Aqara
Aqara Hub M3
- Zigbee
- Wi-Fi
- Thread
- Matter
- Bluetooth
Verified September 2026
The pick for anyone with a drawer full of Aqara sensors: the M3 bridges them locally over Matter, or HomeKit via homekit_controller, and doubles as a Thread border router for other Matter kit. It is not a general-purpose Zigbee coordinator for ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT — it only talks to its own Aqara devices. Setup still needs an Aqara account and app, even though day-to-day bridging then runs locally. That's the real trade-off against Home Assistant's own Connect ZBT-2, a bare 802.15.4 radio with zero cloud dependency, or Home Assistant Green. At 105x105x36.5mm and £109.99, the M3 only earns its keep if you're already committed to Aqara's ecosystem.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Bridged Aqara sensors | Sensor / binary sensor (per device) | Each paired Aqara Zigbee sensor shows up as its own native entity once exported through the M3's Matter bridge. |
| IR blaster | Unsupported | Not exposed as a remote entity through Matter or HomeKit — the hub itself only surfaces an identify function. |
| IR/scene switch | Switch | A scene built in the Aqara app (e.g. an IR command) and shared to the Home Assistant profile appears in HA as a toggleable switch that fires the underlying action. |
| Alarm system | Alarm control panel | The hub's built-in arm/disarm state, reported reliably through the Matter bridge independent of the sensor-export gaps affecting some device models. |
Bridging holds up well at scale in practice — user reports describe dozens of Aqara Zigbee sensors staying responsive through the M3's Matter fabric with sub-second state updates and no perceptible lag as the count grows. The catch is coverage, not performance: a handful of older Aqara models still don't support Matter export at all, so those stay reachable only via homekit_controller or the Aqara app itself, not the M3's Matter path. The IR blaster gets no native HA entity through either bridging route; the working pattern is to build an IR-triggering scene inside the Aqara app, share it to the Home Assistant third-party-ecosystem profile, and it lands in HA as a plain switch you can call from automations — the trick that makes IR + sensor automations possible at all, e.g. wiring a bridged presence sensor to fire an AC-on IR scene switch when a room becomes occupied.
Specs
- power
- USB-C, 5V/2A mains only (no battery); PoE input 48V/0.27A also supported
- radio
- Shared Zigbee/Thread IEEE 802.15.4 radio, plus Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5GHz) and Bluetooth 5.1 — exact silicon model not published by Aqara
- extras
- Ethernet + PoE, IR blaster
- storage
- 8GB eMMC local storage
- capacity
- Up to 127 Thread/Zigbee devices
- dimensions
- 105 x 105 x 36.5mm
- account requirement
- Aqara account and Aqara app required for initial setup and firmware; Matter/HomeKit bridging to Home Assistant runs locally afterward