Smart Home DB is the most trusted community-supported online destination for smart home consumers.

The platform aspires to cut through the complexity of everything smart home and deliver the knowledge needed to make the right decisions quickly, and with confidence.

To realize the above Smart Home DB aggregates and curates all smart home products released around the world, all verified compatibilities, all published consumer reviews and all daily prices from more than 25 online retailers.

Smart Home DB's goal is to accelerate the roll-out of mainstream consumers upgrading to a smart home by filling the 'smart home knowledge gap' and educating mainstream consumers in a user-friendly manner on how to properly upgrade to a smart home.

We recommend to read our Quick Guide (3 min.) to obtain an initial understanding of 'smart home basics' you should know.

Besides the stand-alone benefits any smart home product offers, you will want to know whether a specific smart home product can pair/connect/link/play with other smart home products and product compatibilities graphs and tables satisfy this information need.

Smart Home DB manages the most complete and accurate Smart Home DB's Compatibilities Database in the world.

IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement:

if [THIS] then [THAT]


Channels are the basic building blocks of IFTTT.
Each Channel has its own Triggers and Actions.

For more information about IFTTT, please click here.

From a terminology perspective they all refer to the same product category but the most commonly used terms are 'Gateways' and 'Hubs'.

Smart Home Gateways/Hubs differ from one another based on 5 key dimensions:


1. Open versus Closed Ecosystems

Gateways/hubs are designed to either purely facilitate pairing with products produced in-house (Closed Ecosystems) or to facilitate pairing with as many products as possible, no matter whether the products are produced internally or by other companies (Open Ecosystems).




3. Product Compatibilities

Each gateway/hub has its own unique product compatibilities graph and table, which you can always review in Smart Home DB's Compatibilities Database.

No, Smart Home DB instead daily collects all product prices from more than 25 online retailers to be able to inform you about the lowest (historical) price for each listed product.

Wi-Fi was originally designed to cover large areas and facilitate high-speed data communication (such as media streaming). Wi-Fi’s drawback by being able to facilitate high-speed data communication is that it is a power hungry radio frequency, which makes it a sub-optimal radio frequency for battery-operated devices, such as door locks, scales and sensors.

Radio frequencies such as Z-Wave and Zigbee were also designed to cover large areas, but, in contrast to Wi-Fi, highly power efficient, which makes them ‘perfect’ radio frequencies for battery-operated devices.


Z-Wave versus Zigbee

From a consumer's point of view, the most important difference you should be aware of with regards to Z-Wave and Zigbee at the time of writing the latest update to this answer (Mon, Nov 18, 2014) is that products which use a Z-Wave radio frequency have a higher likelihood of being able to pair with other Z-Wave products compared with Zigbee products.

The above means that the likelihood that a Z-Wave product from a Company A can pair with a Z-Wave product from a Company B is higher than a Zigbee product from a Company C being able to pair with a Zigbee product from a Company D.

If you are considering to buy Z-Wave products it is important to know that Z-Wave uses different radio frequencies around the globe, for example 908 MHz in the United States and 868 MHz in Europe. So if you are living in the United States and use a Gateway/Hub with the 908 MHz frequency and buy a Z-Wave product from Europe with the 868 MHz, your US Smart Home Gateway/Hub will unfortunately not be able to pair with your EU Smart Home Product.

The key reason why Z-Wave products overall are more compatible with one another compared with Zigbee products is the fact that Zigbee is an open standard which is (unfortunately) often tweaked by Zigbee product producers to realize a closed ecosystem in which only the company's own products can pair with one another. Z-Wave on the other hand is a locked standard with fixed interoperability rules which cannot be tweaked by Z-Wave product producers, resulting in a significantly more user-friendly ecosystem for  consumers from a product compatibility point of view.

A Closed Gateway's main purpose is to purely facilitate pairing with products produced by the same company.

For example, the Philips Hue Bridge's main purpose is to purely facilitate pairing with other Philips products such as the Philips Hue A19 Bulb (Color) and Philips Hue LightStrips.


An Open Gateway's philosophy is to facilitate pairing with as many products as possible, no matter whether the products are produced internally or by other companies.

For example, the SmartThings Hub, VeraLite and Wink Hub facilitate pairing with many products produced by other companies.

The Smart Home DB Pricewatch daily collects all the smart home product prices from more than 25 online retailers to be able to inform you about the lowest and highest (historical) price for each listed product.

A Bayesian estimate is used as formula for calculating the Top 100 Products:

weighted rating (WR) = (v ÷ (v+m)) × R + (m ÷ (v+m)) × C

Where:
R = average for the product (mean) = (Rating)
v = number of votes for the product = (votes)
m = minimum votes required to be listed in the Top 100 (currently XX)
C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently X.X)