Aqara Smart Hub M2 (2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Required), Smart Home Bridge for Alarm System, IR Remote Control, Home Automation, Supports Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit and IFTTT

Does exactly what I bought it to to do and almost 8 months later, still no issues. I bought one of the Aqara door locks and wanted to be able to manage it in and via my Home Assistant setup, and this is allowing and providing for that with ease. Honestly once it's setup and working you don't even have to think about it.

I bought the M2 hub about a month ago opened it 2 weeks later because I was moving. Setup was a breeze, then the next day it was offline line no problem saw there was a firmware update did it worked for about 2 days now it stays offline will not reboot by hold the button. Even when unplugged and waiting to reconnect it boots back to offline. Customer service? Ha put in a ticket received a response the next day asking for information. Sent it didn't hear back from them again until 4 days later after I put in another ticket and then they asked to connect to the hub all I have to do is go into the hub messages and give approval. Problem there's no message. So I'm still stuck with a non functional hub.Edit 10/30.Barry was very helpful in troubleshooting the problem I was having. He went through every possible solution to get it back up and running before it was ruled dead. Aqara sent out a replacement and it works as intended. Which is good because I really like they're products. Finished setting up my door and motion sensors. Leak detectors and plugs. I'll be added their present sensor soon.

This was a breeze to install and configure. The instructions were clear, the device UI is well thought out, and it was updated to be Matter compatible shortly after I purchased.I initially bought it to manage Aqara's excellent door sensors (my young child had a habit of trying to sneak out the house) but have added water and movement sensors which all integrate beautifully with the Amazon ecosystem, though I'm planning to switch to home assistant.In any case, the only shortcoming is that Aqara's zigbee implementation is proprietary and thus I can't use this with other zigbee devices. Not a huge deal as USB dongles are getting rather inexpensive and feature rich.Update: If you've got an old one, the Matter upgrade does not turn this into a controller; it's still just an propriety Aqara-Zigbee controller, but a Matter bridge. So it plays semi-nicely with Home Assistant (for me at least) but it doesn't directly control devices. Also, despite being careful, the USB power connector broke off the PCB. I've looked into repairing it and many others have reported similar outcomes. I thought it could also receive power via PoE, but that's the newer M3 model. I was able to remove the lid without damage, then found 4/5 of the copper pads delaminated from the traces and are still soldered to the broken off usb-micro jack. So I scraped the traces down to copper and am hoping I can solder that small (sub 1mm). These traces should be thicker, they are for the main power bus. Will have to bridge with wire. only the ground pin came off without destroying the copper. Also, the data mode pin (4) doesn't seem to be wired to anything (I'm assuming because it's just for power). We'll see So for all of these issues I'm docking a point, knocking it down to a 4-star rating.

Save yourself time and frustration and just get the M3 instead. I was hooking up Aqara T1 valve controllers to the M2 and had consistently poor Zigbee signal on my connected devices. They would work only sometimes when triggered. I kept the same exact set up, just swapped the M2 for the M3, and my signal strength increased 10x. Devices that would work 50% or less of the time now work every time. This is a piece of junk, it literally feels like a puck of plastic with nothing inside. There are minimal instructions and basically 0 customer support. If you want something that “just works”, get the M3.

This hub makes a solid connection to my 2.4 gHz WiFi network and provides good coverage.Most (and so far for me, all) Aqara smart items bridged through it can be addressed in HomeAssistant through the HomeKit integration. No need to bother with Matter - unless you want to. The IR blaster, however, only functions with the phone app and does not expose paired items with HomeAssistant - and that it's only minus in my opinion. However, as I view the IR blaster as a nice bonus, and not core to the product I didn't dock the item a star in my rating. However, if the IR blaster were to be exposed - now, that would be something special!Devices are easy to set up and this hub performs a good as advertised. It's price point makes it a good choice for any home wanting to add good Zigbee coverage for the Aqara ecosystem. Nice.Also, note that I run this hub alongside another Zigbee coordinator (a USB stick) and both networks function without issue even though my 2.4 gHz spectrum is pretty saturated with competing networks. Again, nice!