan to install 8 or 10 of them around the house along with 20-30 Hue PAR30 RGB lights. My goal is to be able to automatically turn on lights when people are in the rooms and also turn on the lights in a different color based on other triggers (maybe when someone drives down the driveway). I don’t really have an end-goal in mind so I’m looking to learn/experiment/tinker.

I had planned to buy the Inovelli ZigBee switch, but I wonder if you think it’s smarter for me to go down the Thread/Matter path. I’ll be spending several thousand dollars on the first wave of the install so I’d like to make a wise decision that will last for a while.

What do you think?
John

You may want to look at the protocol age and how the respective hub has chosen to implement it into their system. The latest Matter update may help with some of the feature set not being exposed but it is still the hub manufacturer that chooses what is going to be available. The advanced features are more accessible in Zigbee currently and I am sure with time the Matter features will be made available it’s just a Matter of when (pun intended).

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