With Wi-Fi, anything in your smarthome can break which, in turn, can lead to everything in your smarthome breaking. Insignia branded plugs, lightbulbs, and even a smart freezer all lost their smarthome capabilities. We saw this recently when Best Buy chose to leave the smarthome business. This means if either side calls it quits, your device does, too. But unlike a smarthome hub, Alexa and Google Assistant don’t control Wi-Fi devices directly-the various clouds talk to each other. And if you control your smarthome with Alexa or Google, their cloud is involved, too. The manufacturer of the gadget provides a cloud and a dedicated app. Wi-Fi devices, on the other hand, depend on multiple clouds. Your hub does all the work, so if the company that manufactures your Z-Wave lightbulbs or ZigBee smart locks quits, your devices will keep working. Z-Wave and ZigBee Are Single Points of Failure Alexander Kirch/ShutterstockĮven when you use a cloud-dependent hub, like Wink or SmartThings, Z-Wave and ZigBee products benefit from company clouds involved in the process. Z-Wave avoids this problem entirely as it only has to contend with itself, even if you add more and more Z-wave devices. It’s easy for the 2.4 GHz spectrum to get crowded and suffer issues. That’s because Z-Wave runs on a different radio frequency-908.42 MHz-while both ZigBee and most Wi-Fi smarthome devices communicate over 2.4 GHz.
are less prone to interference issues than either Wi-Fi or ZigBee. You’ll notice a dramatic difference between the time you send a command and it happens, like turning on the lights. And when you control your smarthome locally, it also works faster. This means that even when the internet is down, you can still control your smarthome. You need dedicated apps, and the closest you can get to a centralized experience is syncing your devices with Alexa or Google.īut with the right hub, like Hubitat, Homeseer, or OpenHab, you can create a smarthome that doesn’t rely on the cloud. All Wi-Fi smarthome gadgets depend on the cloud to work. When you build a smarthome, you have to ask yourself how much you want the cloud involved. Z-Wave and ZigBee: The Kings of Local Processing Hubitat But not all things are equal between the protocols. Now, for every Z-Wave Lock on the market, there’s a Wi-Fi alternative, often from the same manufacturer.
It seemed that every smarthome manufacturer touted Google and Alexa integration, and focused on Wi-Fi radios instead of Z-Wave or ZigBee. But that changed this year-a fact that was evident at CES.
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