Sonoff
Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (ZBDongle-E)
- Zigbee
Verified September 2026
The best-value Zigbee coordinator in the UK at well under £20 — an EFR32MG21 with +20dBm output that just works with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. If you're building your first Zigbee network on a budget, start here. It ships pre-flashed with EZSP coordinator firmware, so there's no manual flashing step. At a compact 75×25.5×13.5mm it's barely bigger than a regular USB stick, but Sonoff doesn't bundle a USB extension cable in the box — the external SMA antenna is worth moving off a cheap 1-2m USB-A extension lead you supply yourself, to get it clear of your PC or NAS case and away from other radios for better range.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Radio type | Config | Auto-selected on setup since the dongle enumerates as an EZSP coordinator; no manual driver choice needed. |
| Transmit power | Number (up to +20dBm) | Configurable in the coordinator settings; community reports mixed results running it pinned at max on dense mesh networks — some drop it to reduce interference with low-power battery end devices rather than chase raw range. |
| Channel | Number (11-26) | Manual Zigbee channel selection, used to dodge 2.4GHz Wi-Fi overlap — worth setting explicitly rather than relying on auto-scan given how common Wi-Fi congestion complaints are for this dongle. |
| Coordinator firmware | Config | Community-flashable via vendor tooling; the stock EZSP-only coordinator firmware is the supported path, while the alternative multiprotocol firmware is community-available but deprecated. |
Both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT auto-detect this coordinator on serial connect with no manual driver step, since it enumerates as a standard Silicon Labs EmberZNet/EZSP device. Because this is one of the most heavily used dongles in the community, firmware version drift shows up in the wild: on busy networks with dozens of devices, some coordinator firmware builds have triggered buffer-exhaustion crashes when migrating between driver versions, so it's worth staying on the firmware version your integration's own docs currently recommend rather than always-latest. The chip also supports a multiprotocol firmware for concurrent Zigbee+Thread operation, but that path has since been deprecated as unreliable in practice — flash the standard EZSP-only coordinator firmware unless you specifically need Thread and are prepared for it to be unsupported.
Specs
- chip
- Silicon Labs EFR32MG21, +20dBm TX power
- antenna
- External SMA antenna
- firmware
- Pre-flashed EZSP Zigbee coordinator firmware
- included
- USB dongle with attached SMA antenna only — no USB extension cable in the box; Sonoff sells a separate 1.5m extension lead
- connector
- USB-A
- dimensions
- 75 x 25.5 x 13.5mm