I have to ask why anyone would use matter over zigbee and z-wave. It seems in my experience to have absolutely nothing going for it. It is as flakey as hell, not particularly easy to setup and I have no idea how I can simply remove and re-add like with zigbee and z-wave when it becomes problematic. I only have one meross socket and after a few months of being completely unreliable it's finally going in the bin. Another technology that really doesn't seem to be prime time.
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I've had very poor experience with thread-based matter devices (devices from multiple manufacturers, border routers from various manufacturers too).
I've had very good luck with Wi-Fi based matter devices though.
I think it's still early days, and will improve long-term into something that is both cheap to design and manufacture, and reliable for the end user.
That said TODAY, and in my opinion the next year or two, there is no way I would base a full design on matter. It needs more improvement, more bug fixes, more vendor interoperability improvements first.
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Yep, exactly. I'm hopeful Thread and Matter can eventually deliver on their promises, but they are both a looong way from that right now.
But it's early in the game and there are a ton of moving parts to coordinate -- it's simply going to take them a while to mature. In the meantime, ZW and ZB work great.
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I'll say this gently...your home is not designed like my home. I had a tricky situation where I could not reliably extend my Zigbee network to cover a spot; however, I had a wifi router point in the space. A Matter via WiFi device worked wonderfully and has stay connected without any issues.
All of the smart home technologies have their issues that we have to work around, and as we design our homes, different factors come into play. It's nice to have another tool to use depending on the job and location.
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The main issue with Matter is and has been a lack of devices. Outside of outlets and lightbulbs, there isn't much variety of device types. Huge categories of devices are missing, or are "coming soon". They have consistently over promised and under delivered.
That said, the couple RGB bulbs and outlets I have used, mostly as a part of being a beta tester for Hubitat (and for personal curiosity) have worked fine. At the time I bought these devices, I could barely find anything that I wanted to test, but the bulbs were dirt cheap, and I used the outlet for holiday lights.
Is Matter worse than Z-wave or Zigbee, I would say not really, other than the lack of devices, and it uses your Wifi network. Oh, and you presently have to commission devices with something like Alexa or Google, which is unfortunate. (Hopefully that changes at some point?)
But on the other hand, you have inexpensive Matter devices and they don't have mesh issues like the Z protocols, not that I really have had much trouble there. But in certain instances, Wifi could be a bit more resilient.
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It's definitely going in the bin now. I deleted the device from Alexa and then added it back. Now when I try and add it to hubitat I get an error stating the fabric already exists even though I deleted the device from hubitat too.
