Smart home connectivity often needs to work between very different devices like lights, sensors, door locks, and thermostats. Making things more complex is the fact that some of these devices are low-power and use batteries, so any wireless connectivity would also need to be low-power and likely, low-range. Several overarching connectivity protocols, such as Matter, Z-Wave, and Zigbee, have been developed to avoid vendor lock-in and platform plays like those of Alexa, Google Home, and HomeKit.

One thing they have in common is the need for a central hub to direct messages between devices, but they all work slightly differently. Zigbee is one of the older standards being used in the smart home, but it's supported by some notable companies, including Samsung SmartThings, Signify (Philips Hue), IKEA, and hundreds of others. And even though new protocols are out, there are still a ton of Zigbee devices on the market, making it an attractive option for your smart home.

So, what is Zigbee?

It's a low-powered, low-cost wireless protocol for IoT devices

Zigbee is a low-power, low-range, and low-cost wireless technology that builds on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol to add mesh routing and networking. Put more simply, it's a clever way to enable all the devices in your smart home to talk to each other. Like Wi-Fi, it uses the 2.4GHz band, but it also uses 900MHz and 868MHz. It's open-source and available for free so that companies can integrate it into their IoT devices without any licensing costs.

The protocol uses AES-128 symmetric encryption to keep security tight and has an effective range of about 35 feet between devices. That's under ideal conditions, though. If you have one Zigbee router device in every room of your house, there shouldn't be any connectivity issues, as the system can handle unlimited hops between nodes.

Why is Zigbee good for my smart home?

Flexible wireless connectivity for IoT devices with mesh topology

There are a few reasons why Zigbee is handy for smart home use. It's low-power, so it enables the use of door, window, or temperature sensors with an incredibly long battery life. It's also reliable, mainly because of how the Zigbee network stack creates a mesh network between devices. A central hub or coordinator connects to other Zigbee devices that function as routers and, finally, out to end devices.

But depending on how your Zigbee devices are installed, they could also work as star topology with one coordinator and several end devices or tree topology with a central coordinator, a few routers, and many end devices. It really depends on how the manufacturer sets up their devices, which can be end devices only or have a dual role as a router as well.

Because of this flexible networking, Zigbee is fairly resilient to wireless interference, as it can reroute messages through other router devices to reach the same endpoints. That also means one device failing won't take down the network in most cases. It doesn't support high-speed data transfer, but it doesn't really need to, as sensor data can be transmitted in small packets. And it's designed to be upgradeable over the air, so the devices can be designed without any ports that might make weatherproofing more difficult.

Open-source doesn't mean every Zigbee device will work together

There is one drawback to how Zigbee is designed. The protocol is open-source, but the manufacturers are free to implement it however they want. This can mean vendor lock-in, with their Zigbee devices being incompatible with Zigbee devices or hubs from other brands.

Zigbee is one of the many wireless standards for smart home devices

Zigbee is one of the established protocols in the smart home market, used by a wide range of companies and their devices. It's worth knowing that Matter, the newer connectivity standard for IoT, is being designed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which is responsible for Zigbee. It's going to be a while before Matter takes over as the smart home connectivity standard, if it does at all, so Zigbee continues to be a viable option for most smart homes. But with Home Assistant, you can use multiple wireless hubs together, giving you the option of making the best IoT networks for your needs.