this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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So, if I'm invested in zigbee, but want to future proof, I should consider threads/matter, and a hub that talks to both?
Can home assistant do that?
Yes if you have a Zigbee and a Thread antenna module connected to your HA instance you can run it as an Zigbee and Matter hub and connect Zigbee and Matter devices. A cheap antenna module is the Sonoff ZBDongle-E. You can flash the firmware of it and turn it into a Thread antenna module. It can also run as a Zigbee and Thread antenna simultaneously, but I never got that working properly. So I just bought two dongles. One for Zigbee and the other for Matter.
I only just bought a zigbee USB antenna, and 4 smart plugs. You're saying I need a second USB antenna dongle for thread?
Yeah you need a separate dongle. The ZBDongle-E from Sonoff is pretty cheap on AliExpress. Cheaper than the official Home Assistant ZBT-1 dongle Nabu Casa sells. Unfortunately running both Zigbee and Thread on one antenna doesn’t work very well even with the dongle from Nabu Casa.
Only thing with the ZBDongle-E is that you need to flash it yourself to run OpenThread via this website https://darkxst.github.io/silabs-firmware-builder/ it’s not hard though.
You can flash the SLZB-06 to use Matter over Thread too. I like those because they use Ethernet and can be powered via PoE, so you can put them practically anywhere you can reach using an Ethernet cable.
Thanks. I'll look into it. Right now I have mainly lights and sockets, through a Lidl zigbee hub, a rebranded Tuya, I believe, but I'm looking into going a bit deeper.
Hows that working software-wise in HA? One running in Z2M, the other ZHA?
I'm not running Z2M and ZHA together though. Just ZHA and Matter. But I've read that running Z2M and ZHA with two dongles is no problem in HA you just have two separate networks
Remembered I have a Conbee III laying around so I flashed it to the OpenThread firmware. Turns out, HA itself handles the devices (you add matter devices in HA settings) and the Conbee is really just the antenna. So no container like Z2M or deconz in the middle. That makes a whole different situation than I assumed above. Documentation was not intuitive but I got it going for me, which is nice