My Zigbee devices are a bit of a mess. I’m thinking of moving it all to Conbee. Automations will be in Home Assistant. What I’m worried about is the “HUB Software”. deConz seems to have issues with groups, ZHA is not really mature. Perhaps ZigBee2MQTT? Or any other suggestions. Snappy and reliable are the goals.
Current Gateways: Hue, Conbee II, IKEA Units: about 40. Hue, Elko, EcoDim, Innr, Ikea, Aqara, Sunricher Software: Hue, Tradfri, Deconz
As @maxym wrote there is already a topic on this with lots of information and opinions.
Apart from that, what do you mean with deCONZ having issues with groups. I use many (deCONZ) groups without problems.
Same… groups working fine with deConz and i find that the conbee stick distance is loads better than z2m, not tried zha as i find deconz to just work with no issues.
Keep in mind, that only deconz supports additional mobile apps like the original hue app und hue essentials. So if you need this, I would recommend deconz.
Ah… what i mean is the conbee 2 usb stick with deconz performance is better than the zigbee2mqqt usb stick and z2m software, when i used the z2m stick it kept on getting loads of drop outs, due to the distance of my devices were to far away and kept dropping off the system, and i had a few light bulbs in each room to act like routers for the z2m coordinator but that still gave me issues.
once i changed over to the conbee 2 usb things are great, no drop outs etc it may be different to date with the z2m usb stick, but i had a bad time with z2m usb, i bought 3 of them and one with an aerial to try and rectify the issue to no avail.
You know you can use the conbee stick with deconz, zigbee2MQTT and ZHA ? I think the distance is determined by the stick used, not by the software used to talk to the stick.
If you’re running deconz, you can use the hue app or hue essentials to configure and control your devices. This is becouse deconz offers a compatible api.
This is an interesting discussion - MDSDM, what did you end up doing?
I’m debating picking up a ConBee 2 and using deCONZ directly plugged in to Home Assistant (I have the OS version directly installed on the NUC, mostly for simplicity).
Right now, I have a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs, dimmer switches, and motion sensors. I’d like to switch mainly because I want to integrate other Zigbee items. My main hesitation is the redundancy I currently have through Philips Hue. The Hue bridge is super reliable, and if Home Assistant ever goes down, I can still control my Hue lights via 1) Hue app, 2) Google Homes, or if need be 3) physical light switches. I didn’t know deconz would connect to the Hue app, so that’s great and would provide some redundancy. However, my concern is (for whatever reason) Home Assistant stops functioning properly. am I just SOL for controlling my lights in that case? Or is there a case where the Conbee stick would continue to function without HA fully working properly?
Perhaps I just need more confidence in my HA setup to not die. So far so good with the NUC I got recently, but bad memories of RPi days has me wary.