I have more than 5 years experience with Home Assistant and Zigbee devices.
(No zwave experience)
Generally I am happy with Zigbee, it's super annoying to pair, but for battery powered devices it's unbeatable.
I went from a some AliExpress USB Stick to a ConBee2 to the Home Assistant Yellow.
I use Ikea, Sonoff, Xiaomi (Aqara) Zigbee devices all of them "just work".
The one big thing Zigbee is good at is not requiring you to need some proprietary App, all devices are just paired locally, you don't need to question if that app you just installed phones home.
For general hardware advice:
Overall the Home Assistant Yellow was the best choice overall, I would anyone who doesn't want to spend a ton of time on HA hosting to just buy it.
Everything works pretty flawlessly with it.
Conbee 2 ist still my current stick because I am experimenting with the Matter/Thread Support on the Home Assistant Yellow, sadly without success though.
My best recommendation if you want to tinker with smart devices is get anything that you can flash Tasmota on. (List of Devices https://templates.blakadder.com/ )
Tasmota is an amazing piece of software that runs on your smart device for example a power plug.
Generally I am happy with Zigbee, it's super annoying to pair, but for battery powered devices it's unbeatable.
I went from a some AliExpress USB Stick to a ConBee2 to the Home Assistant Yellow. I use Ikea, Sonoff, Xiaomi (Aqara) Zigbee devices all of them "just work".
The one big thing Zigbee is good at is not requiring you to need some proprietary App, all devices are just paired locally, you don't need to question if that app you just installed phones home.
For general hardware advice:
Overall the Home Assistant Yellow was the best choice overall, I would anyone who doesn't want to spend a ton of time on HA hosting to just buy it. Everything works pretty flawlessly with it.
Conbee 2 ist still my current stick because I am experimenting with the Matter/Thread Support on the Home Assistant Yellow, sadly without success though.
My best recommendation if you want to tinker with smart devices is get anything that you can flash Tasmota on. (List of Devices https://templates.blakadder.com/ )
Tasmota is an amazing piece of software that runs on your smart device for example a power plug.
https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
Get MQTT running on your Home Assistant device, or any in your network and start connecting stuff to it.
I have Shelly powerplugs flashed with Tasmota and that opens up so many possibilities.