The all-new Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2 abandons Z-Wave

Aeotec announced a brand-new SmartThings-compatible hub at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin that’s sure to disappoint smart home enthusiasts with lots of Z-Wave devices. The Smart Home Hub 2 supports Matter and has a Zigbee 3.0 radio onboard, but the Z-Wave standard—which predates Zigbee—is no longer supported.

The new hub can also perform as a Thread border router, and Aeotec says it’s capable of twice the performance of the previous model (which we praised in our 2021 review), thanks to more RAM and a faster CPU. It also has a Bluetooth Low Energy radio for onboarding and diagnostics as well as a USB-A port, but Aeotec hasn’t revealed what function that component will perform. It draws power through a USB-C port.

Aeotec

The Smart Home Hub 2 can connect to your home network over Wi-Fi or with an ethernet cable, and Aeotec says it’s designed for local control first, so that your smart home won’t ground to a halt if your broadband connection goes down.

Z-Wave had been an element of the SmartThings ecosystem ever since SmartThings was launched as a crowd-funding campaign way back in 2012. Samsung acquired SmartThings two years later, but it stopped building SmartThings hubs in 2021 in favor of integrating them into their smart appliances and smart TVs.

At nearly the same time, Samsung granted Aeotec permission to pick up the hub ball and run with it to keep SmartThings enthusiasts happy. Samsung then re-introduced its own hub in the form of the Matter-certified SmartThings Station in early 2023, but I couldn’t find it in stock at any online retailer today, including Samsung’s own store.

Aeotec has not announced pricing for the new Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2, but it did say it expects to ship the new product at the end of October. We hope to have a hands-on review shortly thereafter.

This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems.