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IKEA moves to Thread (and away from Zigbee)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Man there are way too many IoT standards. What's the difference between these two? How do they each compare to Matter?
Thread is a wireless standard meant to sit next to Bluetooth and WiFi.
Matter is a home automation protocol can that be used over Thread or WiFi. Ideal Matter devices use Thread instead of WiFi because running a bunch of home devices like light bulbs or switches on your WiFi is a recipe for disaster.
Matter is important because it provides native compatibility among different platforms.
What kind of disaster specifically? I hear everyone discouraging from using WiFi for home devices, but never understood what the actual risks are.
I see someone replied about security. But I was just taking about stability.
Most people don’t have super beefy wifi routers. Many have whatever shit their ISP sent them. These are fine for your average number of laptops and phones, etc. but if you then throw on 10 more 2.4GHz WiFi IOT devices, you are probally going to run into devices randomly dropping off the wifi, etc.
Additionally, wifi is usually chosen over other protocols by manufacturers due to the cost of hardware and development. So they are often lower quality. (This is only one reason)
But sure, if you have a super awesome 2.4GHz wifi setup and high quality wifi devices, maybe things will work out just fine. But my personal experience with WiFi tells me I shouldn’t clutter my WiFi.
Also, if you were curious, yes: almost all WiFi IOT devices are 2.4GHz only.
This sort of makes it sound like the advantage of Thread is merely that it's new, and therefore nobody will be affected by having a poor pre-existing Thread setup. If ISPs were sending people Zigbee hubs, it sure would be the cheapest shit available, which could very well translate to similarly terrible Zigbee performance.
I see your point, but there should be much more merit to the specialized IoT protocols than just that nobody has yet flooded the market with terrible Thread/Zigbee devices.
I'm not sure manufacturers choose WiFi because of hardware costs. There are often other reasons (some good, some terrible) for this choice, but I'm certain Zigbee support has to be cheaper; having disassembled plenty of such devices it's almost always a dedicated IC and a tiny PCB trace for an antenna. WiFi support requires a fairly complete TCP/IP stack implementation, basic certificate management etc. which will inevitably require a small SoC; and while prebuilt solutions are plentiful, Zigbee alternatives are an order of magnitude cheaper.
I can imagine software development costs being lower, though, given how every other programmer knows a fair deal about TCP/IP networking, while good comprehension of dedicated IoT protocols is a much rarer skill, there are also much less community resources and open-source solutions available etc.
Thread is the replacement for zigbee.
It's zigbee plus more features.
There is nothing zigbee does better than thread.
Lower power usage, ipv6, standard tls security, not proprietary, etc.
Does Thread support pairing two or more devices so they can control each other directly without going through the coordinator? I do that a bit with my Zigbee network.
I never meant to imply that Thread was the only solution to WiFi based IOT being bad. Just that it is a forward looking choice that has interoperable support from the dominant computing platforms. This is why IKEA is moving to it.
2.4GHz*
Whoops! Fixed.
Thread is a bit more power efficient, which matters for battery powered devices that aren't connected to permanent power and don't need to transmit significant data, like door locks, temperature/humidity sensors, things like that. A full wifi networking chip would consume a lot more power for an always-on device.
There are also performance implications (a Zigbee coordinator can easily handle 100 devices, while many routers would struggle with that amount of clients), power saving (especially for battery powered sensors) - some Zigbee sensors can last years on a single coin cell battery.
Dishonest question, your following comments show you clearly know the common points of these discussions.
There's no arguing that using WiFi for this purpose is an obstacle to widespread adoption and a security risk, no matter how well you yourself are handling it.
There's also the technical advantage of those IoT networks being meshed by design, whereas expanding a WiFi network with mesh functionality often carries challenges.
I may know some answers, but I don't have a full picture, and I wish to complete my understanding by learning others' perspectives and what they find most important about this choice of protocols. Thank you for sharing yours.
An important difference between thread and zigbee/wi-fi I'm not seeing mentioned is that all thread devices automesh in a hub/spoke model as long as they're not battery powered. So your light bulbs, plugs, etc all become extenders and part of a self healing mesh network without a single point of failure. For me it works better than Zigbee for this reason.
Zigbee does that too tho, right?
The wiki on zigbee says so at least
Yes, Thread serves similar functionality to Zigbee, to the extent that some people describe it as Zigbee 2.0.
However it’s a new protocol for a new standard, that has backing from all the big names in home automation, including Apple, Amazon, Google.
Zigbee is a great protocol. Thread will bring better connectivity for the future (we hope)
Pretty sure than an underlying feature of both zigbee and zwave.
They're different in their implementation. Zigbee automesh is more of a centralized router-hub model with self healing relying on routing tables. This caused significant issues for me. Thread is true automesh with all devices acting as a hub in a hub/spoke model, so there's no centralized routing table to act as a single point of failure.
I exclusively use ZigBee. It automeshes.
Thread also works on the 2.4 GHz range but can utilize sub ranges of 868 in Europe and 915 in north America. The 868 and 915 GHz ranges are what LoRa operates on and provides a much greater range for low data rate transmissions.
In fact Meshtastic operates on LoRa on 915 here in the U.S. and I have a node in my second floor window with a 3db antenna and I have been able to message both ways up to 3 blocks away.
Long story short, utilizing 868 and 915 in these devices will make dead spots a thing of the past within a home, even with their lower gain internal antennas.
Thread is a network layer thing, comparable to WiFi or Bluetooth. Matter is an application later thing, comparable to HomeKit or Google home.
Zigbee is both network and application layer.
This article has a decent overview https://www.smarthomeperfected.com/zigbee-vs-thread/
Thread works with matter, these devices will use Matter over Thread.