Hi,
I am very new To Home Assistant and I am just starting to work out what devices I want, What I am finding though is that the devices I am getting, if I connect them direct to HA with Zigbee, Wave or matter, they do not get the full function you would get with connecting them through an integration.
Are there any devices out there that I can purchase that has full functionality with HA without having to use an integration like Tuya
These for starters, Zigbee2MQTT I have 30 some Zigbee devices and no integrations except ZHA
This may not be factually correct.
What you are sensing, how you get it into your HomeAssistant server, and how you interpret the data are three different aspects. The power of HomeAssistant is it doesn’t matter, each aspect can be interchanged, using different sensors from different vendors, different transmission protocols, or different apps and integrations to perform home automation.
Mix and match and futz away!
Reading the vendor documentation is probably going to be the best starting point for you. Not just the devices, but also HomeAssistant documentation too.
We don’t know your needs or what you have already considered. Home automation is a fast moving field that even AI and LLM bots have trouble keeping up with. YouBoob videos age into irrelevance. Reddit and FaceBoob the same. All are used to feed the ever present AI bots which then regurgitate it back to you - treat it with caution.
HomeAssistant has frequent updates, often weekly and monthly. Often these break things. Like purchasing a new car, I recommend you look in these forums at the aftermath of each update and see what the biggest number of problem issues are and avoid that.
Best understand and make informed decision’s.
Just as a point of clarity, integrations are what connect devices and services to HA… so everything you described as “direct to HA” is using an integration.
What you have described is something particularly common with “Tuya” Zigbee devices. These devices don’t always fully follow the Zigbee protocol standard and require custom quirks to work properly in non-Tuya integrations. These tend to get developed for Zigbee2MQTT first and then for ZHA. Most of the time the quirks will bring through everything the device has to offer, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they get updated and everything works, but it’s not something you can depend on unless you have the time and skills to develop them yourself.
In regard to Zigbee devices, I’ve had good luck with Ikea, ThirdReality, and Sonoff.
Your observations are the most true for Matter devices, because the protocol has yet to mature. Some things are not part of the standard yet, some new things in the standard are not implemented by the manufacturer yet. Often those devices have only basic support. For Z-wave I have never found lacking functionality.
As indicated for Zigbee, Zigbee2mqtt often has broader functionality than ZHA (if the support is there).
Many Zigbee manufacturers like Aquara and Tuya do not follow standards to the letter. ZHA relies on the standard. If a device is standard, it works without any effort. Everything else requires a quirk to make it work, which is sort of a workaround. Quirks for custom additional features do not tend to get made if the basic support is standard and present.
In Zigbee2MQTT all support is added manually. Either the support isn’t there, or it is done right. In Zigbee2MQTT there is a lot of focus on adding support for devices and making that easy. So being feature complete is more likely to happen there.