I’ve been using openHAB with Zigbee devices for a long time. I’m now plotting my upgrade to openHAB 5, and I’m wondering what the best approach is for integrating Zigbee devices in 2025.
A short history of my setup: I initially started off with a MiHome hub (=Aquara hub? Not sure). This worked but did not support all non Xiaomi devices and relied on the Xiaomi app for configuration which was not a great experience.
I then tried to use the Zigbee binding, but ran into a lot of issues. In researching those, I learned that Zigbee2MQTT was probably the better option. As a side-note, I would like to suggest adding a note in the Zigbee binding documentation suggesting that Zigbee2MQTT might be the better option. I suspect most people go through the exercise of first trying the Zigbee binding and finding out it is not working very well to the learn about Zigbee2MQTT.
So, now I’m using Zigbee2MQTT. This is working well and setup of a new device is not all that hard. The only downside is that it does require double manual configuration.
In the meantime Matter has emerged as a new standard. Now, I don’t know if I understood this correctly, but some Matter hubs seem to support connecting to Zigbee devices as well. If this is correct, would it make sense to just use a Matter hub to connect to both Matter and Zigbee devices and ditch the Zigbee2MQTT setup? Would this work well or would this result in compatibility issues similar to using the Zigbee binding directly?
The openHAB Zigbee bindings works very well for devices that actually follow the Zigbee standard. The problem is so many vendors implement Zigbee plus proprietary extensions meaning the binding is required to implement special handling for those devices, on a device-by-device basis. Zigbee2mqtt has more volunteers contributing to it so they are able to implement more of that special handling.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say the OH binding doesn’t work well though. It works very well for standard Zigbee devices. Note that Xaiomi Aquara is among those that add proprietary extensions to the standard.
The docs already mention this.
This list is far from exhaustive, and the absence of a device in this list does not mean it will not work - if the device is a standard ZigBee device similar to ones on this list, then it should work.
But that description could be made a little stronger perhaps. But I’m not sure I like the idea of of essentially deprecating one of our own current and maintained add-ons by essentially saying “don’t use this, use this third party app instead.”
As for matter, I guess it depends on how the combo device works. I expect a Matter hub that also does Zigbee but which doesn’t expose the Zigbee coordinator as a serial device and instead does all the Zigbee stuff itself will have many of the same limitations as the Zigbee binding. It will work great for standard Zigbee devices but not so well for the out of standard ones.
