I see a lot of posts about people who like their Zigbee and Z-Wave products. As I’m setting up the hardware in my home, I’m using Wi-Fi products because I already have Wi-Fi. I don’t see much difference in price. What is the actual benefit of setting up a separate network for home devices? Is there a reason that I should consider setting up one of these networks?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Matter sort of makes Wifi more viable, but Zigbee is a proper mesh that generally works great. The more devices, the more reliable the network.

    Zwave theoretically works similarly, but I’ve found it to have way more problems.

    • c10l@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      I have high hopes for Matter but as it stands today it’s a pretty big mess and usability is generally horrible.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        Oh? I run 40 Matter devices and they’ve been pretty great. The downside is that they don’t mesh or act as repeaters as Zigbee does. Simple setup via HA as well.