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I’ve had the Aqara M3 Hub ($109.99) running for six months now, since it was a requirement for the new Aqara ceiling light I previously reviewed. Aqara is positioning the M3 as part of a new class of brand-specific hubs that can act as multi-hubs—meaning they could be the only hub in your house and smart home app on your phone. It’s a lofty goal to compete with giant multi-hubs like Google, Alexa, SmartThings, and Apple HomeKit, particularly because, like other brand-specific hubs, the integrations don’t support that goal yet. You can add almost anything to Google or Alexa either through those apps themselves, or an integration like IFTTT or Zapier.
For now though, the M3 is for Aqara products and can support any other Matter enabled device. While many devices are shipping with Matter these days, there are still some frailties to relying on Matter rather than a device's native application, so ditching the other apps might not be ideal. It probably doesn't matter whether I recommend the M3 or not—it’s all but required for some Aqara devices. What I would suggest, though, is holding off on trying to make it your multi-hub.
All the wireless protocols packed in the M3
The M3 is doing its best to be everything to everyone, including every wireless protocol: wifi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Matter, Thread (as a border router), Infrared, and Power over Ethernet under the hood. (The only standard I didn't see was Z-wave, which is an older standard on par with Zigbee.) The hub is powered via USB-C or PoE, which gives you a little more flexibility than most hubs, which are just powered by USB. The hub is a basic five-by-five inch square puck that can be wall-mounted or hidden away with all the other hubs you already own. Since I own an Aqara G3 hub, the puck was a bit of a disappointment, as it was just a hub without any additional functions. I’ve become charmed by brands that figure out how to make hubs useful in ways that make you want to keep them out, rather than hiding them away. In comparison, the G3 ($89.99) is a clever pan-and-tilt indoor security camera (with a design some say is reminiscent of a cat), and SwitchBot turned their Hub 2 ($69.99) into a clock, thermometer, and hygrometer. Plus, the G3 and Hub 2 were both cheaper than the singularly focused M3. The only thing the M3 has close to this is the ability to act as an alarm or announce notifications over a loudspeaker.
One aspect of all the protocols supported here is that built-in IR transceiver—it means the M3 can support heat pumps, air conditioners, and more. Support is already built into the app for the hub, which walks you through setup using this feature, and I was impressed that I could control most aspects of my A/C or heater via the app. I’d still keep the native app around for fine-tuning, but I could get by with the Aqara M3 functionality, and this meant I could include these devices in automations. I haven’t seen another hub with this feature.
What can you do with the Aqara hub?
Like other brand-specific hubs, you can expose the Aqara hub to your Google Home, Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and any other major ecosystem. You’re limited to four additional ecosystems, which is probably not going to limit anyone anytime soon, and it won’t expose devices linked via IR, just via Matter. This allows you to access the linked devices from within the other ecosystem, like Google or Alexa. So if you pair a sensor, via Matter, to the M3 hub, you can then expose the M3 to Google Home and see that sensor in Google Home. It’s as if you’re creating a solar system, and the Aqara hub and all the devices on it are a planet. The foreseeable issue is this: If you’ve had trouble with devices going offline in your hub occasionally, you know that you have to go to the native app to correct the problem. So now you’ve added another step because you have to go through Google Home, Aqara, and the native app, which you likely have to keep around on your phone for instances like this. Also, remember that you only get limited functions for devices linked via Matter, and Matter does not support all platforms yet. You can turn lights on and off, but you can’t make nuanced configurations of those lights that might be available in the native app. I have a number of these hubs around the house: a Brilliant wall hub, SmartThings itself, and SwitchBot, all of which can be linked to devices via Matter, but what is the point if you have Google Home or Apple HomeKit? If you happen to have a vast number of Aqara devices, that might make sense—or if are a Home Assistant user, where Matter is going to bring everything to your Home Assistant interface.
The M3 supports hub clustering
If that concept is new to you, it was to me, too. Simply put, if you have previous hubs for Aqara products, this new M3 hub will marry them all into a network, and take over as the lead in that network. It will try to assume all the automations and actions assigned to previous hubs, and by keeping those previous hubs around, you create a stronger network so you don’t necessarily need to keep your hub close by the Aqara product—they’d be spread out. It’s an interesting concept since I’m looking to ditch hubs, not keep them around. Normally I’d replace a previous hub with an updated one. Again, if you could get away with Aqara as your only multi-hub, this would be a neat feature, working a little like mesh wifi. More impressively, the assistance offered via the app to set up this feature really held my hand, explaining each step and what would happen specific to my devices. This process migrates data from the original hubs, and then resets them to become part of the network.
Bottom line: It has promising hardware
To be totally transparent, brand-specific hubs don’t catch my fancy, since they tend to be best suited for that brand’s devices, and I’m not much of a loyalist (my devices are from a hundred different brands). It makes sense to make a hub with a voice assistant and tons of integrations with my main multi-hub. Still, I was impressed with the M3, not just in itself, but for what it indicates about Aqara moving forward—they’re trying to be a competitive player in the smart space. While Aqara makes a lot of devices, the meat and bones of the operation is all of their sensors, which any products they make are based on. If you’re using a lot of their sensors as the triggers for automations, it’s certainly reasonable to use an Aqara hub for those automations. While Aqara packed a lot into their little hardware puck, I’d still like to see additional functionality to make it worth staying out in the open instead of hidden—and at a more competitive price. Still, if you need to buy the hub to make an Aqara device work, I wouldn’t feel bad about the value. I think the future is bright for hardware like the M3 hub.
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