I tried out switching from OZW to ZWJS and then ZJS2MQTT over the weekend. Things were mostly straight forward initially, but I was never able to get any of my battery powered door sensors, motion sensors, or smoke alarm to show up despite multiple attempts to wake up the devices and waiting ~24hrs. My battery powered Yale lock worked fine however. Everything without a battery showed up without issue. Response times were maybe a bit better with Z-Wave JS, but OZW performs fine for me so it was hard to say for sure. I took some videos and I’ll maybe do a frame-by-frame comparison later.
After wrestling with Docker for a bit, I was able to gracefully switch between the core Z-Wave JS and Z-Wave JS to MQTT add-ons without refreshing all devices by copying the cache files using HassOS root SSH access as documented in this post. In short, you can copy three Z-Wave JS cache files between the two versions of Z-Wave JS and switch between them without too much hassle (but don’t docker cp or docker exec or you might have problems).
For now I’d recommend using the Z-Wave JS to MQTT add-on if you’re just trying out Z-Wave JS. The core Z-Wave JS add-on doesn’t have much in the way of visualization, logging or configuration options, and it’s really helpful to be able to change the Z-Wave JS log level, or look at the node list in the Z-Wave JS control panel to be able to understand what is happening under the hood for debugging.
Ultimately, I switched back to OZW. Everything just works for me in OZW. I’ll keep the Z-Wave JS add-ons installed but not started so I can easily try them out as updates are released.
Update: Not 100% sure it was related to trying out Z-Wave JS but my Yale lock stopped working after moving back to OZW. I pulled out the batteries on it and refreshed the node in the OZW admin and restarted the OZW add-on a few times and it came back 