The best I've used is Inovelli Red. They have been extremely reliable. I also have their ZigBee variant which is Inovelli Blue and they had also been great.
Home Automation
Discussion about general home automation ideas and projects, home automation protocols like Z-wave, Zigbee, Matter, etc, and home automation software and hubs like HomeSeer, Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Homey.
I have been using a variety of Zooz switches going on 2 years now. The earlier 20 series switches were personally my favorite since the they have a very distinct click and the new 70 series are softer.
As far as reliability they’ve actually been perfect in talking to both a Nortek Combo dongle and the new Zooz 800 series stick directly on home assistant. Now there are a few caveats:
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I’ve had terrible luck with Zooz Relays, I cannot keep the things in sync with HA and I’ve been too busy to troubleshoot it further. I can’t recommend these at this time.
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Zooz dimmers can be picky about the LED bulbs you use, I would advise avoiding dimmers or only getting 1 dimmer to test the bulbs you plan on using. You may get bulbs that are “dimmable” but then end up flickering regardless of being “anti flicker”, and the lowest sim setting IMO isn’t that dim. The only bulbs I have that work well were a clearance bulb from a local hardware store and they no longer stock them so if I end up replacing them in the future I may swap from Dimmers to Smart Bulbs + Smart Switches
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I had one that was DOA but Zooz support sent a replacement in just a couple of days, so support was reasonable.
I ended up getting a bunch of zooz 800 zen76s on/off switches since it was on sale on thesmartesthouse.com and the reviews on other sites are mostly positive. So far no complaints. They work and the click isn't very loud. There was some drama about connecting them to smartthings but i blame the smartthings app for that one. It would just hang on the connecting screen for a few minutes but would eventually connect. I was going to get dimmers but ended up not going down that rabbithole for the reasons you stated. Also i rarely dim my lights so i'm not going to miss that.
Inovelli. It's always Inovelli.