I’m looking for a recommendation for a stand-alone Zigbee hub that’s integratable with Home Assistant and Google/Alexa and is not vendor-locked (ie that would be able to work with devices from any manufacturer). And preferably works out of the box (as I’ve looked at this flashing thing and don’t have the necessary electronical smarts).
I don’t want to go down the route of using HA with a Conbee stick (or whatever) as, as far as I can fathom, getting the devices back out to Google is either a nightmare or expensive.
Or should I just be patient and hope that this Matter thing will solve all of the artificial vendor-locking incompatibility issues?
A supported coordinator stick that works with ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT on HA are probably your least ‘vendor locked’ solution available Although, I dont understand how ‘getting them out to Google would be a nightmare’
Matter is at least a year off from practical release at this point and while it will help. Don’t expect the holy grail of cross compatibility
Thanks for that, but isn’t that just another version of a controller for Home Assistant like the Conbee thing? I can’t see any mention on their site about their own Google/Amazon integration.
I have and while I could do the steps. (they’re tedious, not difficult) I chose to pay for Nabu Casa because I have better things to do with my life than maintaining a perimeter firewall infrastructure. If you choose to go the DIY route… Thats all you. There’s plenty of different ways to skin that cat.
The point was, while not without warts, zigbee on HA is probably your most vendor agnostic solution compared to others on just about any platform.
I dont understand how zigbee have anything to do with Google/Amazon Integrations? Both should be setup separately and will be under different rules. And if you want to manually add it the difficult level might vary depend on your skill set. In my case rather than making my self a headache… I chip in something back for the community, by using nabucasa
Pick any Zigbee coordinator based on the CC2652P chipset, flash with the koenkk-fimrware to it and use in in HA with either ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT. (No direct relation to Google/Alexa with Zigbee)
Recommended vendors: TubeSZ or Zigstar
A huge thanks to everyone who has responded so far, I really do appreciate your taking the time to proffer advice, but you have all completely missed the point of my query:
– I’m really not interested at all in using HA as the Zigbee co-ordinator. I’m looking for a stand-alone Zigbee hub that’s not locked to any one manufacturers’ own devices, but which does have direct integration with Google & Alexa plus Home Assistant.
I’m not aware of any such thing. The closest is deCONZ, but it has relatively limited device support (compared to ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT) and I don’t believe it has any direct Google/Alexa support - instead relying on software like Home Assistant or OpenHAB to provide that.
What I’m seeing in the real world, however, is that devices which can integrate with Google and Alexa do so via a back-end “cloud” solution. In other words, not local. The only real decision is which organization do you trust to be stable, reliable and a good steward of your personal data. That question borders on religion, so I won’t go there. The point is, you sort of need to pick one.
Hubitat is probably the closest thing to a local, standalone, vendor agnostic, Zigbee/Z-Wave hub/controller, that offers free integration with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. There is community-based integration that exists that can bring Hubitat devices into Home Assistant.
No we didn’t miss the point. There are little to none that fit that description. The ones I know of include:
SmartThings:
Mostly cloud at the moment. Theyre currently overhauling thier back end and with it comes more local processing. Devices require DTHs (old format) or Drivers (new format) to work. Agnostic but Builtin drivers are limited. Driver support is also limited.
Hubitat
Agnostic, Local, uses similar groovy infrastructure as SmartThings. In fact most pros and cons apply except better local processing but older tech.
I got the point, but agree many were talking past it.
Waiting for Matter is folly IMO. Matter is still months or more away from launch, and initial products will likely be overpriced. I’m still skeptical how open it will really be in practice.
Unfortunately, you still have to pick a master for your zigbee network.
In a lot of ways, using Home Assistant as the hub makes sense. Most HA devices can be exposed without nabu casa cloud to Homekit (Homekit integration) and Alexa(emulated_hue integration) with relative ease. Google is the most “technical”, but doable. I think there is a recipe for Smarthings as well.
I would expect there to eventually be an integration/add-on to expose HA devices via Matter when Matter becomes a real thing.
Going the other direction, there are integrations to bring third party hubs into Home Assistatnt - Aqara, Tuya, Smartthings, Hubitat, etc - but you’re often then dealing with other cloud dependencies and device restrictions.
Whichever path you choose, pick it and get started.
Personally, after a dalliance with SmartThings, I started in HA with the Nortek stick and ZHA. I since have moved to zigbee2mqtt with the Sonoff Dongle Plus. I had frequent issues with the Nortek stick, but the Sonoff has been 100% stable so far. I like Z2M better than ZHA, a lot of it is subjective preference, but objectively, Z2M has much broader and deeper device support (for now). If you go down the HA as hub path, check out both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT.