Home Assistant founders believe there is currently around 50,000 installations of ZHA integration, what do you Zigbee users in the community think about those statistics?

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Home Assistant founders estimate in the new blog post about analytics that less than 20% of all users have chosen to electively “opt in” for analytics in Home Assistant to enable Home Assistant founders to collect statistics and those users who have “opted in” now have 100,000 installations of Home Assistant.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/11/12/100k-analytics/

“Our estimate is that there are 4-5x more installations than people that opt-in to analytics.”

If that is the case and around 13% of the “opted in” userbase today have the ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) integration installed and those are a fifth of all total Home Assistant installation then there should only be an estimate of about 50,000 Home Assistant installations, which does not sound like a lot to me when considering the popularity of Zigbee worldwide.

https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations

Just based on the number of users on the community forum my guesstimate would be that much fewer users have actually opt-in for analytics and there and there are actually way more ZHA installations than 50,000 today. My guess would be that probably no more than 1 in 10 users have elected to opt-in for analytics or even a lower percentage of users than that.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha

What do you guys think? …are all other Zigbee users using other alternative Zigbee implementations?

Btw, would be cool if analytics could get statistics about radio type users of ZHA integration are using.

ZHA integration today offer compatibility with ezsp, deconz, znp, zigate, or xbee as different radio type.

Data could then maybe be used as additional statistics to try to convince manufacturers to contribute.

Radio Type Zigbee Radio Hardware
ezsp Silicon Labs EmberZNet protocol (e.g., Elelabs, HUSBZB-1, Telegesis)
deconz dresden elektronik deCONZ protocol (e.g., ConBee I/II, RaspBee I/II)
znp Texas Instruments (e.g., CC253x, CC26x2, CC13x2)
zigate ZiGate Serial protocol (e.g., ZiGate USB-TTL, PiZiGate, ZiGate WiFi)
xbee Digi XBee ZB Coordinator Firmware protocol (e.g., Digi XBee Series 2, 2C, 3)

ZHA could use more maintainers of all radio libraries + lack a zigpy radio library for Nordic Semi nRF:

https://github.com/zigpy/

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/issues/394

PS: Yes I have now (since today) also “opted in” for Home Assistant Analytics to add my statistics too.

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I am using ZHA and never opted in for anything .

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I’ve enabled analytics because it might be useful for the devs. I’ve never used ZHA because zigbee2mqtt was there and has always worked incredibly well.

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Exactly. I consider Z2M superior to ZHA for several reasons. But I feel that for some reasons devs prefer to spend resources on their own implementation.

Anyway curious why OP asks for that. however:

What do you guys think? …are all other Zigbee users using other alternative Zigbee implementations?

Assume part of the rest doesn’t use zigbee at all

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I suspect the founders are the best source of information on this. I’d go with their numbers.

I see lots of folks here talking up Z2M. Personally I’ve found ZHA works flawlessly for me. I see no reason to learn/install/maintain anything else. But there must be something too it, because I get the distinct impression I’m in the minority here. That’s fine, as long as ZHA remains well supported.

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You are not alone Tom!

I have stuck with ZHA as it is the natively supported integration within the core which does everthing I need.

Z2M does sometimes appear to support additional diagnostic entities but then I often leave those disabled as I regard much of that to be database clutter I don’t particularly need. It is also one less thing to update and then there’s the additional complexity as it relys on another add-on (MQTT). Admitedly I do already have MQTT for other reasons but I like to keep things simple if I can.

Horses for courses at the end of the day.

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I started with zigbee2mqtt back in the days when the CC253x was not yet supported by ZHA, and I never saw any reason to switch. Zigbee2mqtt fits my use-case perfectly.
And of cause with three Zigbee stacks for HA (ZHA, zigbee2mqtt, Deconz), there has to be fragmentation.
(And more if you count Hue, Ikea, Tuya, Sonoff integrations)

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im also a z2m user and had always fear to try a switch - never change a running system - dont want to include and rename all my xx devices and had tried to switch from zwave legacy to the new zwave platform and it was pain in the … ended up resetting everything to an old backup to get the things back on track. so leassons learned

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FYI, ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT developers have not so long ago begun working on “Open ZigBee Coordinator Backup Format” as an open standard for Zigbee backup and restore. So in the future, the migration path between Zigbee implementations that support that Zigbee backup standard could ideally be as simple and creating a Zigbee backup image in one of the applications and then restoring that Zigbee backup image in another application.

And since Jeedom and IoBroker and based on the same Zigbee frameworks as ZHA (zigpy) and Zigbee2MQTT (zigbee-herdsman) they could be the next Zigbee implementations to support migration paths using the same open Zigbee backup format.

It is not ready for cross-application migration yet but still recommend keep an eye on it (or contribute):

https://github.com/zigpy/open-coordinator-backup

I believe that their initial goal is however to first support migration paths between different Zigbee stacks (and different manufacturers/brands and models/generations of Zigbee radio chips) within the same Zigbee implementation.

I guess it is maybe important to add this note; while the ZHA integration component is the only “native” Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant core, there are of course also many other integrations for Home Assistant that can indirectly support Zigbee devices.

