Which SmartThings hub should you buy?

If you need Z-Wave, there's one answer: the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, in its ANZ variant, model GP-AEOHUBV3AN. If you don't need Z-Wave, don't buy a hub yet. There's a fair chance one is already sitting in your living room.

No, it hasn't been discontinued. That's the question most people arrive with, and the confusion is fair enough: a newer hub turned up in September 2025 and it looks like a replacement. It isn't one. The Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2 sits alongside the original, and it dropped Z-Wave.

Four different things are called a SmartThings hub

They aren't interchangeable. Each carries a different set of radios, and the radios decide which devices you can actually connect.

Two older hubs sit behind that table. The Samsung-branded SmartThings Hub v2 from 2015 and Hub v3 from 2018 are both legacy, and both were still receiving firmware releases in 2026. If you own one, you're not being cut off today. If you're shopping, they're not what you're shopping for.

The question that decides it: do you need Z-Wave?

Everything else follows from that one answer, because only one current hub carries a Z-Wave radio at all. If the devices you want run on Z-Wave, your choice narrows to exactly one product.

Most people don't need it. Z-Wave matters in two situations: you already own Z-Wave devices and would rather not replace them, or the one product you actually want is only made in Z-Wave. If neither is true and you're starting from scratch, you're buying Zigbee, Thread or Matter, and the second half of this page is the part written for you.

If you do need it, the product is the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, the v3-lineage standalone box. Neither newer hub carries Z-Wave. The Hub 2, announced at IFA in early September 2025, dropped it, and the SmartThings Station never had it. If Z-Wave is what you came for, the newest hardware in the line is the wrong hardware.

If you don't need Z-Wave, you may already own a hub

Samsung has been building SmartThings hubs into its own hardware for years. Premium televisions, Smart Monitors, soundbars, projectors and Family Hub refrigerators can carry one, and at that tier the built-in hub also works as a Thread border router alongside its Zigbee radio.

On entry and mid-tier models the built-in hub is a thinner thing. It reaches Wi-Fi and cloud-connected devices only, and needs the SmartThings Hub Dongle plugged into a USB port to add Zigbee and Thread.

The trap is that this is settled by tier, not by year. Don't work it out from the model year of your television. A mid-range 2024 set can have less capable hub hardware than a premium 2023 one, and the difference changes which protocols you can use. Check your specific model in Samsung's compatible-devices directory.

What no built-in hub does, at any tier and with or without the dongle, is Z-Wave. If Z-Wave is on your list, the television isn't the answer.

Who makes the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, and who supports it

Samsung makes the SmartThings platform. Aeotec makes the hub. Aeotec announced the handover on 11 December 2020, and its own release describes the arrangement as an agreement with SmartThings. Which matters more than it sounds: the support obligation for your hub is split across two companies, and neither publishes how long a hub will be supported or what the clock runs from.

The record is mixed. The 2015 Hub v2 was still getting firmware in 2026, which is a long life by any measure. But Samsung shut down the Groovy platform that ran custom device handlers and community automations on 31 December 2022, and households that had built on it had to start again.

If the hub dies, you re-pair everything

Aeotec documents a direct device transfer from a Samsung Hub v2 or v3 to an Aeotec hub, but says the devices themselves must be re-added, and there's no general backup-and-restore path for a hub that has failed. On a household running 30 or 40 Zigbee and Z-Wave devices that's a weekend rather than an afternoon, and some devices will want a Z-Wave exclusion or a Zigbee reset before they'll pair again.

That's not a reason to avoid the product. It's a reason to keep a written list of what's paired to the hub, and to think twice before loading one hub with more devices than you'd be willing to rebuild by hand.

Buying one in Australia

We don't stock any of this, and we couldn't find a dependable Australian source for it, so there's nothing for us to sell you here. We could find no SmartThings hub hardware listed by Samsung Australia at all. Its presence here is appliance-led, which is to say televisions and refrigerators with hubs inside them rather than hubs on a shelf.

The Aeotec hub reaches Australia through a single importer, and a unit bought from an overseas seller falls outside Aeotec's own warranty terms. Australian Consumer Law guarantees still apply and can't be excluded, but chasing a manufacturer warranty across a border is a different exercise from walking back into a shop. That's not a reason to give up on the hub. It's a reason to confirm the seller and the ANZ variant before you pay.

So which one?

Two answers, and the Z-Wave question picks between them.

• Z-Wave, yes: the Aeotec Smart Home Hub, in the ANZ variant. Nothing else current carries the radio, and the frequency has to be the Australian one.
• Z-Wave, no: check what your Samsung television, monitor, soundbar or refrigerator already has. A recent premium model probably has a hub in it already, and an entry or mid-tier model plus the SmartThings Hub Dongle is far easier to buy here than any standalone hub.