IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products
60 comments
·November 6, 2025moshib
IKEA's Zigbee devices have been some of the more stable smart devices I owned. I wasn't running their hub, opting to run with deCONZ in the past and moving to Zigbee2MQTT in recent years.
I do wish the new range would include blinds; the previous generation (FYRTUR) is out of production, and it doesn't seem like there's a replacement yet.
metadat
Fwiw, Smartwings blinds are cost effective and have worked great for me for years now. Cone in both z-wave and zig flavors.
embedding-shape
Does this mean they're abandoning Zigbee compatibility? In my experience, Ikea was making the most reliable Zigbee devices considering the price (as someone who just uses Zigbee and no Ikea hubs, just HA+Zigbee), and would be a shame to lose that, but maybe it's a clear sign I should investigate starting to use Matter more instead?
bluGill
Matter is now a standard not just a common spec. Everyone should demand all new smart home devices support matter. (it is okay if you use Zigbee or some other alternative to control it today but you should still demand matter for the day you switch - that day should come)
In particular note the bane of all smart homes: if you have to move the next owner won't have a clue what you did. In the worst case you have to hire an electrician (no DIY allowed since it isn't your house anymore) to rip that out so your house is livable. If you are using matter there is a chance they can start using your system in their own way. The more matter takes off the more likely this is. Also the more likely others will use it - perhaps you next house will have matter installed for you and so you can just automate it where you want to instead of rewiring the house first.
vollbrecht
A standard where you have to pay to play. Cheapest option is 3000$ per product and 500$ annual.
guerrilla
So, right now I use a Zigbee dongle on my a Raspberry Pi. Is that goimg to be possible with Matter?
nexus7556
Yes, here is the one I use https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
kristofferR
Matter is just the software. A lot of Matter devices use Thread as their radio protocol (think of it as "Zigbee 2.0") though, and you need a separate radio/dongle for that.
Seems like Home Assistant will launch a combo Zigbee/Thread dongle with great range in two weeks, might want to wait for that: https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1opak9w/new_...
jeroenhd
The new Dirigera hub supports both for now (https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/knowledge/articl...) so they'll probably slowly transition.
It depends on your setup how easy it would be, but the Zigbee stick I use for controlling Ikea stuff also has firmware available for using it with Matter. There's a good chance whatever IoT solution you use can be hooked up to Matter.
james-bcn
Isn't Matter derived from Zigbee?
j45
Investigate using home assistant and keep using both from one place.
ifh-hn
I've never really got the smart home thing, and the shit being pulled with the likes of "smart" TVs and cars has really put me off any sort of network connected device I can't control.
How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?
astronads
The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.
seanalltogether
As someone who is a bit of a luddite when it comes to smart home features, there are 2 things that really stand out to me that i would like.
1. Open/Close sensors, I would like to put sensors on my shed door and side gates that can tell me if they are open or closed. I will occassionally leave these open, or the kids may leave them open and would prefer they be closed each night. It's impossible for me to tell if they are closed at the moment without stepping outside.
2. Smart plugs. Being able to remotely operate / schedule plugs to shut off or on seems pretty nice. Outdoor lights being one usecase. Kids media area is another.
tokioyoyo
Easy — you’re not their target demographics. Almost all of my friends have some sort of “smart” devices, and I’ve helped personally to install them when things were a bit annoying (Spotify not syncing, dhcp not working properly and etc.). Absolutely not a single person cared about the “privacy and security” issue.
kristofferR
That's just untrue, these are the exact products a privacy conscious demographic would/should buy.
delecti
It's not that complicated to get, some of them have useful features.
It's just a personal tradeoff between features, downsides, and risks. Most people don't consider the risks at all (implicitly down-weighting that factor), and the value assigned to the features and downsides varies by person. I have some smart lights, because I like the convenience of those lights being on voice control. My TV is "smart" but doesn't get internet because I don't consider the risk of ads acceptable.
kobalsky
running home assistant on a raspberry with a zigbee usb hub is a weekend project and it gives you full control of your devices, you don't need internet access or any cloud subscription to control them.
kristofferR
That's half the point, these are using local communication (Matter over Thread) and are not cloud based. Privacy by default
buckle8017
ZigBee, Thread, and Matter are all locally controlled if you have a local controller that is controlled locally.
You'll still end up being an amateur network engineer though.
martin_a
I find pairing my IKEA bulbs and switches and whatnot to my Conbee 2 stick sometimes hard to do.
I'm thinking about buying a Dirigera hub instead, using that for the IKEA devices and using the Conbee stick only for non-IKEA products.
