Finding the best Zigbee and Z-Wave adapters for Home Assistant

I recently wanted to update my old Zigbee- and Z-Wave USB adapters that I’ve been using with my Home Assistant setup for some years. I’ve taken a look at the products available, and chosen my replacement products. I’ll attempt to list my reasonings for choosing these products below.

My old Zigbee- and Z-Wave USB adapters (Popp ZB-Stick and Aeotec Z-Stick 7, respectively) was not obsolete in any way, and they’ve been working flawlessly for my needs.

The Z-Stick 7 has a Series 700 chipset, and while the newer Series 800 chipset has some improvements over the older Series 700, it’s not significant enough to warrant an upgrade in itself.

The Popp ZB-Stick has a EFR32MG1 chip from Silicon Labs, which is the older “series 1” chipset. They have since released their “series 2” chipset EFR32MG2, that has some improvements, and also has different firmware. There could be an argument to upgrade here, if not for having access to newer firmware and features.

Current setup

To explain the parameters for choosing the replacement products, and why I’m replacing them, it’s worth explaining my current Home Assistant setup.

At home I have a redundant Proxmox cluster which would be the best to run the Home Assistant VM on. However, the servers are located in my server room that has walls of concrete, and where the server is placed in a steel cage/rack. Placing the USB sticks in the rear of one of the Proxmox servers would not have great signal coverage to the rest of my home.

I could probably “extend” the signal from the server room by using a chain of AC powered repeater/router devices, but it would be sub-optimal, and the first “hop” would either way be the weakest link. Theres also the problem of locking the VM to a single physical server for the USB passthrough. Sure, there are ways of doing USB-over-IP in Linux using usbip or ser2net, or you could probably get one of those enterprise USB-to-IP devices (not sure how well that works with Proxmox), but it would complicate the solution (more to configure/maintain, and more things that can fail), and it would require some kind of of dedicated server/host/device just for doing the USB-to-IP.

Due to these factors, I chose to get a dedicated server for hosting my Home Assistant VM. I bought a cheap (~$30-50) HP T630 Thin Client on eBay with 16GB of DDR4 memory and dual SATA m2 SSDs. Proxmox is installed using both SSDs in a redundant setup with ZFS mirror vdev as rpool. Both USB sticks are directly connected to this, and is passed through to the Home Assistant VM. I can then easily move this server wherever I need in my house to get the best coverage, and all it needs is a network connection and an AC outlet.

Even if the solution is flexible, it’s still one extra server to maintain/update/upgrade, and is also a single-point-of-failure. If I ignore the USB sticks and signal coverage, I’d rather have the Home Assistant run in my main Proxmox cluster. This is also the primary reason for looking at new Zigbee- and Z-Wave adapters.

Looking at replacement products

The first obvious change would be to decouple the USB-sticks from the Home Assistant VM. Having discarded the USB-to-IP solution mentioned above, the solution would still most likely rely on some kind of “Z-Wave/Zigbee over network” solution. In the last year or so, several PoE-based products have emerged. They all seem to be based on PoE-enabled ESP32 boards like WESP32 and ESP32-POE, with different addon/GPIO-cards added to them.

Replacement Zigbee product

I’m using Zigbee2MQTT, or Z2M, in Home Assistant (not ZHA), so my decision will be based with that in mind. Z2M currently has four different chipset drivers; zstack, ember, deconz, and zigate. The two latter doesn’t have full support, so these are ignored from further evaluation. Between zstack and ember, the former seems to be the best choice in terms of support, stability, features, and general feedback from users. It’s also the one with most number of officially supported adapters in Z2M (as seen in their documentation).

An adapter supported by zstack currently entails any CC1352 or CC2652 based Texas Instrument chip. Chips ending with P have a power amplifier which support up-to 20dBm vs 5dBm on adapters ending with R/RB. CC2652P2 seems to have been the “golden standard” so-far, but the recently released CC2652P7 seems to quickly take its place. The primary advantage with the P7 (over the P2) seems to be that it’s more powerful, and will support up to 300 directly connected devices (compared to the 200 that P2 supports). Knowing which chipset we want to focus our attention on, we can start looking at the different adapters available meeting that criteria.

Looking at adapter types, they are primarily split into three groups; USB, Network/TCP, and Hybrid (USB+Network/TCP). To allow for re-flashing if a firmware upgrade goes bad, it makes sense to have a USB-enabled device, so the Hybrid category seems to be the best choice, and also allows for more flexibility (i.e. if the adapter were to stop working using network mode, it might still work in USB mode, giving you more time to find a replacement adapter).

After looking at the alternatives, and crawling Reddit and other online forums for comments/feedback from users, there seemed to be a consensus towards three different vendors/makers; Tube, ZigStar and SMLIGHT. There’s also the lesser-known, just-released device from cod.m.

