Integration Battle: stock ConBee II vs. deCONz

[licht77]

Hi!
After running my on premise dockerized home assistant since ~2 years with a Conbee 2 USB Stick and having no issues with the stock zigbee integration (ConBee II) I now stumbled across the integration of Ikeas automatic shades named fyrtur.
Those shades come with a zigbee button and a repeater e1746. Paring those is a little bit weird (needs to be physical close) and ikeas docs are rather suboptimal - but after all it works. The problems start to arise when trying to pair those devices with my current home assistant / zigbee integration,

Google shows up with some howtos - but they all refer to the phoscon app. I played around and found a pretty easy way to integrate that using the docker image “marthoc/deconz”.

Now the big question: is it worth to kick the stock integration out and migrate (read: repair and configure 30ish devices, change automatations etc) to phoscon app and deconZ integration?

Are there any more features or configuration options within phoscon?

Thanks for any feedback!

[phil2000 (phil)]

Just stumbled upon this post back from 22. So I am currently considering moving away from Deconz to ZHA Zigbee Home Automation cause I see more devices are being supported in ZHA. anyone experience in this migration or any recommendations for ZHA over Deconz?

[dbs (David)]

I use both (with two different ZigBee radios) and can’t say I see a difference except in two ways: Deconz has an absolutely fantastic visualization tool and ZHA has better “turn on to a set color” support vs. “turn on” then “set color”.
-David

[phil2000 (phil)]

@dbs thanks for the quick feedback! Ok in that case I wills tay with Deconz cause I guess it is a lot of pain to switch.

[Hedda]

@phil2000

I guess it is a lot of pain to switch.

FYI, while there is not seamless migration methord between different Zigbee gateway solutions there is a way to partially migrate your Zigbee network from deCONZ to the ZHA integration so that you at least do not have to re-pair all your devices, see these instructions (which works for all types of Zigbee Coordinator USB radios and not just SkyConnect) → https://skyconnect.home-assistant.io/migrate-conbee/

But since the ConBee works best with deCONZ but not quite as good in other Zigbee gateway solutions my suggestion would be to buy a new CC2652P based Zigbee Coordinator USB adapter like ITead’s “Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus” (model “ZBDongle-P”) and try that with both Home Assiistant’s built-in ZHA integration and Zigbee2MQTT seperarly to see which interface you like the most.

Also note that most if not all comparison threads of all the popular Zigbee gateway implementations that use Zigbee Coordinator USB adapters like ConBee quickly get very old and outdated as the development progresses of at least ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT and deCONZ/Phoscon moves relatively rapidly, so while not quite what asked for but you might glean some insight from these other existing threads, but the gist is that you should not take anything written more than 6-months ago as being the truth today, and even more have changed in the last years.

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[phil2000 (phil)]

Thanks a lot @Hedda - I think that is a good idea to get another zigbee device and test the solution.