Does that work flawlessly when being controlled via HA or are there other issues to be expected?
edit: Maybe even ditch the Conbee stick after all, build some ESPHome devices as replacements (temperature/humidty - or wait for the IKEA version of that).
whitehexagon
Agreed. I had no problem with the conBee II itself, but it did take me a while to figure out different IKEA ZigBee devices required different 'secret handshakes' to tigger pairing. eg number of button presses withing a second, I think one was 5x, another 4x, and lights were different again. Still, I prefered that hasle than having a hub dialling home.
But it was pretty stable once it was setup. Just occasional reboot on the rPI but I think that was my flakey SMS gateway code.
nerdjon
Is there an article that has the US pricing anywhere? It doesn't look like any of these are on the US site yet so I am curious what these will actually cost.
I keep hoping that Ikea would come up with something that can go over a switch to manually control it. Seems like it would be very much within Ikea's target market (renters). There are devices like this on Amazon but having used them in the past they are finicky at best.
whitehexagon
The ZigBee range used to include a bulb and remote, so you just leave the mains switch on.
Otherwise, I used floor lights in the past with WiFi switchable sockets before I switched to ZigBee. The WiFi ones wanted to dial home.
conception
When I rented I just replaced things and kept them in a box and put everything back when I left.
LeafItAlone
Their new smart plugs finally seem reasonably sized. I love IKEA’s smart home products, but their smart plugs (and many of their device power plugs) are comically sized in the US. Their original US version of the TRÅDFRI plugs wouldn’t even allow for two to be plugged into the same (standard size) dual wall outlet. Their more recent TRETAKT is much better, but still larger than competitors.
mongol
Will zigbee2mqtt be able to talk to these? Or are they in a fully different type of network? If not, any other software that can do MQTT bridging with these?
63stack
I have never heard of Matter before, but I was super satisfied with Ikea's zigbee products. Does anyone know why they switched?
pta2002
It’s a newer standard backed by multiple vendors (importantly, Apple, Google and Amazon, who make the devices that you ultimately want to use to control these things).
Zigbee is great for communication instead of WiFi, but it’s just one part of the equation - it says nothing about the specific commands a device will respond to. You couldn’t pair a Philips remote with an IKEA lightbulb.
Matter attempts to fix it by actually defining the protocol that these devices use. It’s also fully local and open source, which is great. The actual transport layer can be WiFi, but it can also be Thread, which is a newer standard based off Zigbee, and AFAIK some Zigbee controllers can be reprogrammed to support it.
They don’t specify what transport layer they are using here, but considering the kind of devices they are showing (battery-powered remotes) it’s almost definitely Thread.
teamonkey
The way I understand it (please correct me) is that:
* The old Ikea Zigbee products will remain Zigbee. They will still require a Zigbee coordinator.
* The new products will be Matter-over-Thread. They require a Thread coordinator (or whatever the Thread equivalent is called).
* The existing Ikea hub has had a firmware upgrade that allows it to be simultaneously a Zigbee and Thread coordinator.
* The Ikea hub adds a Matter compatibility layer to the devices that don't natively support Matter.
Latitude7973
> or whatever the Thread equivalent is called
Thread Border Router (for info).
j45
Helpful datapoints thanks.
Backwards compatibility is huge.
noir_lord
Matter is definitely a step in the right direction, SDK is under Apache and the actual spec is freely available[1]
Might give it a year or three and if they continue on that path I might have to reasses my "No smart devices in the house" "rule".
[1] https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/22-27349-001_...
PaulHoule
They've been talking about it for years and now they finally have a product?
milliams
https://www.theverge.com/tech/814928/ikea-matter-thread-diri... has some quotes from IKEA saying that they're using Thread. It's strange they didn't say in this release though.
pta2002
I guess because to most consumers, it doesn't actually matter. It uses matter and connects to a matter hub, the way it does it is an implementation detail unless you're making your own hub with homeassistant or something.
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
WaitWaitWha
Vendor lock in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056
edit: Feel free to down but the evidence is in the products.
Zigbee will work with any other Zigbee device if it is properly implemented. not so with Thread.
null
frenchtoast8
It’s less of a switch and more of an upgrade. The hub will continue to work with Zigbee devices, it just adds Matter support to those devices you already have.
wlesieutre
Might be an upgrade if you're using devices through Ikea's hub, but if you've been buying Ikea's zigbee devices for use with some other zigbee network it's a bummer that you won't be able to get them anymore.
Even if you're all in Ikea's ecosystem it will still mean whatever new devices you add from now on are a separate mesh network and can't use the existing zigbee products as repeaters. If the next thing you want to add is at the far end of your house from the hub, it won't have reception there with Matter until you put other new devices in between.
whitehexagon
some background:
close04
Zigbee is the wireless network protocol. The equivalent to it on the Matter side is called Thread, also based on Zigbee from what I read (was developed by Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly known as Zigbee Alliance). Zigbee and Thread operate at OSI L1-3, Matter is L3/4-7.
