Wi-Fi vs Zigbee

Wi-Fi and Zigbee are not really competing for the same job. Wi-Fi is the network you already have, and it carries anything that needs real bandwidth. Zigbee is a separate low-power mesh that runs on its own hub, built for devices that send a few bytes and then go back to sleep. Pick the wrong one for a device and you will feel it, either in batteries you are changing every few months or in a router carrying more clients than it is comfortable with.

The short answer

Put anything that streams on Wi-Fi, and anything that runs on a battery on Zigbee.

Cameras, video doorbells, smart displays and speakers need bandwidth, and only Wi-Fi has it. Door sensors, motion sensors, buttons, temperature sensors and large numbers of lights need to be frugal and reliable, which is Zigbee's whole design. Smart plugs and in-wall switches sit in the middle: either works, and the tiebreaker is how many you are installing and whether you already own a hub.

Most Australian smart homes end up running both. They are separate networks, so there is nothing to reconcile.

Battery life is the difference you will notice

This is the one that decides most purchases. A Zigbee sensor spends nearly all of its life asleep. It wakes, sends a handful of bytes, and goes back down. Aqara rates its Zigbee door and window sensor at over two years on a single coin cell, and that is ordinary for the protocol rather than exceptional.

Wi-Fi makes that much harder. Staying on a Wi-Fi network means holding an association with the router and answering it regularly, and the radio draws far more every time it transmits. Battery-powered Wi-Fi sensors are usually rated in months. A few vendors do beat that, and Shelly's battery range claims a year or more, but they are the exception. Most battery-powered sensors and buttons on the market run on Zigbee, Thread or Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi.

Mains power makes the argument disappear. A Wi-Fi plug in a wall socket does not care how hungry its radio is.

How many devices before something gives

Every Wi-Fi device takes a slot on your router. Linksys puts the comfortable ceiling for a consumer router at 20 to 50 devices, and the raw count is not the whole story: most Wi-Fi smart home gear is 2.4 GHz only, so it all crowds onto the slower band while your laptops and phones have 5 GHz to themselves. A house with 20 bulbs and plugs is most of the way to that ceiling before anyone opens a laptop.

Zigbee handles scale differently. The coordinator only takes a limited number of direct children, 32 in Home Assistant's Zigbee integration, but every mains-powered Zigbee device is also a router that relays for its neighbours. Add a few plugs or in-wall switches and the network grows past 100 devices without the coordinator ever seeing most of them. Vendor bridges and smart home hubs set their own ceilings on top of that: Philips recommends up to 50 lights and 12 accessories on a Hue Bridge.

The catch is that battery devices never relay. They are asleep, so they cannot route for anything else. A Zigbee network made only of sensors has no mesh in it at all: every device ends up shouting straight at the coordinator. Install the mains-powered devices first, in their final positions, and pair the sensors afterwards.

Bandwidth is why your camera cannot be Zigbee

Zigbee runs at 250 kbit/s, and that is the raw radio rate before any protocol overhead. A single 1080p security camera stream needs roughly 2 to 4 Mbps. That is at least eight times what the entire Zigbee radio can carry, for one camera. This is not Zigbee being slow. There is not enough radio there to move video at all.

The same maths applies to anything that shifts real data: video doorbells, smart displays, speakers streaming music, and any device pulling down a firmware update. Those are Wi-Fi devices, and there is no argument to have about it.

What happens when the internet drops

Zigbee never touches the internet. Devices talk to the coordinator over their own radio, so lights, sensors and automations keep running through an NBN outage. You lose remote access and voice control, because those go through the cloud, but the house still works.

Wi-Fi devices vary. Some are genuinely local and keep responding on your network. Many route every command through the manufacturer's servers, which means a dropped connection stops them dead, and a manufacturer closing the service down stops them for good. It is worth checking before you buy, because nothing on the box tells you.

