Well I totally borked my ZigBee network, and it looks like I’ll need to factory reset and re-pair everything. I ignored the warning, and attempted a channel change. Lost everything and can’t get any device to connect.
So since I need to do this, what is everyone’s preference of ZHA vs Z2M? I was on ZHA, but am I missing anything on the other side?
Moved from ZHA to Z2M. Much easier to handle as I already ran an MQTT container, and re-connecting devices to Z2M doesn’t mess with the HA devices.
Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I’ll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.
They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had ‘quirks’ submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.
Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It’s definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.
Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don’t have any Thread devices yet, of course.
I’m on Z2M, mostly because it supports more devices I’d like to use. If ZHA supports everything you have or might want to get in the future, I don’t see a reason to switch.
ZHA here. I picked it since it’s a bit easier to set up with less bits. It works for me, so I didn’t see a reason to change it. I have done channel changes a couple of times with no issue - maybe I just got lucky!
I use ZHA. As I have a Pi, I prefer the less addons the better, and there are ZHA devices for everything. It simply narrows down the spectrum, but overtime it’s coming closer and closer to Z2M in terms of device support and features… So…
There is also Matter and Thread on the horizon, so I wouldn’t bother complicating things further.
Never had any issues with Zigbee2Mqtt. Works fantastically
Zigbee2MQTT is what I’m using. Everything I watched said it was the best, but ZHA is getting better.
I was using Z2M and found it had some weird, unresolvable device control quirks with a dimmer I’m using. Switched to ZHA and have had no problems at all.
I started with ZHA, but moved to Z2M because there was an automation blueprint I needed that was only coded for z2m.
Gotta say, I’m a much bigger fan of the z2m interface. There’s nothing wrong with ZHA but unless something major changes, I don’t see the need to ever switch back.
I use ZHA and so far everything works perfectly and it’s easy to add new devices. I only really use Zooz products for my zwave network though.
I’m loving my zigbee2mqtt setup. Took a couple tries to get the mosquitto broker working right but worth it in the long run.
