Does SmartThings need a hub?

No, not to start. Wi-Fi devices, cloud-connected devices and devices that ship with their own bridge all work through the SmartThings app with nothing else in the house.

You need a hub for three low-power radios: Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread. Matter is its own case, and it needs a controller whichever way it travels. That's the whole answer. The rest of this page is why, and what 'a hub' actually means, because it means four different products.

One thing before any of it, because it catches people out: SmartThings runs on a Samsung account, hub or no hub. There's no way around that.

The short answer, by device

Whether you need a hub is a question about the device you're buying. Ask it once per product, not once for the house.

Anything that reaches Samsung's servers on its own is fine without a hub. That covers Wi-Fi devices, cloud-connected devices that talk to their maker's service and on to SmartThings, and devices that ship with their own bridge, where the bridge carries the radio and SmartThings only has to reach the bridge.

The three that do need one are all low-power radios: Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread, including Matter over Thread. Your phone can't be the radio for any of them, so something in the house has to be.

Matter is the one people get wrong. Samsung's position is that a Matter controller is required and that the app on its own isn't enough, and that holds for Matter over Wi-Fi as much as for Matter over Thread. In the SmartThings range that controller is hardware rather than a setting, and it includes the Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2 and the SmartThings Station.

How a device actually reaches SmartThings

Underneath all of that, a device has exactly four paths in.

• The manufacturer's cloud. The device talks to its maker's servers, and those servers talk to Samsung's. No hub anywhere.
• A hub radio. Zigbee, Z-Wave or Thread, spoken directly between the hub and the device.
• Matter. Over either Wi-Fi or Thread, through a Matter controller.
• A local network integration. An IP device the hub reaches directly across your network, with no cloud round trip. This path does need the hub, because the integration runs on it.

Bluetooth isn't one of them. The Smart Home Hub 2 and the SmartThings Station both carry Bluetooth, but it's used to get the hub set up and to talk to it for diagnostics. It isn't a control path, so Bluetooth on a spec sheet is no reason to expect a Bluetooth device to work.

'A hub' can mean four different products

This is where it gets muddy. Four quite different things go by the name, and they don't carry the same radios.

• A standalone Aeotec hub. Aeotec builds the boxed hardware under an agreement with SmartThings, announced in December 2020. The original Aeotec Smart Home Hub carries Zigbee, Z-Wave Plus, Thread, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Its successor, the Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2, carries Zigbee 3.0, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and drops Z-Wave altogether.
• The SmartThings Station. A hub, a Thread border router and a Matter controller built into a wireless phone charger. Zigbee 3.0, Thread, Matter and Wi-Fi, with no Z-Wave and no Ethernet.
• A hub inside a Samsung device. Plenty of Samsung TVs, monitors, projectors, soundbars and Family Hub fridges have one built in. It's how a lot of people end up with a hub without ever buying one.
• An older Samsung hub. The 2015 Hub v2, which carries Zigbee and Z-Wave but no Thread.

Z-Wave is the one that catches people. It lives only on the original Aeotec Smart Home Hub and the 2015 Hub v2, and no built-in hub carries it under any circumstances. Z-Wave radios are also region-locked and won't interoperate across regions, so an Australian build needs the Australian variant of the hub.

Thread has a similar catch. Samsung confirms that the Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2, the SmartThings Station and its select premium built-in hubs act as Thread border routers. The original Aeotec Smart Home Hub lists Thread among its protocols, but we haven't found a Samsung statement that it acts as a border router, so if Thread matters to you, don't assume that hub covers it.

A built-in hub also isn't a smaller version of a standalone one. Samsung's 2026 hub firmware releases covered standalone hubs only, with televisions explicitly not receiving updates at that release.

What a hub actually adds

If everything you own is Wi-Fi or cloud-connected, the platform already works, so the question stops being whether you need a hub and becomes why you'd want one. The answer is local execution, which is the job a smart home hub does on any platform.

Before SmartThings Edge, the driver architecture that replaced Groovy at the end of 2022, device logic ran in Samsung's cloud. A sensor tripped, the event went to Samsung, Samsung decided a light should come on, and the instruction came back. Edge moved that logic onto the hub itself, using Lua drivers that run on the hardware in your house. Control and automations for directly connected Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave and local network devices with Edge drivers now run locally, and so do timer-triggered automations through the Rules API.

That's the honest case for a hub. Not more features, but shorter paths.

It changes what happens when the internet drops, too. With Edge drivers in place, hub-connected devices keep responding locally, while remote access, cloud notifications and third-party cloud integrations don't. That's a longer answer than this page can carry, but it's the second half of the case for owning one.

So do you need one?

Work it out per device, not per house. List what you already own or are about to buy, and ask what each one speaks. If the whole list is Wi-Fi or cloud-connected, install the app, sign in to a Samsung account and you're finished. If anything on it is Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread or Matter, you need hardware in the house, and which piece depends on which of those.