Hi everyone,
I am reading up on that topic for a few weeks now and the only conclusion I have so far is: There is nothing that works perfect and you need to check for each device if it works with your setup.
So I am asking about your experience so far, what you use, if you plan to change your setup (for what reason?) or what you would do different. Or do you use multiple gateways / protocols at the same time?
I run HA in Docker for a few things, but I have nothing connected yet via one of the protocols mentioned above. Yesterday I came across SkyConnect and thought I found the holy grail of dongles. Zigbee? Check. Zigbee2MQTT? Check. Matter? Check. But then looking at the details... Zigbee2MQTT is experimental and in a few review (although none was younger than 9 months) people report that it works unreliable. Matter support also is not there yet it seems. And to add insult to insury it seems that it officially does not work with a Dockerized HA setup.
So whenever I think I found "my" solution, there is something that does not seem to work, is unreliable or not compatible with all devices. I even ran across reports that said if a device Support Zigbee or MQTT it might still not work with your particular setup because... well... not everything that has a specific protocol stamped on the package seem to work in the same way.
So I feel like running in circles. I wanted to start with a few simple things like Temperature / Humidity sensors and Door sensors like for example the ones from Aqara. But if I throw money at someone my highest priority is reliability. So I want to go a route that (at this moment) is the most stable, reliable and future proof in your opinion.
So I am very curious about your setups and the experience you made with it :-)
Technically I run OpenHAB not HA, but I've struggled with this too.
I've been wanting to dockerize my Openhab for a while but have found similar issues with compatibility and network discoverability so I've avoided it. My current setup is their official Raspberry Pi os (openhabian), with a Conbee II via Zigbee2mqtt for zigbee with Hue, Tradfri and Sonoff devices an Aeotec Zstick Gen5 (no plus) for Zwave with mostly Zooz devices, way too many WiFi devices (mostly TPLink Kasa) and probably some other things I've forgotten.
To be honest though I haven't fully nailed reliability. It works for months straight with no issues but every so often I get a bug that requires resetting a device or two, or an update stomping over my SSL certs, or some intermittent slowness, but it's reliable enough. I specifically avoid any cameras or security devices (beyond some door sensors for non-security reasons) so that I don't have the headache of high reliability.
The whole setup is a patchwork of whatever happened to work at the time and wasn't prohibitively expensive for me. I decided a long time ago that the flexibility was worth more than paying a bunch more for a single highly reliable system.
It sucks, but it works better than manually switching on my lights all the time, so it's good enough for me.