If you’re a Home Assistant user, and want to connect your Zigbee and Matter devices, then one option to consider is this Sonoff ZBDongle E. I bought one a couple of weeks ago, and it seems to work fine with my Home Assistant setup.
One thing you will notice if you view its Amazon product page (sponsored link) is that there’s no mention anywhere of Thread or Matter. Out of the box, this Sonoff dongle will only work with Zigbee devices. However, if you follow this handy guide from Smart Home Scene, you can flash the dongle with custom firmware, which adds support for Thread as well. As I mentioned in my recent is there a Zigbee network in your house blog post, both Zigbee and Thread are protocols in the 802.15 family.
The firmware flasher is actually browser-based, and so there’s no need to download additional software. However, it’ll only work in Edge or Chrome, as seemingly Firefox doesn’t have away of allowing web pages to access serial ports.
Note that the guide linked above is for Home Assistant Supervised and OS. If you’re running Home Assistant as a Docker Container, then you’ll need to install this Docker Image as well. I haven’t tried it myself, as I run Home Assistant Supervised, but this seems to be the way to get it to work.
Once it’s all set up, you’ll be able to add both Zigbee and Matter devices to your Home Assistant installation.
The Sonoff dongle cost £22 when I bought it earlier this month, although at the time of writing the price has been hoicked up to £30. That makes it only £1 cheaper than the Home Assistant Skyconnect, which is the official dongle. Therefore, my recommendation of the Sonoff dongle being a cheaper option no longer applies and it’s up to you which one to buy.