Other implementations that support Zigbee devices are however abstracted behind some kind of third-party hub/bridge/gateway hardware appliance or software application, such as deCONZ/Phoscon by dresden elektronik, Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota (Zigbee2Tasmota), Philips Hue Bridge, IKEA TRÅDFRI Gateway, Samsung SmartThings, ITead Sonoff ZBBridge (eWeLink), Xiaomi Gateway (or Aqara), and Tuya Smart Gateway.

That is, all of those third-party hubs/bridges/gateways translate and convert Zigbee into other protocols or APIs, (may it be proprietary protocol/API or an open standard like example MQTT, alternatively different cloud services), so as far as their Home Assistant integrations go it is not really Zigbee support that has been implemented.

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We know from analytics statistics that 12.9% have ZHA today and I wrote “are all other Zigbee users using other alternative Zigbee implementations?” so the question specifically only covers Zigbee users.

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Thanks for your clarifications, i will definitely have an eye on it and thanks for your really elaborated post!

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Same :slight_smile:

I would have liked to try Z2M to assess, but basically Z2M only supports TI coordinators, and I have a Silicon Labs (with EZSP < 8) :wink:

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Hmm, again wonder why they estimate is that there are only ~5 times more installations who did not “opt in” when sounds like are more installations of Home Assistant companion apps on mobile devices?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.homeassistant.companion.android

https://apps.apple.com/se/app/home-assistant/id1099568401

Wondering if it was from those that they extrapolated that are only ~ 500,000 of total installations today?

Understanding and remembering that there are also alternative app stores + options to install manually.

I too primarily got into ZHA because its potential to support Zigbee coordinators from many different manufacturers and brands as I really like the concept of hardware-agnostic systems and device-agnostic components.

Zigbee2MQTT also got initial support for Silabs EZSP, deCONZ (ConBee/RaspBee), and Zigate as well but they are all still very experimental or even unmaintained so still only stable with Texas Instruments.

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/

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It was not so “thought off” for me at the time :wink:
“Oh, that zigbee thing looks nice. Ok, what does ZHA support that is available on Amazon. Done.” :joy:

Not sure if Z2M was already so popular 2 yrs ago, but for sure I didn’t consider it…

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Ah, haha! For me, it was more my principles against vendor lock-in and preferring the idea of a modular architectural design that ZHA achieves indirectly by using zigpy which has separate radio libraries.

I do wish however that the ZHA integration itself was made more modular using a client-server model similar to the new Z-Wave JS integration so could have the option to run the ZHA component as an stand-alone application server on a dedicated computer and then perhaps even be able control that from other front-ends.

That way my Zigbee network wold continue to be up and running even when the Home Assistant core appplication is down. That is where Zigbee2MQTT still has a major advantage over ZHA in my opinion.

2-years ago Zigbee2MQTT was way more popular than ZHA, and today they both have much more users than either of them did back then, though ZHA has probably taken on more new users than Z2M.

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Support for the cc2531 in ZHA has been added in 0.106. I was using the CC2530 already a long time then with Zigbee2MQTT.

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Yes, ZHA initially only supported EZSP (Silicon Labs) via bellows, then parts of it were split to into zigpy to add support for additional radio libraries. After that it first got the zigpy-cc radio library for Z-Stack 1.2 (for CC253x) and then later it got the zigpy-znp which initially only came with Z-Stack 3.x support (for CC26x2/CC13x2). Then for a while, both zigpy-cc and zigpy-znp supported all Z-Stack versions, but more lately zigpy-cc was made obsolete and recently it was removed completely.

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Interesting. Of course it could be that people who use the app generally have it on multiple devices. Each family members’ phone, and maybe a kiosk device in the home.

I never found the need for the app. I don’t do presence detection and the web site works fine for me. It’s possible there are others like me, which would skew the numbers the other way. But no matter which estimates you use, there are a LOT of HA users!

My experience exactly. I tried it. It works, and it’s native to HA. It’s really the only integration I’ve used which required no setup, no learning curve, no configuration, no firmware updates, no router changes. I’ve seen no breaking changes with it in years. It’s been totally plug-and-play. What’s not to like?

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I use zigbee2mqtt because I have a Hampton Bay Fan that works better with it - the fan has 4 speeds and a breeze mode which are controllable in zigbee2mqtt, but in ZHA the slider only controls 3 of the speeds. I also found the dashboard of zigbee2mqtt allows for more customization of the settings. If it wasn’t for the fan though I probably would have went with ZHA because it was easier to setup being included right in Home Assistant.

I don’t use the addon zigbee2mqtt though and run it through docker. The devices then just pull in through the MQTT integration. I’m probably in the minority of users that run it this way, but I would think the analytics would have trouble capturing me as a zigbee user with this setup.

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It is the same for us, we don’t use the HA mobile app (and I use other methods for presence detection).

We instead all use the “Google Home” app since it’s easier for me to support as other friends and family members who don’t use Home Assistant have other home automation stuff working with Google Home.

Totally agree that ZHA’s “it just works” approach is a great entry point for any Home Assistant beginner.

…though I think more “it just works” and “plug and play” features could make entry to it even easier. Ex:

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