Zwave stuff are way overpriced, even comparing to the wifi or zigbee quivalent.
As an examble I get good quality (aka not an unknown chineese brand) Zigbee smart object for 2 to 5 times lower price than what a Zwave equivalent.
Same goes for wifi one, which are roughly the same price as the Zigbee stuff.
The only good aspect of Zwave was the security protocol that was more robust than the Zigbee equivalent (albeit Zigbee 3.0 closed the gap) and more standardized endpoints. Matter objective is to get those two to surpass their ZWave equivalent.
Unfortunately my gateway (which is compatible with both Zigbee 3.0 and ZWave btw) is still waiting for its Matter/Thread upgrade, so I can’t try it yet, but compairing my Zwave objects with my Zigbee ones, I see no point of buying the former over the later.
I would argue you get what you pay for in terms of interoperability and reliability, but I can imagine people willing to trade some of that for a lower price.
Interoperability comes from standardization, which Zigbee sorely lacked. But actors like Tuya or Leroy Merlin built their own standard over Zigbee, which means anything that has “works with Tuya” will work with any Tuya coordinator of any brand (same for Leroy Merlin ecosystem). And even those who don’t usually mostly works.
With that you’d get ZWave reliability, most, if not all, of its security features, with Zigbee lower price. And they still works great with third party coordinator.
But it is true that Z-Wave uses lower frequency than Zigbee (868MHz vs 2.3GHz). It means lower frequency interferences, and better reliability over high distances.
Zwave stuff are way overpriced, even comparing to the wifi or zigbee quivalent.
As an examble I get good quality (aka not an unknown chineese brand) Zigbee smart object for 2 to 5 times lower price than what a Zwave equivalent.
Same goes for wifi one, which are roughly the same price as the Zigbee stuff.
The only good aspect of Zwave was the security protocol that was more robust than the Zigbee equivalent (albeit Zigbee 3.0 closed the gap) and more standardized endpoints. Matter objective is to get those two to surpass their ZWave equivalent.
Unfortunately my gateway (which is compatible with both Zigbee 3.0 and ZWave btw) is still waiting for its Matter/Thread upgrade, so I can’t try it yet, but compairing my Zwave objects with my Zigbee ones, I see no point of buying the former over the later.
I would argue you get what you pay for in terms of interoperability and reliability, but I can imagine people willing to trade some of that for a lower price.
Another issue is that zwave isn’t available in all countries (or it is but uses incompatible frequencies) so it’s less useful outside the big markets.
I live in a country with 10 million people and it works here. But yes there are probably some that don’t have the frequencies.
Interoperability comes from standardization, which Zigbee sorely lacked. But actors like Tuya or Leroy Merlin built their own standard over Zigbee, which means anything that has “works with Tuya” will work with any Tuya coordinator of any brand (same for Leroy Merlin ecosystem). And even those who don’t usually mostly works.
With that you’d get ZWave reliability, most, if not all, of its security features, with Zigbee lower price. And they still works great with third party coordinator.
But it is true that Z-Wave uses lower frequency than Zigbee (868MHz vs 2.3GHz). It means lower frequency interferences, and better reliability over high distances.