Best Zigbee routers and repeaters for Home Assistant

The cheapest fix for a flaky Zigbee network is three or four mains-powered smart plugs, spread out, one per floor at minimum. Any Zigbee plug that stays powered relays traffic for the battery sensors around it. You don’t need a product sold as a “repeater”.

I run Sengled outlets and ThirdReality night lights as routers in my own house. The other picks come from the spec sheets, the Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA device pages, and what other Home Assistant users report.

Quick verdict

What routes and what doesn’t

Zigbee devices come in two kinds. Routers relay messages for their neighbours. End devices only talk to one parent and sleep the rest of the time.

• Mains-powered plugs, in-wall switches and most bulbs are routers.
• Anything on a battery is an end device. Motion sensors, door contacts, buttons, leak sensors and locks never extend the mesh, however many you own.
• No-neutral relays are end devices too, despite being wired in. The SONOFF ZBMINI Extreme and ZBMINI-L2 can’t stay awake enough to route without a neutral. SONOFF’s neutral-required ZBMINIR2 does route.
• Bulbs route only while they have power. A bulb behind a wall switch that people flick off takes its branch of the mesh down with it. Sengled’s bulbs are the known exception the other way: they join as end devices by design, so they never route. Sengled’s outlets do.

That’s why a house full of Aqara sensors and one coordinator in a basement has dropouts. It has plenty of devices and no mesh.

The plugs I’d buy first

ThirdReality Smart Plug Gen2

About $13 for one, less in multipacks, with energy monitoring and a body slim enough to leave the second outlet free. It pairs to Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA with no ThirdReality hub. Some revisions have no physical button, and the energy reporting interval may need tuning in Zigbee2MQTT. I haven’t run this one; it’s the pick because nothing else is this cheap with metering. ThirdReality also sells a Gen3 at $14.99 on its own store.

Sengled Smart Outlet

I bought six of these to get notifications when appliances finish, and every one of them is also a Zigbee repeater. The indoor ones are all still going. Two in an unheated Minnesota garage did not survive a winter that hit about -15F, which isn’t a knock on them. They aren’t rated for anything close to that. They run around $15 each and about $10 on sale. Sengled sells a Bluetooth-mesh version that looks the same, so check that the listing says Zigbee. Sengled’s own US store is offline; buy through a retailer.

ThirdReality Night Light

Plugs into an outlet and gives you a night light, a motion sensor and a router. As a configurable night light it’s been a little flaky for me. As a motion sensor that never needs a battery it’s been excellent in stairwells and bathrooms, with basically no drop-offs in eight months. Those are also the places a mesh tends to be thin, so it fixes two problems.

Shelly Plug US Gen4

A $24.99 plug that ships on Wi-Fi in a Matter profile. Five presses of the button switch it to Zigbee, where it joins as a router and Zigbee2MQTT already has a definition for it. Only one profile runs at a time, and the Zigbee profile drops the scripting that lives in the Wi-Fi firmware. It costs twice what a ThirdReality plug does, so buy it if you think you may want it back on Wi-Fi someday. I run older Shelly plugs on Wi-Fi, not this one.

Aqara Smart Plug

$29.99 direct, solid build, and a router. Zigbee2MQTT exposes power, energy, voltage and current. Under ZHA most of those measurements come back unavailable, so it’s a Zigbee2MQTT pick. It needs no Aqara hub when paired to your own coordinator.

EU and UK: frient Smart Plug Mini 2

Compact enough not to block the next socket on a strip, with energy measurement, in Type E/F and Type G versions. The Philips Hue Smart Plug also routes, but it costs more and meters nothing, so it only makes sense if you’re already on a Hue mesh.

When a plug isn’t enough

At the far end of a long house, or anywhere without a handy outlet, a plug may not be the right shape for the job. A router still joins the mesh by radio, so each of these has to be within range of another router or the coordinator.

• The SMLIGHT SLZB-06 is sold as a coordinator, but its firmware can run it as a plain Zigbee router instead. PoE powers it anywhere you can run a network cable, such as a ceiling or an attic, and its external antenna reaches further than a plug. About $73 on Amazon.
• A spare SONOFF ZBDongle-E or ZBDongle-P can be reflashed with router firmware and plugged into any USB charger. The external antenna gives it more reach than a plug. It’s a project, not a purchase, and only worth it if you already have one in a drawer.

A detached garage or outbuilding that no router can reach by radio is a different problem. The fix there is a second Zigbee network with its own Ethernet coordinator, such as a second SLZB-06 in coordinator mode, not a repeater.

If the whole network is weak and not only one corner, the problem is more likely where the coordinator sits. Zigbee coordinator placement for large houses covers that, and a PoE coordinator lets you move the radio without moving the server.

How many, and where

• One per floor at minimum, and spread them out. Four routers within a few metres of the coordinator give the far bedroom no path.
• Put one between the coordinator and each problem device, roughly halfway.
• Keep them off switched outlets and power strips that get turned off.
• Stick to a few brands. A router with odd firmware can cause pairing failures for every device behind it. The routers in my own house are Sengled and ThirdReality. frient and Inovelli have a similar reputation, though I haven’t run them.

Check that it worked

Open the network map in Zigbee2MQTT, or the visualization in ZHA. Each device is labelled as a router or an end device, and the lines show who is talking through whom.

Battery devices don’t always move to a new router on their own. Aqara sensors in particular tend to stay with the parent they joined through. If a sensor is still dropping after you add a router near it, re-pair the sensor while holding it next to that router.

If devices still fall off after that, work through how to debug flaky Zigbee devices, and check that your Zigbee channel isn’t sitting on top of your Wi-Fi.