What is Shelly?

What Shelly is

Shelly makes smart home hardware, and the range does three jobs: it switches things on and off, it senses what is happening around the house, and it measures what the place costs to run.

The switching is the part Shelly is best known for, and it works differently to most of what is sold as a smart switch. A Shelly module is small enough to fit inside a standard wall box, behind the light switch or powerpoint that is already there. You don't replace anything on the wall. The module goes in behind it, the switch keeps working the way it always has, and the circuit gains an app, a schedule and automation on top.

The rest of the catalogue is easy to miss if you have only ever seen the relays. Shelly also makes touchscreen wall displays, motion and door sensors, water leak detectors, smoke and gas alarms, temperature and humidity sensors, radiator valves, buttons, dimmers, LED strip controllers and energy meters.

The company behind it is Shelly Group SE, headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was Allterco until 2024, when it took the name of its own product range and converted to a European company. It is publicly listed, trading as SLYG on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange and in Frankfurt.

That Frankfurt listing is probably why people ask whether Shelly is a German company. It isn't, and it isn't Chinese either. It's Bulgarian.

How a Shelly works

Each module joins your home Wi-Fi and gets an address on your network. From there you can reach it three ways: the Shelly app, a web interface built into the device itself, or whatever home automation system you already run.

A Shelly holds its own settings and runs its own schedules. The cloud is optional, which is why one keeps switching your lights when your internet goes down, and why the physical switch on your wall never stops working regardless of what the network is doing.

What Shelly makes

Shelly names its products by what they do, which makes the range easier to read than most.

Switching and dimming

The 1, 1PM and 2PM relays switch one or two circuits, with the PM models adding power measurement. The Mini versions do the same job in a smaller body for tight wall boxes. The 1L and 2L work on circuits with no neutral wire, though LED loads on those need a Shelly Bypass fitted at the light. Pro models are DIN-rail mounted for the switchboard instead of the wall box. Alongside them sit dimmers, including DALI and 0-10V versions for commercial fittings, LED strip controllers, and shutter modules for blinds and curtains.

Sensing

The BLU range covers motion, door and window contacts, temperature and humidity, and buttons, all on Bluetooth and all battery powered. Separately there are safety devices: water leak detectors, smoke alarms and a gas detector. Input modules like the i4 bring existing switches and dry contacts into the system.

Metering and control

Energy monitors clamp onto your mains to measure a whole house or an individual circuit. The Wall Display is a touchscreen that mounts in a wall box in place of a light switch and drives the rest of the system, and it comes in several sizes.

Not all of that reaches Australia. The Shelly range we stock covers the in-wall modules, dimmers, energy monitors, BLU sensors and Wall Displays. If you are not sure which module suits the job, the picker asks a few questions and names it.

Generations, briefly

Shelly devices are sold by generation, and the generation tells you which radios are inside. Gen3 is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Gen4 added Zigbee to the same models, so a Gen4 device can join either network. Pro is the DIN-rail line for switchboard work.

What it works with

Shelly is unusually open about this, and it is the main reason the range turns up in other people's setups.

Gen4 devices support Matter, which means Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa and SmartThings can add them directly. Home Assistant has shipped a Shelly integration since 2020, and it talks to the devices locally without going through Shelly's servers at all.

One catch worth knowing before you buy: a Gen4 device runs a Matter profile or a Zigbee profile, not both at once. It ships on Matter, and five presses of the button swaps it over. Switching to Zigbee takes the device off Wi-Fi entirely, so you lose its IP address, its web interface and Matter along with it. Its Matter support runs over Wi-Fi in the first place, because there is no Thread radio inside.

Installing one in Australia

Two things are specific to here.

Shelly publishes separate ANZ documents for several Gen4 models, and they are not the same as the European ones. The ANZ 1 Gen4, 1 Mini Gen4, 1PM Gen4 and 2PM Gen4 are 110-240 V AC only. The European versions of those same models also accept DC supply and switch DC loads. Ours don't, so a spec sheet promising 12 V DC is the wrong page for this country.

The Wave range is a sharper version of the same problem, because Z-Wave frequencies are fixed by region and the bands don't overlap. Australian Wave devices run at 919.8 MHz against Europe's 868.4 MHz. A European Wave device cannot join an Australian network, and no firmware update fixes that.

Then there is the install itself. A Shelly module goes inside a wall box or a switchboard, on mains wiring, which makes it electrical work. In Australia that is fixed wiring under AS/NZS 3000, and licensed work in every state. The devices are designed to be quick for a sparky to fit, and most take a few minutes once the switch plate is off, but it is not a DIY afternoon. The wiring diagrams are worth handing your electrician before the visit.

Who Shelly suits, and who it doesn't

Shelly suits you if you like the switches you already have and don't want to change how the house looks. It suits you if you want local control and would rather not depend on a company's servers staying up. It suits you if you are running Home Assistant, or intend to.

It suits you less if you want to avoid an electrician. Smart bulbs and plugs get you switching without touching any wiring, and for a rental or a first try that is the more sensible starting point. It also suits you less if you want one app that does everything beautifully, because Shelly's own app is functional rather than polished, and the range assumes you will eventually point it at something else.

So the cost is an electrician's visit up front, in exchange for a system that doesn't stop working when someone else's server does.