SONOFF Universal Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle E Gateway with Antenna for Home Assistant, Open HAB etc, Support Data Flow Control

I bought the SONOFF Universal Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (ZBDongle-E) to use with Home Assistant, and it’s been absolutely excellent. Setup was quick and straightforward, plugged it in, configured it in Home Assistant, and it was ready to go. Devices pair quickly, are recognised instantly, and connections have been extremely stable. I’ve since added multiple Zigbee sensors and devices, and everything works flawlessly. Range is very good thanks to the external antenna, and responsiveness is fast with no noticeable delays. The dongle feels well built, runs cool, and has been solid running 24/7. I’m using it with SONOFF Zigbee devices as well as other brands, and compatibility has been excellent across the board. If you’re building or upgrading a Home Assistant Zigbee network, this dongle is a no-brainer. Reliable, powerful, easy to set up, and great value for money. Highly recommended.

I use this with my homelab to control smart home devices from a variety of manufacturers from a centralised Home Assistant installation - it works across brands, detects new devices quickly, and required very little set up

I bought this item to run from a tiny pc which is running Home assistant to control all my devices at home. I found it well made and packaged nicely, and price-wise was very happy. No problems at all, straight out of the box it worked extremely well and picked up all the devices I needed it to. My home automation journey is just starting out but this dongle, paired with some sonoff zigbee repeaters is going to help a lot.

Bought this as a replacement for the Texas Instruments CC2531 as I kept getting drop outs using Zigbee2MQTT in conjunction with Homeassistant. I can say that I have not had a single drop out issue as a result of this zigbee gateway. While it was a bit of a hassle to migrate every device over (I have over 50) it was absolutely worth it to have them reliable within the interface. I believe there are some methods out there to export then import all your zigbee devices if you are migrating (To save you the headache I had). This was able to manage my zigbee mesh from an external garage to the house, obviously working in tandem with the zigbee router devices in my mesh. I do use it in combination with a USB extender as gets recommended online, however I don't know if that is providing much of a benefit. But goes to show how reliable and secure the connection is even through external walls. While this is a bit more expensive than some of the alternatives, the reliability is worth the money, as it will save you time further down the line.

A must-have for any smart-home enthusiast. Very easy to set up, integrates well with Home Assistant. It is device-agnostic, meaning that you can easily integrate both Sonoff and other manufacturer's Zigbee devices. It is very sturdy, and has a very strong and stable signal range.

I used this successfully for 3 years after starting out with Home Assistant but it has some drawbacks. First is that it essentially needs a long USB2.0 extension cable to get it away from your USB ports interference. If you plug this directly into the USB ports of your server/raspberry Pi you'll find your Zigbee Network is very unreliable, if anything can connect at all. The range I found was absolutely fine for a standard UK house, but I had plenty of hard-wired smart switches and smart bulbs/smart plugs that can act as routers, i.e. repeaters for the signal. If you try to connect solely battery powered devices to this you may struggle with range on the other side of your house. Compatibility with Zigbee2MQTT in home assistant was great, essentially plug and play (after making sure the correct USB device is passed through to the correct virtual machine, if using VMs) but if you're using a Pi solely for home assistant there'll be no issues there. Only issue I had, which caused me to move away from this device to an SMLIGHT PoE type dongle was that every so often the Zigbee network would completely fail and could only be fixed by restarting Zigbee2MQTT. In the end I had an automation to restart Z2M every 6h which helped but wasn't ideal. The logs didn't give me any useful info other than devices couldn't talk to home assistant and vice versa so it's impossible to say if this dongle was the issue or if it was my virtualised setup, or something else, but I can confirm that having switched to the SMLIGHT my Zigbee network is rock solid now. So I think if you're just starting out and are running home assistant on a Raspberry Pi and just running a few Zigbee devices this will be absolutely perfect for you. However if you can envision a more serious Zigbee setup in your future, and especially if you want to move Home Assistant between servers and/or have your servers in a different location to your Zigbee dongle etc, I'd highly recommend you start out with a SMLIGHT PoE-type dongle.

Thw most integral part of my smart home...works great

Bought a cheaper one first with same chipset. But it had a cheap enclosure, an annoying green light and not antenna so a poor range. This sonoff one fixes all three of those issues and has been rock solid now for weeks. Really worth paying a few quid more for this one.