FYI, heads-up to Zigbee users is that ESPHome will soom have initial support for Zigbee end-device building for Zigbee binary sensor devices on the ESP32 platform in the ESPHome microcontroller firmware framework has now been merged into mainline ESPHome (dev branch) and will be released as part of the upcoming ESPHome 2026.5.0 release (which will become available some time in May of 2026), in addition to improved Zigbee support for the nrf52 platform (which is further ahead since it was intially introduced in the ESPHome 2026.1.0 release in January of 2026):
Documentation about this native Zigbee component for ESPHome dev branch can be found here:
ESPHome’s zigbee component allows exposing most supported ESPHome components over a Zigbee network to Zigbee2MQTT or Home Assistant’s ZHA (Home Assistant’s built-in Zigbee gateway) (and maybe potentially to other Zigbee gateways such as OpenHAB, though commercial Zigbee hubs will most likely not support ESPHome components out-of-the-box).
ESPHome will suppors Zigbee on nRF52 and ESP32 platforms, bringing new connectivity option (as alternative to WiFi/Bluetooth/Thread):
- Binary sensors support - Expose GPIO states via Zigbee.
- Sensor support - Expose ESPHome sensors via Zigbee’s Analog Input cluster with automatic unit mapping. Currently only available only on nRF52 platforms.
- Switch support - Control ESPHome switches via Zigbee as binary output. Currently only available only on nRF52 platforms.
- Numbers support - Numbers are implemented as analog output clusters with description, engineering_units, and present_value attributes. Currently only available only on nRF52 platforms.
Implementation of the ESP Zigbee component works with ESP32-C6, ESP32-C5, and ESP32-H2 and is based on this external component:
Note! There is no OTA support for Zigbee today (and it is not even on the roadmap yet) so flashing updates have to be done manually!
Should also be noted that the initial implementation for ESP32 is dependent on Espressif’s ESP Zigbee SDK 1.0 , and a the major change in Espressif’s upstream ESP Zigbee SDK 2.0 with the new Zigbee stack it introduced will relativly soon require a change of the underlying library that this makes use of:
Quote from post originally posted by luar123 in [zigbee][core] Add support for Zigbee binary sensors on ESP32 H2 and C6 by luar123 · Pull Request #11553 · esphome/esphome · GitHub
I could bring forward more PRs for additional options, sensor, switch and number components quite fast. However, espressif released a version 2.0 zigbee sdk a few days ago. Currently I am implementing it in my external component to test it (this will probably take a few days). If it works well we should consider to update here, or in a separate PR, before the release because they change the zigbee partition type. Overall, changes are large, they dropped zboss in favor of their own stack and integration with esp-idf seems much better. Functional changes are small, so review effort should be low, but all functions/types/macros change names.
Hopefully the update to ESP Zigbee SDK 2.0 will bring what is needed to add native Zigbee OTA (Over-The-Air) support to ESPHome, as well better flexibility + faster iteration for new features (e.g., Zigbee 4.0 and Zigbee Direct) and bug fixes or customizations needed to meet evolving Zigbee requirements for custom solutions with ESPHome with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT.
PS: The back-story here is that tomaszduda23 and luar123 (who both been working on Zigbee support for ESPHome separately for nrf52 and ESP32 during a couple of years now) are now fully aligned and the initial Zigbee config with platform/component abstraction should be handled/formatted at a high-level for ESPHome config to be platform-independent, and such be able to use similar ESPHome configuration fpr Zigbee on nRF52 and ESP32 platforms with microcontrollers that have IEEE 802.15.4-based radios, though both platforms support different features and have different limitations as they depends on different Zigbee stacks under the hood.
For reference, here is also a long ESHome feature-requests discussion about Zigbee support on the ESP32-H2, ESP32-C6 and ESP32-C5: