Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation partner with Z-Wave Alliance members to advance local control, privacy, interoperability, and long-term smart home reliability. This collaboration helps ensure that certified Z-Wave devices work seamlessly with Home Assistant while supporting an open, standards-based smart home ecosystem.
You might say we do things a little differently at the Open Home Foundation. Not only do we open source one of the biggest smart home platforms in the world, but we put local control and privacy at the heart of everything we do, even when it comes to working with partners.
The foundation was created in 2024, to legally govern and protect our core projects, including Home Assistant, and keep them open source forever. Guided by three principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability, we believe a connected home should be truly interoperable, and not lock a user into one manufacturer’s device line or one ecosystem.
As the Partnership Manager here, my role is to foster relationships with third parties to achieve these goals. One way we do this is through the ‘Works with Home Assistant’ program. Unlike other badging or certification programs, this focuses on local control by excluding devices that need cloud access. And while many ‘Works with’ badges are limited to only one open standard or connectivity type, we certify devices that use WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Matter and, crucially, Z-Wave, to give our users as much choice as possible.
How We Work With Z-Wave
While we’ve always been Z-Wave supporters (there is native Z-Wave integration on Home Assistant) the make-up of the Z-Wave Alliance means we can easily collaborate with other organizations aligned with our values. Local control, high levels of security, and rock-solid reliability mean that Z-Wave vendors are some of our most popular partnerships. We make Z-Wave certification a pre-requisite for these partners, to ensure open standards are supported and prioritized as we’re firm believers that they contribute to a more interoperable and private smart home.
This means we pay it forward by ensuring we are actively contributing to the Alliance, both with code and with general support. We’re very proud that the popular Z-Wave JS library was donated to the foundation in December and is managed by our Z-Wave expert Dominic Greisel in-house. This library is used widely by manufacturers and developers alike. As with all our projects, community contributions are what power its success. We also worked extensively with our commercial partner, and fellow alliance member, Nabu Casa on the launch of the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 last year. Combining this kind of collaboration with the freedom and flexibility that comes with being open source means we can do things our way, for example by creating what we believe is the most performant Z-Wave adapter on the market, due to its optimized design and size.
What Being a Z-Wave Alliance Member Means For Us
We find the Z-Wave member meetings extremely useful, and attend both the European and stateside events. They provide us a great opportunity to network with other community members, keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s coming next with Z-Wave, and actively contribute to both technical and marketing working groups. It’s a perfect chance for us to speak to the manufacturers we work with, look at the new products they are launching, understand how we can represent them perfectly from within Home Assistant, and ensure everything ‘just works’.
About Our Partners
We’re proud to boast some pretty recognizable names in our Works with Home Assistant Z-Wave partnerships. They represent a large variety of device types, functionality, different regions, and both Z-Wave mesh and Z-Wave Long Range (ZWLR). Our current partners include Zooz, Shelly, Jasco, Leviton, and Homeseer, with the most recent addition being HeatIt who join us with a great range of Z-Wave switches and climate controllers. We’re also really excited to have some diverse manufacturers in our testing pipeline right now. We’re finalizing testing on door locks, switches, a big range of sensors, and some innovative fire safety products from newer Alliance members too. More of our partners will be announced very soon, so watch this space. If you’re interested in seeing the certified devices we keep an up-to-date Z-Wave list here. And if you’d like to see the shiny Works with Home Assistant badge on one of your products, I’m always happy to hear from other Alliance members too!
About the Author
Miranda Bishop is the Partnership Manager at the Open Home Foundation, and its flagship project, Home Assistant. Based in the UK and part of a global team, she runs the Works with Home Assistant certification program as well as other partnerships within the Foundation. The Works with badge is a recognizable mark of certification that items work locally and seamlessly with the Home Assistant smart home ecosystem. Miranda is also the Z-Wave Alliance Marketing Working Group Co-Chair and a frequent attendee of the Alliance summits.
