Expert's Rating
Pros
- Easy to set up and pair to Aqara’s Zigbee devices
- Includes an integrated infrared blaster and a speaker
- Very inexpensive
Cons
- Can control only Aqara’s Zigbee devices
- App isn’t the most intuitive
- Poor-quality user manual
Our Verdict
The affordable Aqara Hub M2 supports up to 128 Zigbee devices, and it has an integrated infrared blaster. But in some respects, Aqara locks you into its own ecosystem.
Best Prices Today: Aqara Hub M2
The Aqara Hub M2 is an inexpensive Zigbee 3.0 smart home hub designed to control Aqara’s line of Zigbee smart home products, including its smart plugs and in-wall dimmers, which I’ll review soon. Despite its being the central component in a walled garden—it won’t work with Zigbee products from any manufacturer other than Aqara—the Hub M2 is compatible with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT.
On the one hand, the Hub M2’s closed nature is limiting: If Aqara doesn’t make the type of smart home component you want, you’re out of luck. On other hand, it’s freeing: You’ll never be left to wonder if a component will work with it, and you’ll know precisely how to integrate it into your Aqara-based smart home system.
The Aqara Hub M2 can control up to 128 of Aqara’s Zigbee devices, which should be more than enough for most smart homes.
Design
The Aqara Hub M2 can control up to 128 of Aqara’s Zigbee smart home devices. It also includes an integrated IR blaster for controlling products that have IR receivers.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Shaped like an oversized hockey puck, the Aqara Hub M2 immediately recalls the Homey line of smart home hubs, although Aqara’s device lacks the Homey’s swirling lighting effects. In fact, both hubs have some of the same features, including a built-in infrared blaster that can control a television, air conditioner, fan, or anything else equipped with an IR receiver. (Pro tip: To add an IR device, tap “Hub M2” under the Aqara Home app’s Accessories tab, then tap “Add Remote Control.”)
This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems.
The Hub M2 also has a built-in speaker that allows it to serve as an alarm clock, a doorbell chime extender, a speaker for your security system, and more, depending on which additional peripherals you have installed in your house. Power is provided via a micro-USB port; a cable is included but not an A/C adapter (you’ll need to supply a 5V 1A adapter). You can also set up a battery back-up system with a user-provided 10,000mAh power bank with passthrough charging.
The Aqara Home app is not entirely intuitive, being based on “boards” versus rooms in your home. If you’re using it as a home security system, you can set home, away, and night modes that govern the behavior of components such as motion sensors.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Aqara provides a hot mess of a user manual—printed in tiny type, no less—but you’ll probably find you don’t need to read it while setting up the hub. Power on the device, add an accessory in the Aqara Home app, and select the Hub M2 from the list. Aqara’s proprietary pairing technology does the rest of the work and bridges the device to your home network. The hub can connect to your wireless router’s 2.4GHz frequency band, or you can plug an ethernet cable into the hub’s RJ-45 port. You’ll see a USB-A port on the back of the hub, too, but it’s reserved for a future unspecified purpose.
The Hub M2 can control up to 128 of Aqara’s Zigbee devices, which should be more than enough for most smart homes. While some Aqara products can also work with a Samsung SmartThings hub, you cannot use any third-party Zigbee devices with Aqara’s hub. You won’t encounter the same limitation with IR devices, however, and they are not included in the 128-device limit.
Restricting the smart home products you can use with the Hub M2 to Aqara’s own product line eliminates any compatibility guesswork when it comes to building out your smart home: Just scroll through the list of devices in the Aqara Home app, find the one you wish to add to the system, hold down the device’s power button for a few seconds, and Aqara does the rest.
Using the Aqara Hub M2
The Aqara Home app uses and easy-to-understand scripting language to control the behavior of Aqara Zigbee smart home devices, but it can also control various devices that have infrared receivers, such as TVs.
Christopher Null/Foundry
The Aqara Home app lets you assign devices to rooms, but the app is really designed around “Boards,” which are more arbitrary groupings of devices that the user can completely customize. This lets you drop devices for different rooms into a single page, along with additional panels—a live weather widget, for example—and then organize them how you see fit. This is not at all an intuitive process, and Aqara offers only minimal handholding, but I was able to muddle through it eventually with the compatible five devices I had on hand to test.
Devices can be managed individually for basic functions, such as setting up countdown timers or viewing real-time energy consumption; but you’ll want to use Aqara’s automation engine for more complex actions. This if-this-then-that style scripting system lets you connect various devices together, set up schedules, and the like. If you want to turn on a light bulb when a motion sensor detects movement, this is the way to do it.
Should you buy the Aqara Hub M2?
You can also use third-party systems to control Aqara’s products, as the hub supports HomeKit, Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT. I tried several of these and had no issues getting voice commands or cross-vendor automations up and running. Invariably I found the Aqara platform to be responsive to commands no matter how I delivered them.
The Aqara Hub M2 is one of the most affordable smart home hubs on the market, and the same can be said of Aqara’s other smart home products (again, look for my reviews of several soon). If you think the upside of taking a simple and easy path to a smart home outweighs being limited to one company’s smart home products, the Aqara Hub M2 is a fine platform to build on.
If you don’t, you might want to see how the upcoming Matter-compatible Aqara Hub M3 fares when we review it.
Specifications
- Onboard radios: Bluetooth, Zigbee, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi
- Smart home protocol: Zigbee
- Maximum number of Zigbee devices supported: 128 (Aqara devices only)
- Matter compatible? No
- Router connectivity: 2.4GHz Wi-Fi or ethernet cable
- Smart home ecosystem support: Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, IFTTT
Correction, February 14, 2024: The Aqara Hub M2 uses a micro-USB cable for power, not a USB-C cable. We regret the error.
Best Prices Today: Aqara Hub M2
Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, TechHive
Christopher Null is an award-winning technology journalist with more than 25 years of experience writing about and reviewing consumer and business tech products. Previously, he served as Executive Editor for PC Computing magazine and was the founder and Editor in Chief of Mobile magazine, the first print publication focused exclusively on mobile tech. In addition to covering a wide range of smart home gear for TechHive, he is a frequent contributor to Wired, This Old House, and AAA’s Via Magazine.