If you’ve built any kind of smart home or commercial IoT installation over the past decade, you almost certainly have Zigbee devices in it. Maybe a lot of them. Philips Hue bulbs, Aqara sensors, IKEA blinds, Sonoff switches — Zigbee has around 4,000 certified device types and billions of deployed units globally. It works reliably, it’s power-efficient, and your existing setup probably runs fine.

So why is everyone talking about switching to Matter?

The honest answer: multi-ecosystem interoperability. Zigbee requires a hub. That hub might talk to Apple Home, or Google Home, or Amazon Alexa, but usually with limitations, usually through vendor cloud services, and usually not all three simultaneously in a sensible way. Matter changes that by making devices natively compatible with every major platform without a cloud dependency. The “multi-admin” feature means you can control the same device from an iPhone and a Google Home speaker without either one being the primary controller.

Whether that’s worth anything to your specific situation depends heavily on what you’re trying to achieve.

What You Actually Can’t Do: Upgrade Existing Zigbee Devices to Matter

Let’s get this out of the way first. You cannot firmware-update a Zigbee device to become a native Matter device. The radio protocols are different. Matter runs over Thread (a low-power mesh using IEEE 802.15.4) or Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Zigbee also uses IEEE 802.15.4, but the network layer is entirely different — a Zigbee radio cannot speak Thread.

This means every path to Matter involves either a bridge or a hardware replacement. There’s no third option.

Bridging: What It Is and When It Makes Sense

A Zigbee-to-Matter bridge is a device that sits between your Zigbee mesh and your Matter fabric. It joins both networks and translates between them, presenting your Zigbee devices as Matter virtual devices to the rest of the home network.

Several options exist today. Philips Hue’s bridge is Matter-certified, so your Hue bulbs appear as native Matter devices in Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa simultaneously. Aqara’s M2 and M3 hubs do the same for Aqara sensors and switches. Home Assistant with the ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) integration plus a Matter bridge configuration works for mixed Zigbee installations, though the setup is more involved.

Bridging makes a lot of sense if:

Your Zigbee devices are working fine and aren’t near end-of-life. Replacing functional hardware purely for protocol reasons is difficult to justify on cost grounds — Zigbee sensors in particular can last 5 to 10 years on a battery.

You have a large estate of Zigbee devices. Replacing 50 sensors is a very different conversation from replacing 5. The bridging approach lets you get the multi-ecosystem benefits of Matter without a forklift upgrade.

Your priority is ecosystem interoperability rather than Thread mesh resilience. The bridge adds a single point of failure (the bridge itself), but for most home and small commercial use cases, that’s an acceptable trade-off.

What you lose with bridging: some granularity of control, occasional latency from the translation layer, and dependency on the bridge device staying online. Some device-specific features also don’t translate cleanly — certain Aqara sensor states or button press patterns may not map to the Matter device type correctly.

Replacing: When It Actually Makes Sense

Replacing Zigbee with native Matter-over-Thread devices makes the most sense for new installations. If you’re wiring a new building or starting fresh, Thread-native devices (which use Matter as the application layer) give you proper end-to-end Matter support without the bridge dependency.

It also makes sense when devices are failing anyway. If your Zigbee hub is dying or your devices are reaching end-of-life, that’s the natural moment to shift to Matter-native replacements rather than sourcing more Zigbee hardware for a now-legacy ecosystem.

For commercial IoT and industrial installations, the calculus is different again. Matter hasn’t penetrated commercial or industrial IoT in any meaningful way yet. Zigbee 3.0 remains the dominant standard for commercial building automation, and products like the Zigbee 3.0 standard profile are actively supported across the major industrial IoT ecosystems. The smart home benefits of Matter (multi-platform interoperability) simply aren’t a priority in most commercial deployments. For industrial use, Zigbee stays the right answer for now.

Thread: Don’t Confuse It With Matter

A quick clarification because this causes confusion constantly. Thread is the networking protocol. Matter is the application layer that runs on top of Thread (and also over Wi-Fi and Ethernet). When people say “Thread border router,” they mean a device that bridges the Thread mesh to your IP network — usually your Wi-Fi router or a smart speaker.

Apple HomePod mini, Apple TV 4K, Google Nest Hub 2nd gen, and newer Amazon Echo devices all act as Thread border routers. If you have any of those, you already have Thread infrastructure. Whether you have any Thread devices is a separate question.

The Practical Advice

For most existing Zigbee installations in 2026: don’t rush to replace. If you want the multi-ecosystem benefits of Matter, add a good Zigbee bridge (Philips Hue bridge or Aqara M2/M3 are the most reliable options with the most active firmware updates). Get the interoperability you want without replacing working hardware.

For new installations or hardware refresh cycles: buy Matter-native devices. The ecosystem has matured significantly in 2026, the device selection is much better than it was at launch, and you’ll avoid the bridge dependency from the start.

For commercial and industrial IoT: Zigbee 3.0 is still the right choice. Matter isn’t there yet for these applications.

The migration from Zigbee to Matter is happening, but it’s a gradual device replacement over years rather than a migration project you need to plan and execute this year.