Man there are way too many IoT standards. What's the difference between these two? How do they each compare to Matter?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Thread is a wireless standard meant to sit next to Bluetooth and WiFi.
Matter is a home automation protocol can that be used over Thread or WiFi. Ideal Matter devices use Thread instead of WiFi because running a bunch of home devices like light bulbs or switches on your WiFi is a recipe for disaster.
Matter is important because it provides native compatibility among different platforms.
What kind of disaster specifically? I hear everyone discouraging from using WiFi for home devices, but never understood what the actual risks are.
There are also performance implications (a Zigbee coordinator can easily handle 100 devices, while many routers would struggle with that amount of clients), power saving (especially for battery powered sensors) - some Zigbee sensors can last years on a single coin cell battery.
Let’s say your lightbulb(s) become comprised. A bad actor now has a toehold into your network.
Maybe they run a spam relay through the bulb. Maybe they attack your network by attacking the printer that hasn’t had a firmware update in years.
Point is, there’s someone with access to your network that isn’t you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1fjspoc/what_is_the_point_of_having_a_separate_devices/
Right, thanks. But this can be easily resolved by:
- Removing devices' access to WAN, which also vastly reduces the external actor's ability to compromise them in the first place.
- Isolating devices from each other with internal firewall rules, allowing them to only interact with the hub host. Is this correct, or am I missing something?
Good luck explaining how to do any of this to my parents, for example. For someone with a technical background that's feasible, for someone with an it background it's even easy. For the other 90 or 95% of people who are actually supposed to buy and use these things, it isn't. They don't even know something like this can be done, let alone that it should be done.
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I see someone replied about security. But I was just taking about stability.
Most people don’t have super beefy wifi routers. Many have whatever shit their ISP sent them. These are fine for your average number of laptops and phones, etc. but if you then throw on 10 more 2.4GHz WiFi IOT devices, you are probally going to run into devices randomly dropping off the wifi, etc.
Additionally, wifi is usually chosen over other protocols by manufacturers due to the cost of hardware and development. So they are often lower quality. (This is only one reason)
But sure, if you have a super awesome 2.4GHz wifi setup and high quality wifi devices, maybe things will work out just fine. But my personal experience with WiFi tells me I shouldn’t clutter my WiFi.
Also, if you were curious, yes: almost all WiFi IOT devices are 2.4GHz only.
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Thread is a bit more power efficient, which matters for battery powered devices that aren't connected to permanent power and don't need to transmit significant data, like door locks, temperature/humidity sensors, things like that. A full wifi networking chip would consume a lot more power for an always-on device.
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An important difference between thread and zigbee/wi-fi I'm not seeing mentioned is that all thread devices automesh in a hub/spoke model as long as they're not battery powered. So your light bulbs, plugs, etc all become extenders and part of a self healing mesh network without a single point of failure. For me it works better than Zigbee for this reason.
Zigbee does that too tho, right?
The wiki on zigbee says so at least
Pretty sure than an underlying feature of both zigbee and zwave.
They're different in their implementation. Zigbee automesh is more of a centralized router-hub model with self healing relying on routing tables. This caused significant issues for me. Thread is true automesh with all devices acting as a hub in a hub/spoke model, so there's no centralized routing table to act as a single point of failure.
Thread also works on the 2.4 GHz range but can utilize sub ranges of 868 in Europe and 915 in north America. The 868 and 915 GHz ranges are what LoRa operates on and provides a much greater range for low data rate transmissions.
In fact Meshtastic operates on LoRa on 915 here in the U.S. and I have a node in my second floor window with a 3db antenna and I have been able to message both ways up to 3 blocks away.
Long story short, utilizing 868 and 915 in these devices will make dead spots a thing of the past within a home, even with their lower gain internal antennas.
I exclusively use ZigBee. It automeshes.
Thread is a network layer thing, comparable to WiFi or Bluetooth. Matter is an application later thing, comparable to HomeKit or Google home.
Zigbee is both network and application layer.
This article has a decent overview https://www.smarthomeperfected.com/zigbee-vs-thread/
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I am pretty happy with zigbee so far. Is that a good thing? I haven‘t done anything with matter so far.
It's just a technological step forward. Thread was designed from the ground up as an IPv6 protocol. Honestly, this kind of move is coming later than would have been ideal, given the massive growth in IoT devices.
Yeah so far it doesn't matter because zigbee and zwave still work fine.
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@[email protected] I have nothing useful to contribute, but I fucking love your username. Thank you for the smirk you gave me, have a nice evening mein Genosse 👋
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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?
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.
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Googling didn't reveal any useful answer, did anybody know it has an article about what's the advantage of matter vs mqtt?
Do you mean Matter vs Zigbee? Matter and MQTT are totally separate things.
Ok, now I'm completely out. From the phrasing "matter over threads" I concluded that matter is the protocol and threads the RF Standart?!
Broad support from the major platforms (Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung).
Crap. I use pretty much exclusively Ikea stuff with my Home Assistant
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It makes sense. Hopefully it's more reliable than my Zigbee devices. I constantly have to power cycle devices made by a variety of manufacturers to get them to register again. And I've tried more than a few zigbee hubs. Can't say I'm a fan.
Check interference with wifi signals wifi on channel 1 and zigbee on channel 25 gives you the most separation. As long as a neighbor doesn't blast on wifi channel 11.
There is also software compatibility, I found hue to be the most stable for routers. Osram was terrible, recent firmware made it okay.
I'm in literally the middle of nowhere, the next nearest house is 4 miles away and I'm not even connected to the grid. If there's a wifi signal detectable, it'll be mine. So I've shifted frequencies around trying to get it to stabilize, with little luck. I've primarily been using Sonoff, Aqara, Ikea and SMLight, and hubs from each of them.
Honestly, I've been migrating to zwave since I don't seem to have issue with anything I use on that protocol.
Aqara (specially older devices) are known for being temperamental and not playing well with other hubs/devices. If you have each manufacturer on its own hub, make sure they are using separate channels. If everything else fails, 2.4GHz is also used for Bluetooth, microwaves and other, maybe your location has noise on that band,
Z-Wave is using lower bands (800-900mhz depending on location) and certifying the devices better for software compatibility. It's a fine solution as if it works for you, any limitations are basically theoretical (like the 200 devices).
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xkcd 927 in action right there.
Zigbee works just fine, but needs a hub to share out devices eg internet access or HomeKit. But it is quick. How thread compares remains to be seen.
Remains to be seen? What other information are you waiting for?
I’ve been using Thread devices for ~5 years now.
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finally!! :D
Isn't the HA cloud dongle able to do both because they're on the same 2.4 gigahertz or whatever?
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