I am a relatively new HA user and when I first got it I probably did all sorts of weird things without realising! Now I am ready to transfer my smart home over to HA I just want to check this is as it should be:
I have the Matter integration installed and working, and I have a Z-wave dongle installed and working, and Z-wave listed as an active integration.
However Matter (Matter Server 6.4.1) and Z-wave (Z-Wave JS 0.6.2) are also listed under Settings/Add-ons. Are the add-on versions likely to be something I installed without knowing what I was doing or are they something each integration installs and needs?
There are differences between integrations and add-ons.
integrations are built-in components. In the case of those two above they setup and allow communication between HA and a zwavejs server or matter server.
add-ons are separate standalone apps that provide functionality outside of HA. In this case the zwavejs add-on provides the infrastructure to manage your zwave network. and it’s similar functionality for matter.
I say “standalone” very loosely in this case because add-ons are a particular thing only in HA Supervised and HA OS. Add-ons are HA versions of otherwise truly standalone apps created using Docker. Both the standalone version and the add-on version are running in the background under Docker but the add-on is managed from within HA itself while the standalone version is managed by the user outside of HA.
So in these cases you will need both the add-ons (for creating servers for managing the external infrastructure) and the integrations (for allowing HA to interact with the servers).
But to be clear I don’t use Matter so I’m just making an educated guess that it will work just like zwavejs, which I do use.