ST user for years in my home previously; gut renovated the house and we’re finalizing it to move back in. I had Lutron Caseta light switches and dimmers installed everywhere (~70 devices; may be more and I may need a second Lutron hub), and had at least a couple GE Enbrighten z-wave outlets installed in each room to establish a good Z-wave mesh.
I’m going to toss my original ST hub and start fresh. Which hub is best these days? Money is no limitation, I just want the best/fastest/most robust performance available. As I see it, it’s either the original Samsung ST, which can be bought refurbished; the Aeotec hub; or the new Samsung charging station hub. I believe the new charging station version does NOT have z-wave compatibility, which seems like a big miss to me. Is the Aeotec Hub the best/most recent option?
No, because at the time of this writing, Z wave is not compatible with matter in any way, neither directly nor via bridge.
the company that owns the Z wave license has said that they are working on a project that might eventually make it possible to create hubs that integrate Z wave and matter, but so far no manufacturers, have signed up to use it. So that’s several years off at least.
So the following looks great, but it’s not yet available. And it would definitely require a whole new hub, and again, nobody’s even working on one with this capability yet.
If you want an official Smartthings Hub with zwave, as @jkp mentioned, your only option is the Aeotec.
Another option that a number of community members use is to get a hubitat Hub, and then use one of the community built integrations between it and smartthings. You would connect your zwave devices to the hubitat Hub (which is two zwave generations ahead of the Aeotec). You would still be able to use the smartthings app and any integrations which are not available in Hubitat. It’s technically a little complicated, but there are definitely people doing that.
You do still need to have a Smartthings Hub of some kind in order to make the integration work, but I believe that could be the station, which is less expensive. You can check with the people who have written the community integrations to see what the details are.
The integrations that have been been built so far. The two approaches are a little different, but you can ask questions in the author threads.
