Today I run Home-Assistant with a UZB1 stick connected. This trough passtrough in vmware esxi.
IT works good and stable, but I had preferred an external network-attached device to just controll my z-wave.
Something like my external pi with deCONZ/ConBee.
What is the best, most stable and future-proof way of doing this?
Both Pi with software and commercial hubs with Integrations are welcome .
But anything depending og a cloud is unacceptable.
Zwave2MQTT can run on any device that has a Zwave stick to convert all Zwave controlls to MQTT.
You can have your MQTT broker on that same device.
HA only needs to have sensors made for the MQTT topics you care about.
The openzwave beta does this as well, connect zwave stick to a pi, load up docker and point it to your mqtt broker.
thanks, do any of you have any how-to’s also`?
Can You tell me what is difference between Zwave2MQTT and OpenZWave (beta)? Which is more stable and supports more devices?
The differences is OpenZWave beta is maintained by the core devs of HA, zwave2mqtt is maintained by a 3rd party outside of HA.
They both use openzwave 1.6 as the library under the hood.
Ok, thanks for reply…
Big question: which one is more stable now? And supports more devices (thermostats, door key locks)?
Big thread about OpenZwave (beta) (The Future of Z-Wave in HA - QT-OpenZWave) don’t looks very well?
Since they utilize the same software they have the same stability and support the same devices.
I’m also very interested, especially for ZWave as my ZWave network takes a few minutes to start-up on each HA restart which is sometimes problematic.
My Zigbee network (Zigbee2MQTT integration) starts super fast on HA restart, so that’s less an issue.
I’d like to run the ZWave stack on a separate Proxmox LXC.
I run Zwave2MQTT as a docker container and I prefer it over the default Zwave integration.
The huge benefit it that it is up during HA restarts.
OpenZWave looks very promising but still a litlle bit ‘young’.
It’s young, but for my use (about 30 ZWave devices, mainly Fibaro and Aeotec), it seems perfectly usable and stable for me.
I think I will give it a try. 
Integration of my 17 Fibaro Roller Shutter 3 is not perfect with the core native ZWave integration, especially the state feedback is far from perfect. I have to use workarounds and still it’s not perfect.
I don’t any problem with any of my others nodes.
Another emerging choice is zwavejs2mqtt. This is the exact same project as zwave2mqtt but using a new z-wave driver (zwave-js instead of OZW). If you like zwave2mqtt then zwavejs2mqtt is probably the future.
From what I read zwavejs supports multicast and S2. Nice.
I think this will be the right solution for me.
Well, I will use a Respary Pi dedicated JUST for this. What should be my way to install?
Stability and easy/low maintenance are my first priority
I see these options:
Do you run supervised or core?
Unable so far to have It work with same setup. Pi antenna satellite plus VM in proxmox with supervised
I just did this.
For me, the fist question to ask is : “which ZWave implementation do you want to use ?”.
If you want to use OpenZwave 1.4 you have many solutions.
If you want to use OpenZwave 1.6 you have less solutions.
Another way might be to use a dedicated ZWave gateway. I’ve been using the Fibaro HC Lite for 2 weeks and I’m very pleased so far (integrated in HA using the fibaro integration). No more bugs with my 17 Fibaro Roller Shutter 3 FRS-223 ! 
And my ZWave network has been up for 15 days and does not take 5min to restart after each HA restart.
