Since more companies can make Zigbee chips they are slightly cheaper than Z Wave chips due to the added competition. The major difference being, historically, only they could make Z Wave chips whereas Zigbee chips can be made by anyone. Coincidentally enough, Silicon Labs is one of these companies. If Z Wave were to “win” as the smart home protocol standard, Silicon Labs would stand to make a ton of money.Ĭontrast this with Zigbee, which has always been an open standard.Īs an open standard, many different companies have had the opportunity to build Zigbee chips. And no competition typically means higher prices for consumers (or, at a minimum, total price control). When only one company can make something that means no competition. However, the closed nature of this protocol was often criticized by consumers and companies alike because it meant that only Silicon Labs could create and sell Z-Wave chips that go into “Z Wave” smart products. They were always frontwards and backwards compatible and well tested. This usually meant that Z Wave products worked more reliably with other Z Wave products. Z Wave certification was made mandatory for all companies that wanted to make Z Wave products. Since its inception, Z Wave was a proprietary standard, which means the protocol was owned by a single company (Silicon Labs, as of early 2018).Įarly on this worked in the favor of Z Wave – since a single entity owned the protocol it could strictly enforce compliance to its rules, and it did. Notice Z Wave isn’t included in this collab. This way developers can focus on making their products compatible with a single standard, instead of making the same product compatible with multiple protocols. The idea behind the collaboration is to create a new connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products (as of mid-2021, they are referring to this standard as “ Matter“). If you don’t feel like reading their whole post, here’s the gist: I you haven’t already heard about this collaboration, Apple released a nice explanation here. The common smart home standard collaboration between Apple, Google, Amazon and Zigbee, announced in December of 2019. We’ll start by addressing the elephant in the room. Now that you have a basic understanding of what these technologies are and why they exist at all, let’s dig deeper into the pros and cons of each. Not a great experience when you have to swap out your products batteries every 3 weeks.Īnd finally, maybe worst of all, if your Wi-Fi goes down, so does your smart home network. This makes Wi-Fi less than ideal for wireless smart home products that require batteries. There are however several notable downsides.įor starters, many of your traditional home products today already use Wi-Fi and by adding more you run the risk of congesting your home network and slowing things down.Īnd, while Wi-Fi has a high data rate, it also consumes a lot of power. Why don’t companies just use Wi-Fi as the smart home standard?Īnd a great deal of smarts products today do leverage Wi-Fi. That’s why you can have Z Wave and Zigbee products under the same roof, “working together”. This allows products with different protocols to work together. Smart hubs integrate with the major languages, or protocols, in the market and help to translate them. That’s because smart hubs like Samsung SmartThings, Hubitat Elevation, Wink Hub 2 and others have been able to help mask the issue. The many smart home protocols that exist in 2022įor the most part, the everyday consumer has been pretty well shielded from this dilemma. My goal for this post is to arm you with all the information and direction you need in order to start comfortably building your smart home. Several of which are new as of this year.Īfter several hours of research and over a year of personal experience, I present to you the official Z Wave vs Zigbee manifesto for 2022. While there are many similarities between the Z Wave and Zigbee protocols, there are also some key and important differences to understand. Oh, and Zigbee was recently included in the smart home open-source standard collaboration alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon. While Z Wave has a better track record of compatibility between products and never interferes with your Wi-Fi network, Zigbee is faster, has a greater range of signal, boasts on open protocol standard, and owns a significantly larger marketshare of the smart home product space. Since you’re here, I’m willing to bet you’re experiencing something similar. And, more importantly, whether or not I should even care.

After a little research of my own, I was still unsure of exactly what all the differences between them were.

I came across the terms “Z Wave” and “Zigbee” a lot the first day I started looking into smart home products.

Zwave home control