Matter’s smart-home promise now depends on bridges for Zigbee and Z-Wave

Matter is not making older smart-home standards obsolete. Instead, bridges such as Homey Pro, Aqara Hub M3 and SONOFF Bridge Max are becoming the key to bringing legacy devices into modern ecosystems.

Most smart homes are built around an awkward truth: plenty of reliable kit still speaks Zigbee or Z-Wave rather than Matter. That matters because Matter is designed to unify control across major platforms, while older devices still depend on their original radios and hubs. As comparison guides on Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave and Wi-Fi note, the appeal of Matter is interoperability, but its practical value often depends on how well it can absorb existing devices rather than replacing them outright. The result is a growing market for bridges that translate legacy gear into Matter without forcing a full rebuild of the home.

The most important distinction is between a bridge and a controller. A Matter controller, such as a HomePod, Echo, Nest hub or SmartThings hub, is what users interact with. A Matter bridge sits between that controller and non-Matter devices, translating supported Zigbee or Z-Wave equipment into Matter device types. That translation is useful, but it is not perfect. Bridges can only expose features that Matter defines, which means some buttons, dials, scene controls and vendor-specific functions may be simplified or lost. Guides on migration to Matter and protocol compatibility both stress that buyers need to match the bridge to the devices they already own, rather than assuming any bridge will work with any legacy product.

Among the products compared, Homey Pro stands out because it is one of the few consumer hubs able to bridge both Zigbee and Z-Wave into Matter from the same unit. The guide positions it as the most capable all-round option for mixed homes, while noting that Home Assistant remains the most flexible route for advanced users willing to add radios and community software. That DIY path is more involved, but it gives users broad protocol support and fine-grained control over which devices are exposed. By contrast, several popular hubs remain limited to their own ecosystems. Aqara, THIRDREALITY and Tuya-based gateways are described as largely brand-locked, which makes them suitable for owners of matching hardware but poor choices for mixed-brand homes.

Wired connectivity is another recurring theme. The guide argues that Ethernet or PoE-linked hubs are generally more dependable than Wi-Fi-only alternatives, especially for users trying to avoid intermittent “no response” behaviour in voice assistants and app dashboards. That is why the Aqara Hub M3 is presented as a strong choice for Aqara-heavy installations: it combines Matter bridging with a wired network connection and a Thread border router, while staying tightly focused on Aqara equipment. The Philips Hue Bridge Pro occupies a similar place in lighting-focused homes, where users want mature software, large device capacity and a straightforward path for Hue bulbs, strips and accessories already paired to the Hue ecosystem.

For mixed-brand Zigbee homes, the SONOFF Bridge Max is singled out as a more open option. The guide notes that it can bridge a wider range of third-party Zigbee devices than the brand-specific gateways above, and that its local web-based configuration will appeal to technically minded users who prefer to avoid app-led setup. That openness does not extend to Z-Wave, which remains the hardest protocol to bridge into Matter. The comparison makes clear that practical Z-Wave options are still limited, with Homey Pro and the Home Assistant route emerging as the main realistic answers. A separate guide on Z-Wave and Matter coexistence also highlights how narrow that field remains, underlining the same point from a different angle.

The buying advice is straightforward. Aqara users are directed towards the Hub M3 for larger, wired systems and the smaller M100 for modest sensor counts. Hue owners already have a bridge in place and only need to upgrade if they want more capacity or newer features. Tuya and Smart Life users are better served by a hub designed around that ecosystem, while THIRDREALITY owners gain the cheapest simple route through the company’s own bridge. For anyone who values breadth above convenience, the guide argues that Home Assistant plus the right radios remains the most adaptable long-term setup, even if it asks more from the user. Device compatibility databases such as HomeHubAtlas reinforce that approach, since bridge selection is ultimately about checking exact hardware support rather than buying on protocol name alone.

The wider lesson is that Matter has not made legacy smart-home standards irrelevant; it has made translation more important. Zigbee remains common because it is efficient and well established, while Z-Wave retains value in retrofit and security-focused installations. Matter does not erase those networks, but a good bridge can make them far easier to manage from a modern control layer. For buyers, the practical test is not whether a hub supports Matter in the abstract, but whether it bridges the right devices, with the right feature set, in the right ecosystem, on the right kind of network connection.