There are many opinions about which Zigbee solution is best for the Home Assistant. Some swear by Zigbee2MQTT and others want ZHA or Deconz solution. All three have their advantages and disadvantages.
For a long time, I have used Zigbee2MQTT as a solution for the Zigbee network at home. It consists of just over 100 devices. A good mix of power and battery units, and several different suppliers. All of this has actually worked very well.
A while ago I bought a Skyconnect coordinator. I have used this on the test solution for a while, and it has worked very well.
So now it was time to change the radio from ZZH to Skyconnect. The advantage of Skyconnect is that it has, among other things, a newer Zigbee chip (more powerful), and you also get Thread with the purchase if you choose to go for the ZHA and multipan solution.
You can also use Skyconnect on Zigbee2MQTT without the Thread option. I want to have both, and have therefore chosen to go from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA.
There are (at least) two ways to go from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA, either by migrating automatically or setting everything up again. With 100 units, one would think that migrating might be smart. When I tested this on my test environment, I found that some of the devices were not included correctly. So that’s why I chose to set everything up again this time.
Fortunately, you can run both Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA in parallel on one and the same Home Assistant installation, as long as you have 2 coordinators. I therefore set up SkyConnect against ZHA as a multi-radio coordinator and installed ZHA and Thread as recommended by Home Assistant.
Then I took one device at a time, removed it from Zigbee2MQTT, and then included it again in ZHA. The advantage of this is that you are strictly not in a hurry. The entire Zigbee network will work during the period, and no one will really notice that you move/make changes. You also get an opportunity to perhaps clean up automations etc. a bit when you do it this way – I did anyway.
After everything had been moved from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA, I uninstalled the Zigbee2MQTT addon and removed the old Zigbee plug.
I have now run the solution with ZHA for a couple of weeks, and have not experienced anything negative with this. Stable and nice. The advantage has actually been that the Zigbee network is perceived to be faster and more responsive. It could perhaps be because Skyconnect is a newer and more powerful radio.