FYI, ESPHome 2026.1.0 has now been released with a Zigbee End Device component based on nRF SDK supporting nRF52 platform:
“The zigbee component allows exposing supported ESPHome components over a Zigbee network to Home Assistant via Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA. Due to the limitations of the Zigbee protocol, only basic properties are exposed. Additional properties must be configured manually in Home Assistant. Each ESPHome entity consumes one Zigbee endpoint. Because of a limitation in Zigbee2MQTT, at least two endpoints are required. The maximum number of supported endpoints is eight.”
So far in ESPHome 2026.1 they added initial support however it already features supports for sensor, binary sensor, and switch functions:
Quote below from the release notes:
Zigbee Support for nRF52
ESPHome now supports Zigbee on nRF52 platforms, bringing a new connectivity option alongside WiFi, Bluetooth, and Thread:
- Binary sensor support - Expose GPIO states via Zigbee (#11535)
- Sensor support - Expose ESPHome sensors via Zigbee’s Analog Input cluster with automatic unit mapping ([#12187](https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pull/12187))
- Switch support - Control ESPHome switches via Zigbee as binary output (#13083)
wipe_on_boot: once - Wipe network settings only on first boot, preserving connections after OTA updates - Framework version support - Configure nRF-SDK version with experimental support for SDK 2.9.2 and 3.2.0 (#12489)
Future
Zigbee support in ESPHome is currently available only on nRF52 platforms but there is an open PR to also add ESP32 support as well:
Also be ware that both tomaszduda23 and luar123 also still have their previous work and and side-development woth pulls requests open as drafts that offer much more extensive and comprehensive Zigbee device types (which also have much more information and better overview of the project scopes), but I guess that if the two pull requests linked above are accepted and merged into ESPHome mainline then each of their comprehensive work (linked below) will be partially rewritten to align with the new agreed upon standard and formatting. See these for more background information: