Zigbee vs Z-Wave: which to buy in Australia

The short answer

Buy Zigbee unless a specific product you want is Z-Wave.

Zigbee is cheaper, there is far more of it on sale in Australia, and its 2.4 GHz radio is the same in every country, so a device works wherever you bought it. Z-Wave is the calmer radio and it gets through walls better, which is a real advantage in a big masonry house. But Australia is its own Z-Wave frequency region, and that changes what you are allowed to buy and what will actually pair.

That is the recommendation. The rest of this page is why, and where Z-Wave still wins.

Australia is its own Z-Wave region

Z-Wave runs below 1 GHz and the exact frequency is set per country. Silicon Labs, which makes the Z-Wave chips, lists Australia and New Zealand as the ANZ region on 919.8 MHz and 921.4 MHz, tested to AS/NZS 4268. The United States uses 908.4 MHz and 916 MHz. Europe uses 868.4 MHz and 869.85 MHz. None of those overlap.

Here that is a legal line as well as a technical one. The ACMA puts the Australian 900 MHz ISM band at 915 to 928 MHz, and says devices using 902 to 915 MHz are not authorised for use within Australia. American Z-Wave sits at 908.4 MHz, under that floor.

So a good half of the Z-Wave buying advice online is written for the American market and does not survive the trip. Cheap Z-Wave locks on an overseas site, a US bundle deal, a hub someone recommends on Reddit: check the region before any of it. Zigbee has no equivalent trap. It uses the 2.4 GHz band on channels 11 to 26, the same everywhere, so what you buy overseas joins the network you have here.

Range, walls and congestion

Sub-GHz is the genuine Z-Wave advantage. A longer wavelength loses less through brick, and a lot of Australian housing is double brick or rendered masonry with a foil-lined wall behind it. Where a Zigbee mesh needs a mains-powered device every room or two to keep the chain going, Z-Wave will usually make the same trip in fewer hops.

Be realistic about the numbers. Ordinary Z-Wave products specify around 30 to 40 m indoors. The 100 m figure that gets quoted is line of sight with nothing in the way, and it is a comparison figure rather than something you should plan a house around.

The other half of it is who else is using the band. Zigbee shares 2.4 GHz with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and every neighbour's router. In a townhouse with three access points and units either side, that band is crowded, and most Zigbee flakiness people blame on the protocol is really channel overlap with Wi-Fi. It is fixable: Home Assistant's advice is to set a static Wi-Fi channel first, before touching the Zigbee channel. Z-Wave never has the argument in the first place.

How big each network gets

Classic Z-Wave caps at 232 devices including the controller, and a message can pass through at most four repeating nodes on its way. Zigbee uses 16-bit addressing, so the theoretical ceiling is around 65,000, and it has no equivalent four-repeater rule. Frames carry a hop allowance and each hub's software sets its own depth limit.

Neither ceiling is what you will hit. Your hub runs out first, and every hub has its own tested device limit well below both numbers. Ask what the hub is rated for rather than what the protocol allows.

Z-Wave Long Range is the exception, and it is the one worth knowing about here. It drops the mesh entirely, talking straight to the controller over a much longer distance with room for thousands of nodes. It is defined for the United States and Europe. There is no ANZ frequency plan for it, and Home Assistant's region picker offers Long Range for Europe and the USA and nowhere else. An 800 series chip in an Australian hub does not change that. In Australia, Z-Wave means classic mesh.

What you can actually buy here

The specifications are close. The catalogues are not.

Zigbee is everywhere. Philips Hue's entire lighting range runs on a Zigbee mesh, where each mains-powered light passes the signal along. Aqara, Sonoff, IKEA and the Tuya white-label ranges are all Zigbee, sold through mainstream retail and local online shops, from twenty-dollar contact sensors up.

Z-Wave in Australia is a real range, not a dead one, but a narrower one. Shelly publishes ANZ versions of its Wave in-wall relays and dimmers at 919.8 MHz, and there is a specialist tail of Aeotec, Fibaro and Yale gear through importers. What you give up is breadth: fewer brands, fewer device types, and almost nothing at the cheap end. Expect to pay more per device than the Zigbee equivalent, because ANZ is a small production run of a certified product.

Controllers need the same check. Some are sold as distinct Australian models; others ship one radio worldwide and set the region in software. Either is fine. Buying a US model and hoping is not.

Certification and interoperability

Z-Wave's pitch is that certification is compulsory and the command set is standardised, so a certified device and a certified controller of the same region should work together. That mostly holds, and it is the strongest argument for paying the Z-Wave premium.

Zigbee 3.0 unified the older application profiles and closed most of that gap, but "any Zigbee device works with any Zigbee hub" is still not a safe claim. Manufacturers add their own clusters, some brands want their own hub for full function, and what you get depends on what your hub's software exposes. If you are building on Home Assistant, that is largely a solved problem, and the choice of Zigbee adapter matters more than the brand of the sensors.

Who each one is right for

Choose Zigbee if this is your first system, if you are buying sensors and lighting, if budget matters, or if you are building on Home Assistant. That covers most people reading this.

Choose Z-Wave if you have a large or heavily built house where a 2.4 GHz mesh keeps dropping devices, if the specific product you want has no Zigbee equal, or if you already run a Z-Wave controller and would rather keep one network than start a second.

You can also run both, if your hub carries both radios. Plenty do. They run two separate networks that your automations treat as one set of devices, and that is the normal outcome for anyone who has been at this a few years. Buy for the device, not for the protocol.