Yes, zwave is in the much less congested 900mhz range. It is a fair bit more reliable as it doesn’t compete with:

- WiFi

- Bluetooth

- microwave ovens

Additionally, it’s a bit more strict with certification so you can easily use multiple vendors for zwave whereas with zigbee it’s often a terrible experience since vendors implement things differently in ways that are not as interoperable. In fact, for a device to be certified by the zwave alliance, it must pass strict conformance testing to ensure backwards compatibility and interoperability.

On Europe the 860MHz band is subject to more restrictive transmission duty cycles, LBT or FHSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-range_device#SRD860

In the US you also have the FCC reshaping the 900 MHz for industrial broadband and NextNav. So there will be more competition.

https://www.nemko.com/blog/fcc-reshapes-the-900-mhz-band-for...

https://www.landisgyr.com/br/pt/home/knowledge/blog/Navigati...

All it costs is significantly more money and less options.

If you limit your pool of zigbee devices to just more reputable companies, you'll end up with around the same amount of options as zwave and they'll be reliable but significantly cheaper.

You also have the option to find some super cheap stuff that works just fine. That usually requires some research but not much. You can also build ESPHome devices for zigbee but that's pretty niche, to say the least.

Having previously been all zwave then moved and tried to go matter but ended up with zigbee, I wish I never listened to people saying what you are. As far as I'm concerned, zwave doesn't know it's dead yet and Matter isn't going to fulfill it's promises because the corporate interests that wouldn't give you local control with zigbee aren't suddenly going to change their minds because it says matter now.

My entire “smart” home setup is built with Matter over Thread. It’s fully local. No internet access required. With Home Assistant onboarding can be done without a smartphone now. Devices without official certification work but probably only in Home Assistant.

My Matter over Thread stuff keeps occasionally falling over in Home Assistant and becoming unavailable, probably a router issue as I’m using a homepod mini but still endlessly frustrating.

I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.

My whole setup is, suboptimal, to put it delicately. It’s just running on a NUC that’s crammed inside my AV cabinet, antennas would be crammed in there as well. I mostly buy zigbee stuff but it’s hard to ignore how cheap the Ikea Matter over Thread kit is.

Dunno, personally I have found HA + MoT to be strictly worse than Z2M. It's the classic case of the Douglas Adams quote:

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

HA MoT has a simplified UI, that hides hellish complexity underneath, that's held together by loose pieces of gum, which means its difficult to troubleshoot. HA has a rather laissez faire policy to stability, for example, they rolled out an update just recently that made it impossible to add new devices.

I just readded yday evening my Ikea temp sensors as they mysteriously stopped working for no reason. Why? Who knows, but you can't ship stuff like this to a non-technical audience, especially if they rely on it. I had it connected as the temp sensor of my AC, and was surprised to find the AC was not working, thats how I found out it suicided itself.

I never had any problems with Thread that couldn’t be fixed by pulling batteries from a crashed Ikea device and I have very little interest in how the protocol works.

Automatic updates in Home Assistant are disabled by default for a reason. It’s not an ultra polished, safe corporate environment for non technical wives and children.

Which sensor? Battery powered temp/humidity sensor or USB-C powered air quality monitor? I’m asking because the battery powered one is known to be bad. They disconnect and refuse to connect again until their batteries are pulled for ~10 seconds. It’s a device problem, not Thread problem.

But Matter _is_ locally-controlled. Matter-over-Thread is better as there's no side channels to abuse; Matter-over-Wifi also guarantees local control though the presence of Wifi means a high probability of some additional onboard software bloat the manufacturer can use to enshittify the product if you're not careful.

This is both good and bad, and no surprise its an American standard. Lower frequencies have higher range, which is good if you live in a house (because range), and bad if you live in an apartment (because interference and crowded channels). So it will compete with itself, and everything on the ISM band (which you have no control over).

Also, Z-wave’s frequency is a bit better at handling things like metal electrical boxes - useful if you live in an older home.

Anecdotally, I have Z-wave, Zigbee, and WiFi devices. Z-wave and WiFi are far more reliable than zigbee.

some zigbee controllers even support being converted to thread via a firmware update

smlights do that! they are great.

hey buddy! are you a coder?

Zwave frequencies, as well as regulations, vary between countries/regions. This means that equipment isn't interchangeable, something I'm currently running into - I can't get a zwave electronic door lock for Japan while I could easily have bought one in my home country. But I wouldn't be able to bring it if I wanted to.

Zigbee is basically the same everywhere, however the 2.4GHz band is of course somewhat congested.