Bridges

Some links below are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.

A bridge is a translator. It speaks a protocol Apple Home does not — Zigbee, Z-Wave, KNX, or a manufacturer’s own radio — and presents whatever is on the other side to the Home app as ordinary accessories. Buy one because of the accessories you already own, or intend to own. Nobody wants a bridge for its own sake.

A bridge is not a home hub

This is the confusion that sends people to the wrong product, so it is worth being blunt about.

A home hub is a HomePod or an Apple TV. It runs your automations, it gives you access from outside the house, and on current models it is the Thread border router the low-power mesh depends on. You need one. Apple makes it, nothing on this page replaces it.

A bridge is a box from an accessory manufacturer that adds devices to your home. It does not run automations and it does not give you remote access on its own.

If nothing in the Home app works when you leave the house, you are missing a home hub, not a bridge. Buying a Hue Bridge will not fix it.

Matter did not make bridges obsolete

It made them more interesting. Two roles are worth telling apart:

• A Matter bridge takes accessories that do not speak Matter — a drawer of older Zigbee sensors, say — and presents them to Apple Home as if they did. This is how a device bought in 2019 keeps working.
• A Matter controller commissions and runs Matter accessories. Your Apple TV or HomePod already does this for Apple Home.

A hub that does both is buying you time on kit you already paid for.

Bridges worth buying

Everything in one box: Aqara Hub M3

The Aqara Hub M3 carries Zigbee 3.0, Thread and Bluetooth radios with dual-band Wi-Fi and a wired Ethernet port, and it acts as a Matter controller and a Matter bridge at the same time. That combination is why it is the one to buy if you want a single box rather than a shelf of them.

The bridge role is the valuable half. Aqara has sold Zigbee accessories for years, Zigbee is not Matter, and the M3 exposes those older sensors, switches and locks to Apple Home as bridged accessories — so an existing drawer of Aqara kit keeps working rather than becoming landfill.

Check price on Amazon UK

If you have Hue bulbs: Philips Hue Bridge

The Philips Hue Bridge is the most-owned bridge in the world and the reason is not sophistication — it is that Hue’s Zigbee bulbs need it, and that it is the only way to get the full Hue system rather than the reduced Bluetooth-only version.

Buy it if you have Hue bulbs, more than a couple of rooms, or want Hue’s own switches and sensors. Do not buy it for anything else.

Check price on Amazon UK

If you have Bosch: Bosch Smart Home Controller II

The Bosch Smart Home Controller II is the hub for Bosch’s own range, and a software update turned it into a Matter bridge — which is what puts it in this directory. It passes Bosch accessories through to Apple Home even though those accessories do not speak Matter themselves, including the second-generation Light/Shutter Control, radiator thermostat and room thermostat.

Check price on Amazon UK

If you have eufy cameras: eufy HomeBase S380

The eufy HomeBase S380, also sold as HomeBase 3, sits at the centre of a eufy camera system, and its argument is the absence of a monthly fee. It ships with 16 GB of storage and takes an internal drive up to 16 TB, so recordings go somewhere you own. For several cameras recording continuously that is the difference between a week of history and a year.

Check price on Amazon UK

The generic Zigbee gateways

The Mi Smart Home Hub (Amazon UK), the ZemiSmart Zigbee Hub (Amazon UK) and the MOES Wired Smart Gateway (Amazon UK) are the cheap end. They work, and they are the right answer if you have already bought that manufacturer’s sensors. They are the wrong answer as a first purchase, because the value of a bridge is entirely in the ecosystem behind it.

What to check before you buy

Which of your accessories it actually exposes. A manufacturer’s bridge does not necessarily pass everything through to Apple Home. Ranges get split: the newer generation crosses over and the older one does not, or the sensors appear and the switches do not. Check the specific models you own, not the brand.

Whether it needs the internet. Some bridges talk to Apple Home locally and some route through the manufacturer’s cloud. The local ones keep working when the broadband is down and do not stop working when a company loses interest. This is the single biggest quality difference between bridges and it is rarely on the box.

Ethernet or Wi-Fi. A bridge is the thing every accessory behind it depends on, and it sits in one place forever. If it has an Ethernet port, use it.

How many bridges you are accumulating. The realistic end state for a mixed house is two or three, each next to the router with its own power supply. A hub that speaks several protocols is worth a premium simply for the sockets and the shelf space it saves.

Whether you need one at all. A Thread or Wi-Fi accessory that joins Apple Home directly needs no bridge, and that is now most of what is worth buying. The bridge is for the kit you already have, and for ecosystems — Hue, Bosch, eufy — where the bridge is the system.

And a home hub, separately. Worth repeating, because it is the mistake this page exists to prevent: a bridge adds devices, a HomePod or Apple TV makes them do things by themselves.

The full list of HomeKit-compatible bridges, hubs and gateways in the directory is below.