Do you have to install the Z-Wave JS to MQTT when you first configure your Z-wave or can you add this addon after you already have several z-wave devices in only the Z-Wave JS?
Zwavejs2mqtt is (one of) the way(s) that you can control and interact with your zwave controller & devices.
the zwave integration is the way that HA interacts with your zwavejs software
Other ways of doing that are using the zwavejs add-on (which is separate and distinct from the integration), the openzwave 1.4 integration in HA or the openzwave 1.6 system itself (which needs it’s own HA integration for HA to interact with it).
So the (pedantic) answer to your question is that if you use the zwavejs add-on you will never use zwavejs2mqtt add-on. And if you use zwavejs2mqtt you will never use the zwavejs add-on. You can only ever have one system interacting with your zwave controller at one time.
So, to set up your system, if you are already using the zwavejs add-on to control your zwave network, then that is technically all you need to control your network.
If you want HA to be able to interact with your zwave network (and of course we all do 
) then you need to add the zwavejs integration to HA and point it to your zwave controller software which in this case is the zwavejs add-on.
I think… it’s hard to tell from your post where you are actually at with your zwave setup.
This post does a good job showing an overview of the different ways zwave works in Home Assistant
Thank you for your answer. I have HA working with the z-wave devices though the zwavejs integration and everything works well. I think I saw that adding the Zwavejs2mqtt addon gave you more options.
It does. At least for now. They are supposed to reach parity between the capabilities of the zwavejs integration and the zwavejs2mqtt control panel eventually. No idea how long that will take tho.
the issue is that as I stated above you can’t run the zwavejs add-on (which I’m assuming you are using) and the zwavejs2mqtt add-on (container, etc) at the same time. you can only use one or the other.
also, based on your post above, I’m still not sure you realize that there is a difference between the zwavejs integration and the zwavejs add-on.
If you don’t need the capabilities of zwavejs2mqtt then I probably wouldn’t go thru the trouble of switching to it.
Sometimes filling in between the lines is a challenge, especially with HA and it’s sometimes obfuscating naming conventions. I’ll add this… regardless which way you go the zwavejs “integration” is required and used by both the zwavejs and the zwavejs2mqtt plugins (which only one of those plugins can be used at a time). In a nutshell, its a choice between the 2 plugins pretty much.
Most folks going for the 2mqtt plugin due to some extra features it has (for now). What are those added features you may ask?
The only difference I’m aware of (it’s a huge difference), is the ability to easily send zwave commands to your nodes from a webui.
AFAIK currently the zwavejs plugin cannot do this, but zwavejs2mqtt can. Would you ever need this? It depends on your devices really. There are some you could setup that don’t ever require more than the ability to include/exclude from your controller. OTOH, there are some devices that require you to send a zwave command to get them working exactly the way you want them to work.
For example in my case, I had to do make changes to all of my Ecolink brand door/window sensors. These came from the factory with the so called “binary report” disabled. This meant HA only got a “sensor” entity from it, which read “0” when closed, and “255” when opened. This would have required more work to automate with compared to a “binary_sensor” with just open/closed states. So I used HA (original zw integration… this way years ago) to send a zwave command to turn on the binary report on those devices, before I could really start automating around them. If I got new ecolinks today, I’d have to do the same thing using zwavejs2mqtt.
Another example are in-wall dimmers/switches. Many of these devices have the ability to enable/disable double tap, dimming steps, dimming rates, and other features, but these adjustments all require sending zwave commands.
So all that said… if you just scan over some screenshots of the zwavejs2mqtt webui, you’ll see all those commands are beautifully laid out in a newb friendly gui. I don’t understand the underlying currents that drive a need for the “official zwavejs addon”, since zwavejs2mqtt isn’t even using mqtt… but I digress. If zwavejs addon gets all the same features, I’ll probably switch to that since it’s technically “official”.
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