I installed a second HA to bring to my cabin and tried Zigbee2mqtt instead of ZHA, Im going to leave ZHA for Z2M period!
if you use ZHA you will have alot fever options, I tested the Aquara FP300 in both and its like day and night, you get the ability to change alot more stuff and alot more entities, its like maybee 10% of the features when using ZHA so drop it for the cooler kids Z2M.
Just wanted to put this out there since I didnt find any abvious reson to switch to Z2M from ZHA, did alot of googling, this is game changer!
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And Iāve ZHA for years and Iāve almost had zero issues using it. In my use case I see no reason at all to switch to Z2M. But Iāve never used an FP300 so I canāt tell you if the differences would be useful to me.
ZHA is built-in to HA so itās more likely to continue to be well supported. Z2M is a third party app which could lose support at any time and it uses an intermediary integration (MQTT) so there are more points of failure.
So I donāt think one is any ācoolerā than the other.
I guess what Iām saying is itās all in the use case.
Zigbee requires ātendingā regardless of the ācontrollingā layer of software that you are using : ZHA, Hue, Aqara, Zigbee2MQTT, Smarthings ā¦
That said from my experience with far too many of them, Zigbee2MQTT for āreal worldā home automation setup. 2nd place is Hue, if you have lots of money and can live in a very controlled ābubbleā.
joke but true, if you have one 100% Zigbee standard compliant light bulb, go with ZHA. I am sad to say this statement/joke, however standards are good to a point, then āsignificant otherā reality sets inā¦ @finity I understand your point and have tried hard in past to make ZHA the āsolutionā, however you go to the Zigbee2MQTT converter issues log to see the massive work being done on supporting devices with Zigbee2MQTT :
Just look at the github change log for Zigbee2MQTT device support and it is āmike dropā, no question, unless you have 1 
(ZHA) or are a rich 
person (Hue) .
Good hunting!
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In six years, Iāve never had a problem with ZHA.
If you already run MQTT, then of course Z2M is for you. But to me itās far simpler to only buy things which work with ZHA than to add Z2M and MQTT to the stack. Iām good with two fewer things to learn, install, maintain and check for breaking changes every month.
Have you installed the custom quirk that is available for ZHA?
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Iām in neither category.
I have around 50+ zigbee devices from many different manufacturers and only 3 light bulbs and not one Hue device in the bunch.
Everything works really good and I donāt miss Z2M (Iāve tried it, didnāt see the benefit so went back to ZHA).
I honestly donāt remember any time at all that Iāve needed a zigbee device and couldnāt use it because ZHA didnāt support it. not once. Maybe Iāve just been lucky or maybe my needs are just that simple.
but I donāt feel limited by ZHA at all.
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Z2M has better device support generally, the number of devices that need customized files to handle device specific clusters is quite high, it seems Z2M is faster with this than ZHA generally. Iāve been using ZHA for a few years now, pretty happy with it but there were devices where it took a while for the device handler (quirk) to come out that gave it full functionality.
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It has been a while since I tested, and I have not experimented with the the new Zigbee2MQTT more direct device messages. That said, when I did test, I found ZHA and Hue integration to handle high speed changes (for example a rotatory dial movement) much better than Zigbee2MQTT. This was the only use case where I found Zigbee2MQTT lacking due to itās extra layer in itās interface to HA via MQTT. The tight API interfaces that ZHA and Hue seem to use with HA appeared to give this performance benny.
Iām not having any issues with ZHA and I have 41 lights (all but two are Philips Hue) and number of motion sensors, contact sensors, light switches and temperature/humidity sensors from varying manufacturers.
Yes, the arrival of built-in support for new devices is slower, but, as an example, a custom quirk for the Aqara FP300 Prescence Sensor was written very quickly and is continuing to be refined, making the device fully usable.
ZHA can manage firmware updates using the Z2M repository and now offers its own repository.
Another good point. That extra layer (MQTT) could in theory add some latency. Itās probably not a huge deal for most devices, but it can feel very unnatural to flip a switch and have to wait even an extra fraction of a second. This is one of the things people hated about CFL bulbs.
To be clear, I donāt think this would be a reason to avoid Z2M altogether, just another factor to consider.
In theory, probably 5-10ms? You would never notice that. MQTT is widely used outside the smart home sphere, in production lines for example. Itās a fast, reliable protocol.