Response time follows the same split. A local command travels a few metres and lands almost instantly. A cloud command goes to a data centre and back, and you feel that on a light switch.

They share the 2.4 GHz band, and they do fight over it

Zigbee sits in the same 2.4 GHz spectrum as Wi-Fi, and this is the most common cause of a Zigbee network that works for a week and then starts dropping devices.

Zigbee uses channels 11 to 26, spaced 5 MHz apart. A 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi channel is 20 MHz wide, so each one sits on top of four of them. Wi-Fi channel 1 covers Zigbee 11 to 14, Wi-Fi 6 covers Zigbee 16 to 19, and Wi-Fi 11 covers Zigbee 21 to 24. The gaps left between them are Zigbee 15, 20 and 25, which is exactly the three Home Assistant recommends.

So pin both. Set your router to a fixed 2.4 GHz channel of 1, 6 or 11 at 20 MHz width rather than leaving it on auto, then put Zigbee on whichever of those gaps sits furthest away from it. A router on Wi-Fi 1 or 6 pairs with Zigbee 25; a router on Wi-Fi 11 pairs with Zigbee 15. Keep the coordinator well away from the router, and if it is a USB coordinator, keep it off a USB 3.0 port, which throws out 2.4 GHz noise of its own.

What each one costs to start

Wi-Fi is cheapest for the first device and gets worse from there. There is no hub to buy, so a single Wi-Fi plug is the cheapest possible way in. But every device you add loads the same router, and the Wi-Fi version of a product is rarely cheaper than the Zigbee one.

Zigbee front-loads the cost. You need a coordinator before anything works, whether that is a vendor bridge like the Hue Bridge, a hub with a Zigbee radio built in, or a USB coordinator on Home Assistant. Past that, the network gets more reliable as it grows, which is the opposite of what Wi-Fi does.

We put the crossover at around five to 10 devices, and it arrives sooner if any of them run on batteries. Below that, Wi-Fi is hard to argue with. Above it, the hub has already paid for itself in batteries and router headroom.

Where Wi-Fi is the right choice

Anything that streams. Cameras, video doorbells, smart displays and speakers need bandwidth Zigbee does not have.

One or two devices. If a single plug is the whole plan, a hub is overkill.

Renting. Nothing to install, nothing to leave behind, and the whole setup fits in a box when you move.

Products with no Zigbee version. Air conditioners, robot vacuums and most appliances are Wi-Fi only, so the choice is made for you.

Where Zigbee is the right choice

Anything on a battery. Sensors and buttons last years instead of months.

Lots of lights. 30 Zigbee bulbs are 30 devices on a mesh built for them, not 30 more clients on your router.

Automations that must not fail. Local control keeps working when the internet does not.

Buttons and switches you press. The response is immediate, because nothing leaves the house.

A setup that will keep growing. Every mains-powered device you add makes the mesh stronger.

Does Matter change this?

Not in the way people expect. Matter runs over Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Thread. It does not run over Zigbee, and a Zigbee device cannot be updated into a Matter device, because Matter works on top of IP while Zigbee is a complete network stack of its own.

What happens instead is bridging. A Hue Bridge or a SmartThings hub presents its Zigbee devices to Matter controllers as though they were Matter devices, so existing gear shows up in Apple Home or Google Home without being replaced.

And Zigbee is not going anywhere. The Connectivity Standards Alliance, which also maintains Matter, released Zigbee 4.0 in November 2025, a major update that tightens security and commissioning and adds sub-GHz radio support, and kept it fully backward compatible with the billion-plus Zigbee devices already deployed. Buying Zigbee in 2026 is not buying into a dead end.

So run both

There is no version of this where you pick one and stay there. The cameras go on Wi-Fi because they have to, the sensors go on Zigbee because they have to, and the plugs and switches go wherever suits the size of your setup. Decide per device rather than per house, and set the two networks up so they are not sitting on top of each other in the 2.4 GHz band.