General Hardware Guidance or Compatibility List

I’m confident that this has been answered many times, but I’m not seeing anything.

I’m looking for a list of the better vendors/manufacturers in general. I’m just getting started, and I was about to buy the Kasa Smart Light Switches. I did a quick search on the Home Assistant site and found the “Active Alert” for these devices. Apparently Kaza has broken their compatibility with an update.

First, thank you and congratulations on a community that keeps things like this alert up to date.

I can obviously just look up any device I’m looking at for compatibility, but those kasa switches would have been compatible a year or so ago. So, the question is which vendors/manufacturers have a good track record for working well with Home Assistant?

Thanks.

There’s no one perfect brand, so I’d first decide on the communication type. I recommend ZigBee or Z-Wave. Then you can start looking at manufacturer websites and cross check models here in the forum.

Thank you. I wish this stuff would get standardized.

It looks like everyone is trying to control the whole house by building their own solutions. It’s the 1980s browser wars all over again. Makes it exceptionally hard to shop for hardware.

For Zigbee devices, I always check

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/

and

Thanks. I found a breakdown of mqtt, zigbee and a few other common protocols, so it’s not as bad as I thought. Some people are making efforts to standardize. It’s just a few companies trying to role out proprietary trash and undermine those efforts.

Question: Do we have something similar for OZW or Z-wave JS?

If there is, I’m interested too.

Answering my own question: see Z-Wave JS Config DB Browser (https://devices.zwave-js.io/)