Your smart home should work together. Here is how to make it.
Every box says it works with everything. Then the lock will not show up in the app, the sensor drops off the mesh, and the lights stop responding because a server four states away is having a bad day. Smart Living Web explains the layer where those things actually happen: radios, standards, controllers and the gaps between them.
Start where you are#
I am choosing a system
Seven platforms, one honest matrix, including who each one is wrong for. Then the platform picker weighs it against your household.
I am about to buy a device
Nine questions to answer before checkout, plus the compatibility checker for the specific thing in your basket.
Something is broken
Diagnosis in order of likelihood: pairing fails, devices go unresponsive, automations run late.
I want it to work offline
What still runs when the internet drops, scored platform by platform in the Local Control Index.
The four numbers that shape every smart home#
Those four facts explain most of what goes wrong in a smart home, and none of them appear on the box. That gap is the reason this site exists. We cover the plumbing: what Matter is and is not, how Thread meshes actually behave, which radio suits which job, and what happens when the vendor turns the servers off.
Topics, covered end to end#
Matter
The application standard: versions, device types, pairing, multi-admin, bridges, and the honest list of what it still cannot do.
Thread
The low-power mesh: border routers, why you end up with three networks, and how to design a mesh that holds.
Platforms
Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings, Home Assistant, Hubitat and Homey, with the trade you are actually making.
Reliability
Local versus cloud, outage behavior, privacy, network setup and surviving a shutdown.
Tools that do the arithmetic#
Free, no accounts, and everything stays in your browser.
Platform picker
Six questions, weighted against every platform, with the reasoning shown rather than hidden.
Compatibility checker
Device plus platform plus connection method, and what you lose in the middle.
2.4 GHz channel planner
Your Wi-Fi channels in, clean Zigbee and Thread channels out, with the frequency math shown.
Internet outage audit
Tick what you own, see what survives a broadband failure and what goes dark.
Border router finder
Filter every shipping Thread border router by ecosystem and Thread version.
Exit cost calculator
What it would cost, in hardware and hours, to leave the platform you are on.
Original research#
We publish the datasets behind our conclusions, with the rubric attached, so you can disagree with the weighting and recompute it yourself.
- The Local Control Index. Eight criteria, 100 points, every major platform scored on what survives an internet outage.
- Matter feature gap tracker. How many months pass between a feature landing in the specification and landing in your hub.
- Thread fragmentation report. Why a house with three border routers usually has three separate Thread networks, vendor by vendor.
- Twenty years of smart home standards. What each wave promised, what survived, and what that predicts about the current one.
Datasets are published as JSON under CC BY 4.0. Take them, use them, link back.
How this site works#
Every page carries an update date and a fact-check date, cites the specifications and vendor documentation it relies on, and separates what a standard says from what a product actually does. Where behavior varies by firmware, we say so instead of picking the tidier answer. When we get something wrong we fix it and log it.
Read the editorial standards, the scoring methodology, or the corrections log. New here? The glossary decodes every term on the site, and the site index lists everything at once.