Everything Presence One vs Aqara FP2

For whole-room occupancy in Home Assistant, I’d choose the Everything Presence One; for zones configured through Aqara’s app, the Aqara FP2. The EP1 also has manufacturer-documented Homey and SmartThings paths, with different setup requirements below.

An Everything Presence One runs in my living room and an Aqara FP1E on my dining room ceiling. I haven’t run the FP2; its comparison and the EP1 Homey and SmartThings guidance here come from documentation. If you are deciding where sensors should go, start with how to add presence detection to every room.

The short answer

If Home Assistant is your platform and you want zero cloud, the Everything Presence One: ESPHome-native, fully local, endlessly tunable. If you want zone-level tracking with a polished app and accept a vendor layer, the Aqara FP2; its multi-zone tracking is the most capable here (up to 30 zones), but Wi-Fi setup runs through Aqara’s app. If you want zones but no vendor app, the Everything Presence Lite is the only sensor here that does zone tracking over a purely local ESPHome path.

Everything Presence One: whole-room occupancy over ESPHome

The Everything Presence One is an open-source ESPHome multi-sensor: mmWave presence plus PIR motion, with temperature, humidity and light sensing on the same board. Its native Home Assistant connection runs locally without an Everything Smart Home account or cloud relay.

Because it runs ESPHome, the detection behaviour is configurable: distance thresholds, sensitivity, timeout, and how the mmWave and PIR halves combine. What it does not do is zones - the vendor’s own EP1-versus-Lite comparison lists both zone support and multi-target tracking as “No” for the One. It tells you the area is occupied or it is not, rather than where in that area you are. Initial setup and tuning take patience; choose the platform and firmware path before following a setup guide.

Can Everything Presence One work with Homey or SmartThings?

Yes. The vendor’s EP1 firmware installer offers Home Assistant, Homey and SmartThings options. Match the board revision printed on your device - 1.3/1.4, 1.5 or 1.6 - and its SEN0395 or SEN0609 radar. Select CO₂ support only if that expansion module is fitted. These are firmware choices for particular hardware, not interchangeable downloads.

Homey’s encryption requirement is a security tradeoff: the device-to-hub API traffic lacks encryption even though it stays local. If you require that connection to be encrypted, the documented Homey path does not meet that requirement. Home Assistant supports an encrypted native API connection.

SmartThings exposes occupancy, separate PIR and radar states, temperature, humidity, light and LED control. CO₂ readings and calibration require the optional module, matching firmware and successful detection by the driver. There is no Restart Device tile. Firmware updates and deeper diagnostics use the vendor’s device tools, so I would not assume every Home Assistant control is reproduced in SmartThings.

There is also the Everything Presence Lite, and it is not simply a cut-down One. It drops the PIR and the temperature/humidity sensor, keeping the mmWave radar and a light sensor - but its LD2450 radar tracks up to three people by X/Y position and lets you draw detection zones from Home Assistant, which the One cannot do at all. So if zones are the reason you are reading this, the Lite rather than the One is the Everything Smart sensor to look at, and it gets you there with no vendor app.

Aqara FP2: zone tracking with a vendor layer

The Aqara FP2 approaches presence from the consumer side. Its headline feature is real zone-based tracking: one sensor can watch multiple areas of a room and tell you which one is occupied. For nuanced automations - couch versus desk versus doorway - that is a real capability the EP One does not have at all. It is not, however, a reason you must accept a vendor layer: the Everything Presence Lite above draws zones locally.

The compromise is the control path. The FP2 is a Wi-Fi device set up through Aqara’s app, and its cloud dependency is low but not zero; Home Assistant reaches it through HomeKit Controller (local, firmware 1.1.6+), which works well once configured but adds a layer. Zone calibration also takes real trial and error. If room-level logic is the thing you need, the vendor layer is the price of it.

A third option worth knowing: Aqara FP1E

If you run a Zigbee network, the Aqara Presence Sensor FP1E splits the difference: mmWave stationary-presence detection over plain Zigbee, pairing directly with Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA - fully local, no Aqara hub required. It’s the one on my dining room ceiling, on Zigbee2MQTT. It does not do zones at all - it reports whether the covered area is occupied, not where in it somebody is - but it is cheaper and slots straight into an existing coordinator.

Comparison table

The Everything Presence Lite is the missing fourth column here: no PIR and no temperature or humidity, but zone tracking and multi-person positioning that neither the One nor the FP1E offers, over the same local ESPHome path.

Beyond these three, the best mmWave presence sensors for Home Assistant roundup covers the rest of the category, and best local presence sensors takes in the wider field.