If you associate IKEA with affordable flat-pack furniture and kitchen utensils with unpronounceable names, you might have overlooked the fact that the company has been at the forefront of the smart home revolution for decades.
My house is full of IKEA smart home products
I’d say that 90% of my smart home runs purely on IKEA devices. This includes a ton of smart plugs, some smart bulbs, contact and infrared sensors, remotes, and an air quality monitor. I can honestly say that I’ve had zero issues with any of this stuff, and it cost me far less than it would if I’d spent my money elsewhere.
The first time I visited IKEA to pick up some smart home gadgets, it was purely out of curiosity. I bought a small selection, mostly smart plugs and a few bulbs. By the time I had unpacked and set everything up, I was left wishing that I had bought a lot more. So off I went for a second trip to pick up everything I’d missed the first time around, plus a few spares just in case.
My initial skepticism came from just how cheap IKEA’s lineup happens to be, and I was happy to be proven wrong. IKEA’s most basic smart plug was the cheapest I could get my hands on at the time, but you’d never have known it from the quality and ease of use. The rest of the range has treated me well, too.
I had read a few reports that some of the battery-powered IKEA devices (like door and window sensors and passive infrared motion sensors) had issues with excessive battery drain, but all of mine are still on their first set of AAAs.
Works with Home Assistant (and more)
There are three ways to use IKEA’s smart home lineup, and I chose Home Assistant. When I purchased these devices in 2025, IKEA’s entire lineup used the Zigbee low-power wireless protocol to communicate. Since Zigbee is an established protocol that’s well-supported in the smart home sphere, adding IKEA to devices to an open smart home platform like Home Assistant is trivially easy.
I used the Zigbee Home Automation integration to add plugs, bulbs, remotes, and sensors one by one. I’ve since exposed them to Apple Home using Home Assistant’s HomeKit Bridge integration. That means I can control all of my IKEA devices using my iPhone in Apple Home, while Home Assistant hums away quietly in the background and powers the whole affair.
You don’t need an IKEA-branded hub to make this work, just a Home Assistant server with a Zigbee radio like the ZBT-2. These devices are well-supported by the platform, though they miss out on a few features like over-the-air software updates and, in some cases, an accurate battery reading. Neither are dealbreakers for me.
Alternatively, you can use IKEA’s proprietary Dirigera hub and associated smartphone app. This is a turnkey solution that is designed to be broadly accessible. You can control and schedule devices using the IKEA app, but functionality is greatly limited compared to what you get with Home Assistant (plus the hub only supports IKEA devices, whereas Home Assistant brings everything together in one place).
There’s one other way to use certain IKEA devices together, and that’s Touchlink. This is essentially a technology that allows you to bind two compatible devices together without the need for a hub. IKEA sells some bulbs with a remote control in the box, which are already paired, but you can pair other devices using a combination of button presses and proximity. While Touchlink is the simplest way to go, it’s also the most limited.
The real star for me is Home Assistant support, which explains why the Home Assistant community is so obsessed with IKEA devices. You can kit out your whole home with plugs and sensors for a few hundred dollars, while bringing other devices from other brands that use different protocols together in one place.
IKEA’s smart home lineup is changing
Right now, IKEA is going through something of a smart home rebirth. While the devices I built my smart home around all used the Zigbee wireless protocol, the company is in the process of relaunching its smart home range and shifting to the Matter over Thread standard.
Matter is an open standard, supported by all major proprietary smart home ecosystems (from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung), plus IKEA’s own platform, and Home Assistant (of course). Thread is the name of the wireless networking protocol being used, which is similar to Zigbee for all intents and purposes.
To add Thread devices to any smart home ecosystem, you’ll need a Thread Border Router like a modern HomePod (for Apple Home), or a ZBT-2 configured in Thread mode (for Home Assistant). IKEA is basically opening its smart home devices up to more ecosystems and devices, while still maintaining support for its existing platform.
This means a whole new range of devices are currently in the process of being launched, with IKEA replacing like-for-like Zigbee devices with Matter over Thread equivalents. With this in mind, some of the new devices still work over Zigbee, while others, like sensors, are locked to Thread.
If you’re looking to kick-start your smart home, you can do a lot worse than a trip to IKEA. Just try not to buy too many homewares and hot dogs while you’re there.