Matter is a communication protocol adopted by a lot of manufacturers but I think practically for the buyer the real benefit is that you no longer need a bucket of hubs for each of the device ecosystems one might use. It's more future proof so it makes sense IKEA would add support for it in their hardware including existing hubs I believe.
darkwater
You never needed a bucket of hubs with things like zigbee2mqtt or the Zigbee implementation in Home Assistant. That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol. Actualyl you can also pair between them different vendors products (i.e. Ikea remote with Philips bulbs)
pta2002
While you could do that, the hub needed to implement the logic to actually convert the different "APIs" that the products spoke. E.g. imagine an IKEA remote sends "button_on" to turn on the light, but the Philips remotes send "light_on" or something. Philips lights will work with their remotes but not with IKEA remotes, since they wouldn't know what to do with "button_on". Zigbee2mqtt and ZHA are great projects that implement a compatibility layer to all of this, but they do have to explicitly support every device (and they support basically _every_ device there is, thanks to a ton of community work, they're genuinely great projects and something that wouldn't really be possible without open source). You mention that you can pair between different vendor's products, but that's not quite the case - you can pair different vendor's products to the hub, and the hub can translate between them. But while you can pair an IKEA remote to an IKEA bulb without a hub, you can't really do that between different brands.
Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer. You can use Thread without Matter, at which point you basically have Zigbee + IPv6, but the power comes with Matter since now every device is speaking the same language and can actually understand each other.
carderne
What “hub” thing do I need to use this? I use an iPhone but really just want to use some physical remote switches.
I currently use Home Assistant but want to shift to something more “mass market” as I’m bored of being family tech support.
thedougd
You're looking for a Thread border gateway. Lots of stuff already has it. Someone mentioned AppleTV and HomePod mini. Newer Google Nest speakers/displays have it as well.
But you can do it with just Home Assistant and a Thread radio: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread#turning-ho...
Personally, I pair my wifi and Thread matter devices to my Apple Home, as each Apple TV behaves as a redundant, ethernet connected gateway. I then do a secondary pairing to Home Assistant and Google Home. Local control and it works very well.
kps
For some degree of future-proofing you'll definitely want a device with a Thread radio.
(I've done paid work on Matter so I'll avoid giving possibly-tainted opinions on any particular vendor's products.)
fundatus
You could get an IKEA Dirigera, but one of the upsides of Matter is that you do not need the manufacturers hub anymore. So an Apple Homepod or a Home Assistant instance with a Thread stick will do as well! (Or any other Matter hub for that matter of course)
k33l0r
An Apple TV or HomePod mini, if you want to stay within the Apple ecosystem…
petepete
I use an IKEA Dirigera, which speaks both Zigbee and Matter.
null
AndrewDucker
Excellent.
I have some Thread/Matter smart bulbs, and they work well, but Ikea joining in shows that it's finally ready for the mass market.
whitehexagon
Although I have been trying to only buy 'needs' not 'wants' recently, I did stockpile a few IKEA ZigBee gadgets before they retired them. One of the few product lines their MBA's hadn't destroyed.
I was working on some Golang code, talking to them via the very open ConBee II ZigBee gateway. Great fun, and very fast once I got subscribe vs polling working. So now I get an SMS for door access, but kinda hopefully never for a water leak.
No interest in yet another 'standard', especially since Matter seems to mandate PKI device attestation. ZigBee just feels more open to me, and I have enough eWaste devices with expired certificates.
I just bought an AirGradient sensor and set up home assistant. What an absolute joy, both experiences (though I had issues building AirGradient's firmware due to some issues on their end, to their credit their dev team told me they're going to adopt my recommendations) are streamlined and professional and super easy to set up for a techie. I've already got in the habit of opening the window to the office as the sensor detects elevated CO2 (happens faster and more often than expected, very glad I invested).
However, I also bought a 3 SCD41 sensors and ESP32 C3 Superminis from the most reputable sellers on AliExpress, that's been an abject failure. I wanted additional sensors in other rooms less at risk, and wanted to try using ESPHome and putting together my own soldered little devices. Got counterfeit sensors (no laser engraving on the side as Sensiron indicates is without reception the case in genuine parts) and either counterfeit or defective microcontrollers (cannot connect to wifi, even 2.4GHz WPA2, a common enough problem from my research with ). The spread from reputable sellers in NA was absolutely ridiculous and worse then buying premade pieces by a large margin.
All to say, as fun as DIY is, I'm grateful to have trustworthy products available affordably. I'll still block internet access and leave them on a dedicated IoT VLAN, but I can at least not worry it's going to incorrectly label the air quality for a child's bedroom. I'll probably pick up 3 of the CO2 sensors from IKEA, if reviews look good.