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IKEA moves to Thread (and away from Zigbee)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I am pretty happy with zigbee so far. Is that a good thing? I haven‘t done anything with matter so far.
@arschflugkoerper@feddit.org I have nothing useful to contribute, but I fucking love your username. Thank you for the smirk you gave me, have a nice evening mein Genosse 👋
thanks lol
Tja
I agree, great name!
It's just a technological step forward. Thread was designed from the ground up as an IPv6 protocol. Honestly, this kind of move is coming later than would have been ideal, given the massive growth in IoT devices.
I am just getting started on this journey but zigbee seems great and I like that it works fine even if the wifi goes down. I'm not sure what the drawbacks are or the benefits of Matter.
matter and thread are different things fyi…
thread uses the same wireless communication as zigbee (zigbee has other stuff on top of it), so is a low power wireless protocol
matter is the data format that devices use to communicate on top of an IP-based network like wifi or thread. it’s meant to standardise all these competing “works with google” “works with alexa” “homekit compatible”: if it works with matter, it should work with any coordinator that has matter compatibility (which all the big ones do these days)
thread will work great if the wifi is down - same as zigbee!
matter also (afaik) forces local devices: your coordinator (a homepod, alexa, etc) talks directly to the device without going through the internet. again, same as zigbee
Thanks for the explainer, that last point is really great actually and I'm surprised that Amazon/Google etc are pushing for Matter if the data isn't sent to the internet.
well your coordinator gets to end whatever it likes wherever it likes but the devices themselves communicate over your internal network so everything should be much snappier
Yeah so far it doesn't matter because zigbee and zwave still work fine.
Hehe.
Anyway, I am also completely on Zigbee. While I like the concept of Matter over Thread, I wouldn't want to switch, because it will start with a too small network to cover a good distance and if I start replacing Zigbee devices, I effectively sabotage that network as well. So my only move would be to replace all Zigbee with Matter/Thread devices. And that seems insane. So I hope I keep getting new Zigbee devices for a while.