• Tube’s Zigbee Gateway CC2652P7 (without USB mode)
• SMLIGHT SLZB-06p7
• ZigStar UZG-01
• cod.m ZigBee Coordinator 1.0 (CZC-1.0)

All of them have a variant with the CC2652P7 chipset, however Tube’s version with CC2652P7 does not support USB mode (only the CC2652P2 version does).

I think all four of these is a good alternative, so you won’t make any “wrong decision” choosing either of them. However, if we are nitpicky, the Tube variant has to be exluded from the list since it did not meet our requirement for USB mode. The CZC-1.0 seems to be heavily influenced by the UZG-01 (its firmware is even forked from UZG-01), it’s brand new as of writing this post (released 15.5.2024) which limits the number of reviews and feedback from people using it, and is also more expensive than UZG-01 (almost double the price). For these reasons, I’ve excluded it from the list as well.

We are then stuck between the SMLIGHT SLZB-06p7 and ZigStar UZG-01.

Both of these (plus the excluded CZC-1.0) supports automatic mDNS discovery by Z2M if HA and the device is on the same subnet, or if your router/home network supports mDNS proxying/relaying between subnets. However, we will not rely on this feature, and will just use the IP address of the device directly by using port: 'tcp://<ip-address>:<port>' in the configuration.

Looking to find differences between these two, there are not many. If we look away from the physical form factor (dimensions/size of the outer shell), they are very similar. They both support the third-party open-source firmware XZG, and they both have USB-C ports (rather than micro-USB that many ESP32 boards have). They both seem to be developed/organized by people located in Europe, SMLIGHT seems to be based out of Ukraine, and ZigStar out of Germany.

For me, the choice ultimately was based on the physical form factor. I don’t like the thin, long form factor of the SMLIGHT SLZB-06p7, so I went with the ZigStar UZG-01.

Replacement Z-Wave product

Since it’s more or less is just one alternative for Z-Wave in Home Assistant, Z-Wave JS, and the list of supported adapters is “all known 500- 700- and 800-series adapters“, there does not seem to be many factors for deciding what adapter we choose. For clarity I’m using the Z-Wave JS UI add-on (that integrates with HA via WebSocket), and not the official Z-Wave JS addon. There is no difference in adapter support or compability between the two, so it does not affect the choice of adapter.

There does not seem to be any ready-to-go Z-Wave adapters/products that supports PoE. I’ve seen some commercial products like the TRF-ZW10, but they seem to be very proprietary and closed-source, and I have not found anything online that confirms that they work fine with Z-Wave JS.

The only product I’ve seen, is Tube’s Z-Wave PoE Kit. It consists of the same ESP32-POE that the other Tube products have, and has a Raspberry Pi GPIO to Olimex UEXT adapter for fitting a Z-Wave GPIO adapter. It’s been officially tested, and confirmed working, with both the RaZberry 7 Pro and Zooz 800 Long Range ZAC93 modules.

There was two deciding factors when choosing the GPIO module. The first being the size of the company, and where they are located. Z-Wave.me, the company behind RaZberry 7 Pro, is based in Russia, and seems to be a relatively small company/organization with a few niche products. The Smartest House (the company behind the entire Zooz brand) is based in the US, and seems to be a large, well-funded organization, that produces a lot of other products (where the Zooz 800 Long Range ZAC93 is a small cog in the wheel).

The second deciding factor was firmware updates and support. This somewhat ties in with the first deciding factor. Z-Wave.me seems to have no specific warranty for the RaZberry 7 lineup. They have some other products mentioning 1 year warranty, but that’s it. Their firmware download selector did not seem to work properly when writing this post, and when working around that, it seems the latest firmware was from 2022 (SDK 7.17.01). The support in general seems to be lacking, which will most likely limit the longevity/lifespan of the product.

On the other hand, Zooz seems to offer 5 years extended warranty and lifetime support for the Zooz 800 Long Range ZAC93. They regularly release firmware updates, and the latest version as of writing this post was from July 2023 (SDK 7.19.3). They have newer firmwares for their USB sticks (SDK 7.21.3 released May 2024, and SDK 7.22.0 released July 2024), which most likely is, or will be, available for their GPIO modules as well.

Based on these factors, the choice was pretty easy, and I went with the Zooz 800 Long Range ZAC93 module.

Well, technically it was the non-long-range ZAC93 (as I’m based in Europe), and the Z-Wave Long Range (ZWLR) feature became available in Europe long after it became available in the US. The ZWLR feature was announced for Europe back in February 2024, but I suspect the ZAC93 module was developed before that. They might release an updated version that supports ZWLR in Europe at a future date.

Summary

In the end I chose the ZigStar UZG-01 PoE Zigbee adapter, and Tube’s Z-Wave PoE Kit with the Zooz 800 Long Range ZAC93 module.