Wireless in IoT

ZigBee vs Z-Wave: What's the Difference? Everything You Need To Know

ZigBee

ZigBee is a low-power wireless mesh network standard for battery-powered devices. ZigBee’s technology was designed so that custom profiles could be developed and deployed, making it faster and easier for manufacturers to create wireless products for common applications. This lowered the bar for many OEMs to create ZigBee products, contributing to ZigBee’s popularity today. ZigBee devices operate in the 2.4GHz band.

Z-Wave

The Z-Wave standard is not open to the public. Z-Wave uses the unlicensed frequency band in the 908MHz range, which helps avoid interference with ZigBee, as well as other popular wireless technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi. This does avoid certification issues

How do ZigBee and Z-Wave compare?

ZigBee	Z-Wave
Data Rate: 250kb/s	Data Rate: 40kb/s
Power Consumption: ~40mA	Power Consumption: ~2.5mA
Shorter range: 10-20 Meters	Longer Range: 30-65 Meters
Operates at 2.4 GHz	Operates at 908 MHz
More flexible profile development	Closed profile development
Chips & Modules available from multiple manufacturers	Chips only sold by Silicon Labs, originally a proprietary standard developed by Zensys
Variable certification process	Strict certification process
Supports over 65,000 devices on the mesh network	Supports over 232 devices on the mesh network
More difficult to configure and get up and running	More user-friendly, easier to set up
Cheaper	A little more expensive compared to Zigbee
ZigBee has more connected devices in the market and thus more resources and community support for the application that you are building.	Not as wide-spread as ZigBee and may be more limited in community resources
Both ZigBee and Z-Wave can last years on a coin cell battery but only when used in sleep mode. Constantly transmitting a signal would only last a couple months.
Both run on the mesh networks

So which one should you use?

Between the two, ZigBee has had the bigger market share, but Z-Wave has been making large strides to match ZigBee these past few years. ZigBee is open to the public but certification rules can be confusing to uninitiated. Z-Wave is propriety technology available only to customers and limits the options available for Z-Wave components, but this helps ensure that certification is strictly enforced and provides more reliable interoperability between Z-Wave devices from different manufacturers. “Customers can go and purchase products with Z-Wave in them, but they can’t create or tinker their own stuff with Z-Wave,” says Tyler Wojciechowicz. “To join the Z-Wave ecosystem, there’s stringent certification process and can take up to 6 months. All companies/design engineers looking to use Z-Wave in their design, have to go through this process.” Technology wise, ZigBee provides a stronger data rate, but Z-Wave provides farther range. Depending on your application, you may prioritize one over the other. ZigBee also operates on the same frequency as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and may be more susceptible to interference compared to Z-Wave.