What are Zigbee and Z-Wave? This is everything you need to know.

Your connected home can be built a lot of different ways, but likely starts right here.

Maybe the most fun part of new tech and internets of things and stuff is all the crazy names attached to it. And there are a lot of them.

Two of the most popular, for now anyway, are Zigbee and Z-Wave. They are fun to say and have similar sounding names and are mostly used for the same things. But there are some differences. We've seen more than a few questions about them and since we like to geek out over this sort of thing, we can talk about what they are and what they are used for. And bees.

What is Z-Wave?

Z-Wave (or ZWave or Z Wave) is a way for two or more things to communicate wirelessly. It's a low-energy mesh network where devices can communicate directly with each other by sending very reliable and very small low-latency bursts of data, but it still requires a hub or gateway so a device can control all the other devices. It's almost exclusively used for residential applications — you use it around your home or small office — while other standards (like Zigbee, which we'll get to in a minute) are better suited for industrial and wide-scale commercial applications.

Z-Wave is represented by names we already know, and there are 1,700 different products that are Z-Wave-certified.

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