I’ve been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I got started, like most people, with some basic Philips lights. They have this cheap line called WiZ (like $15 a light), but you need a special app to set them up. I also tried their fancy Hue line (~$60 per light!) because I wanted to get into motion sensors and have lights that turn on automatically. The big difference is that WiZ uses WiFi, and Hue uses Zigbee.
At first, I was kinda pissed that WiZ didn’t have a motion sensor. But it turns out there’s a legit reason, and it’s not just the company being greedy. Motion sensors have to be super power-efficient, spending most of their time in a deep sleep to run for a year or more on a battery. WiFi is a total battery hog, so slapping it into a sensor would drain the thing in days. That’s the real reason you don’t see WiZ sensors.
Home Assistant totally saved my wallet by letting me mix and match, I could use a Hue Zigbee sensor to trigger my cheap WiZ WiFi lights. But once I got a Zigbee router, I started looking into the protocol and realized it’s way better than WiFi for smart home stuff, like in every way. The only thing holding me back from buying more Hue devices was their crazy price.
Luckily, I found out AliExpress is flooded with no-name Zigbee devices, and I’ve been buying them like crazy. The best part is that every new device makes my whole mesh network stronger and more reliable. You really can’t beat the prices from China at the moment, it’s a total game changer and there are no sane reasons to prefer WiFi.