What’s the Difference Between Zigbee and Z-Wave? Here’s Everything You Need to Know

ZigBee and Z-Wave are among the most widely adopted smart home protocols. From smart light bulbs to thermostats and controller hubs, both communication protocols are used extensively in a wide variety of smart home gadgets.

To ensure your smart home devices can stay in seamless synchrony with each other, sticking with one smart home protocol is a good idea. But between ZigBee and Z-Wave, which smart home protocol is best for you?

Not sure which one? Let’s help you make a decision.

What Is Z-Wave and ZigBee?

Before we put the two smart home protocols against each other, let’s understand a bit about both of them.

Both ZigBee and Z-Wave are low bandwidth, low energy, mesh networks. Low bandwidth in the sense that they can carry little amounts of data. They are labeled as low energy because they are relatively energy efficient and require little energy input to stay active.

Similarly, when we say they’re mesh networks, it means, rather than depending on one central hub (like a router) for communication, each device acts like a node and connects to each other to form a web of interconnected devices. Here, every node or device can serve as a data endpoint or a signal repeater that sends data to the next node in the network.

Both communication protocols are typically faster than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and usually offer better reliability in connections. However, because of their low bandwidth, you won’t find them in devices like HD security cams that transmit a lot of data.

They’re better suited for sensors, smart lights, smart locks, basically mostly devices that won’t need to transmit a lot of heavy data. To better understand both smart home protocols, take a look at our Z-Wave protocol explainer as well as our deep dive into the ZigBee protocol.

In a nutshell, ZigBee and Z-Wave are very similar in a lot of ways. However, they also have a lot of unique features that make each of them worth choosing over the other. But what are these features?

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Compatibility

Ideally, you want to walk into a shop, buy a ZigBee product, come home, plug it in and watch it work with other ZigBee products. That’s the selling point behind most unifying smart home protocols and ZigBee is not an exception. You can buy a ZigBee product from one brand, and it’ll be able to talk to a product from another, thereby providing seamless Integration.

However, it’s not just ZigBee that offers this cross-brand compatibility. Z-Wave offers it as well. So, just as a ZigBee product from one brand would be able to integrate with that of another, Z-Wave can achieve the same. But, there are a lot of nuances to this fact. On the surface, products using either protocol can talk seamlessly with each other, but this is not entirely true. Why?

Z-Wave operates within a varying frequency range depending on the country or region. In Europe, it operates around the 868.42 MHz band, 908.42 MHz in the US, and other varying frequencies across several countries. Consequently, if you try to use a product that was originally designed for, say, the European market, in the US, there are bound to be compatibility issues irrespective of the fact that they’re all Z-Wave products.

On the other hand, ZigBee is more unified on this front. ZigBee uses the more universal 2.4 GHz radio frequency band making it more globally compatible. As a result, it is less likely you’ll have issues using your European ZigBee product in the US. A compatibility problem worth discussing when it comes to the ZigBee standard is that ZigBee is a multi-standard protocol that could be implemented differently by any product manufacturer.

There’s a different standard for home automation devices, digital health devices, home, and hospital care products, and several others. Worse off, products using different ZigBee standards or profiles can not talk to each other seamlessly.

This is why some ZigBee products, like ZigBee-compatible hubs, only work with a limited subset of ZigBee products. However, the ZigBee 3.0 standard promises to unify all ZigBee protocols such that one ZigBee product should be able to talk to others irrespective of their profile.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Available Devices

If you’re settling for either smart home protocol, you probably want to ensure that you’ll find all the products you need for your smart home. Both ZigBee and Z-Wave are very prominent smart home protocols and are adopted by a lot of established smart home brands.

You’ll find ZigBee products made by Samsung, IKEA, Belkin, Lux, Philips, and Amazon. Similarly, you’ll find Z-Wave products made by Samsung, Yale, August, Logitech, Kwikset, Honeywell, and LG. There is no shortage of devices for both smart home protocols. However, in terms of sheer product numbers, Z-Wave has more products in its circle. If you choose to look out for products made by big-name smart home brands, ZigBee is more favored.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Cost of Products

Apart from product availability, you also want to get available products at reasonable prices. In terms of the product cost, you’ll find ZigBee products to be generally cheaper. In some cases, you could find a ZigBee product that sells for, say, $20 but a similar product that uses the Z-Wave protocol for $40 to $50. Although you may not always see significant price differences, you’ll certainly do so a lot of times.

In case you’re wondering, it’s not necessarily about the brand. You’ll still find ZigBee products from big-name brands that are almost half the price of similar products from less-known smart home brands. One of the reasons for this is that while ZigBee is an open protocol managed by an alliance of several companies that agree to a certain IoT standard, Z-Wave is a proprietary product owned by a single company.

To make Z-Wave products, a product manufacturer would have to pay for and take part in a rigorous Z-Wave certification program. The costs of certification and adhering to the Z-Wave standard are eventually pushed to the end users resulting in higher retail prices.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Potential Interference

ZigBee operates within the 2.4 GHz band which opens it to a lot of potential interference. The 2.4 GHz radio frequency band is also used by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth smart home products. This could result in either of the three smart home protocols running into each other. What does interference look like in real life? Well, a good example is communication among your ZigBee-powered smart home devices not going through as smoothly as you’d like.

Z-Wave on the other hand is less affected by interference. While a lot of smart home devices would be running through the 2.4 GHz frequency, Z-Wave stays comfortably away at the 800 to 900 MHz (0.8 to 0.9 GHz) radio frequency range. Consequently, there’s less competition within the frequency band and less room for interference.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Attenuation

You’ll probably be using your smart home devices at your home, full of concrete, metallic, or wooden walls. You want signals from your smart home devices to be able to reach each other for smooth communication. Attenuation is how well or poorly the signal from your smart home devices can travel through obstacles like your room’s concrete or wooden walls without losing much of its signal strength.

In this metric, Z-Wave does better. Z-Wave has a lower attenuation due to running on a lower-frequency radio band. ZigBee’s higher 2.4 GHz radio frequency band makes it more susceptible to attenuation due to physical obstacles.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Range

The range of both smart home protocols is often a talking point. ZigBee has a shorter range of around 35 feet while Z-Wave can do 330 feet in open spaces and 150 feet indoors. While this is a significant difference, both smart home protocols are mesh networks, and their ability to mesh significantly affects their collective range. In order words, if more ZigBee devices are placed in a ZigBee network, it can cancel out the advantage that Z-Wave has in terms of node-to-node range.

ZigBee vs. Z-Wave: Which One Is Better?

ZigBee and Z-Wave are both well-established smart home protocols with their own sets of pros and cons. Z-Wave is often criticized for being a closed system. However, one of the advantages of this is the control that it gives homeowners. The Z-Wave Alliance guarantees that every Z-Wave device complies with a strict set of standards. In contrast, while it is open source, ZigBee is sometimes faulted for its perceived lack of interoperability.

From an end-user perspective, a lot of customers would be happy with products from either camp. Luckily, an increasing number of smart home devices now offer more than one standard, so you don’t necessarily have to make a choice.