Smart home hub

A smart home hub is the device that ties a smart home together. It talks to devices that cannot join Wi-Fi on their own, such as Zigbee, Z-Wave or Thread sensors, bulbs and locks, and connects them to your home network and your phone app. It also runs the automations you set up, such as “turn on the hall light when the front door opens”. A hub can be a dedicated box, or a function built into a smart speaker, a TV box or a router. Whether you need one depends on the radios your devices use and on the ecosystem you choose.

What does a smart home hub actually do?

A hub does three jobs:

• It translates. Zigbee and Z-Wave are low-power radio networks designed for small battery devices. They do not use IP, the internet protocol that phones, laptops and routers use. The hub has the matching radio (for Zigbee, a Zigbee coordinator) and passes commands and readings between that network and the home network.
• It keeps track of the home. It knows which devices exist, which room each is in and whether each light is on, and the app shows this.
• It runs automations, often locally. When the rules run on the hub itself, a motion sensor can still switch on a light while the internet connection is down. When they run on the maker’s servers, the same rule stops working if the connection or the service fails.

Apple’s description of its own home hub, a HomePod or an Apple TV, puts automation next to two other roles: it lets you control accessories while you are away from home, share control with others, and “automate your accessories to do what you want, when you want”. Apple also requires a home hub before you can add Matter accessories to its Home app.

Do I need a smart home hub?

You need one if any of your devices use Zigbee, Z-Wave or Thread, or if your ecosystem asks for one to run automations and give you control from outside the home. You may not need a separate box if every device connects over Wi-Fi and you are content to use each maker’s app and cloud service.

You may already own a hub without knowing it. Amazon says that some Echo speakers and eero routers have built-in smart home hubs for Zigbee devices, and Apple names the HomePod mini and the Apple TV 4K (3rd generation) Wi-Fi + Ethernet as examples of home hubs that work with Thread. A dedicated hub makes sense when you want one place for devices from many brands, more advanced automations, or control that does not depend on any company’s servers.

What is the difference between a hub, a bridge, a border router and a Matter controller?

They are four roles, and one product often plays several of them.

• Hub: the three jobs described above.
• Bridge: connects one family of devices to the home network or to another system, without being the brain of the whole home. The Philips Hue Bridge connects Hue lights; Philips says that after a software update “your Hue lights and accessories automatically support Matter” when they are connected through it. A Matter bridge, in general, presents devices that do not speak Matter, such as Zigbee bulbs, to Matter apps. Bridges have been a product type in Matter since version 1.0, released in October 2022.
• Thread border router: a border router connects a Thread network to Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Thread already uses IP, so the border router forwards messages instead of translating them, and it does not run automations on its own.
• Matter controller: the app or device that adds Matter devices to your home and sends them commands. Amazon describes the Echo in this role as “the Matter administrator used to discover and connect Matter devices to Alexa locally”.

The line between router and hub is also blurring. With Matter 1.4, announced in November 2024, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which maintains Matter, added a certified category for home routers and access points that combine “both a Wi-Fi access point and a Thread Border Router”.

What kinds of smart home hubs are there?

There are three broad kinds:

• Built into a device you already own. Smart speakers, smart displays, TV boxes and some routers include a Zigbee or Thread radio. They are convenient, but limited to the features and devices of their own ecosystem.
• Dedicated hubs. A separate box, usually with several radios, that plugs into the router and comes with its own app.
• Software you run yourself. Home Assistant, an open-source platform that runs on a small computer at home, describes itself as “open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first”. It reaches Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread devices through plug-in radio adapters. You gain control and flexibility, and in exchange you look after updates and backups yourself.

Matter makes it easier to move between these over time, because a Matter device can be added to more than one controller. The guide Matter vs Zigbee explains when each standard fits and how a hub can pass Zigbee devices on to Matter apps.

What happens to a hub if the maker’s cloud shuts down?

It depends on how much of the work happens inside your home. What runs locally can keep working; anything that goes through the maker’s servers, such as control from outside the home, voice assistant links and sometimes the app itself, can stop.

Belkin’s Wemo products show what this looks like. Belkin announced the end of Wemo cloud services and app support for select products, effective 31 January 2026. Its support page says that from that date the Wemo app, remote access and voice assistant integrations stop working for the affected products, while products already set up in Apple HomeKit before that date keep working through the Apple Home app, without Wemo’s cloud.

Before choosing a hub, check three things: which features work without the internet, how long the maker promises security updates (its security support period), and whether your devices could move to another hub if this one stops being supported. The smart home, explained shows how ecosystems, hubs and radios fit together.

Part of the IoT Glossary. Spotted an error or a missing term? Tell us.