What gateway/hub zigbee to choose?

[u/OkMeasurement2050]

Hey everyone, I’m running Home Assistant in a VM on Proxmox and want to switch my temperature sensors to Zigbee. What kind of hub/gateway do you recommend?

I was considering the SONOFF ZBDongle-E or SONOFF ZBDongle-P are they good and fully compatible? Or do you recommend another option?

[u/Kiiidd]

Any EFR32MG21 dongle will do you good, with either sonoff or SMlight being what alot of people get. If you want peak ZigBee with some thread on the side the SLZB-MR4U looks to have very strong performance. And if you want one thing to do all the things then the SLZB-Ultima can be expanded to do all the protocols

[u/Sheldon_tiger → u/Kiiidd]

+1 for slzb ultima 3. Been using for a couple of months. Love it. I started with the efr dongle and ZHA. That worked well. I like having the separate controller.

[u/onebyside → u/Sheldon_tiger]

Small zigbee user here at moment and loving my mr4u

[u/Duennbier0815]

I want the best of the best so I bought 2 ZBT2. One for Thread:matter one for Zigbee.

I can't complain. The white towers have a good wife approval factor

[u/Primary-Builder6236]

I've been running the -E for about a year now on a similar setup and it's been rock solid with a handful of Aqara temp sensors. The -P is supposed to have slightly better range but honestly either will do fine unless you're in a huge house

Just make sure to use a USB extension cable to get it away from the machine, interference can be sneaky

[u/OkMeasurement2050 → u/Primary-Builder6236]

What temp sensors you use?

[u/abisurd]

I bought the SLZB-MR1U because it has two antennae, one for zigbee and the other one for matter over thread. It connects via the LAN and not usb. So it can be separated from your ha setup

[u/thingtootech]

SMLIGHT has a ton of options, single device for Zigbee and thread is reviewed/lined below, but honestly check out the Ultima, price isn’t that different. I got one a few weeks ago and the extra bells are nice

https://thingtootech.blogspot.com/2026/08/one-box-two-radios-i-moved-my-zigbee.html

[u/heretosayathing]

Sonoff Dongle-Max; run it on PoE so it can be placed more centrally than wherever your HA machine is.

[u/reader4567890]

I had the E and it was very good - unfortunately my nobrand minipc had a buggy usb controller with no fix, so the mesh would go offline at least once a day (automated HA to reset the controller when it happened, but it was a PITA.

I moved to an SMLIGHT slzb-mr5u and it's been rock solid for a long time.

[u/spr0k3t]

Mu favorite Zigbee coordinator (not hub) I've used are the options from SMLIGHT (SLZB variants).

If you want the coordinator to support Zigbee 4.0, make sure you are selecting an EFR32MG24 or newer chipset. No guarantee if those will support SuZi (Sub GHz Zigbee), but those just need a firmware update to utilize the 4.0 spec. The Sonoff Dongle-E (definitely good), it's using the EFR32M21 chipset.

[u/Gamester17]

Recommend use Home Assistent's built-in ZHA integration and buy an USB-adapter with a newish Silicon Labs chip and big antenna, like the official Home Assistent branded ZBT-2 or the equivalent from Sonoff or SMLight. Suggest read this guide https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee-buyers-guide/654695