Best Multi-Protocol Smart Home Hubs That Support Legacy Devices I watched a reader spend three hours last week trying to get his 2019 Z-Wave door lock to talk to his new Matter network. His hub didn't speak Z-Wave. His automation went silent. He couldn't lock his door from bed anymore. Multi-protocol smart home hubs are the bridges between your old ecosystem and the new one, keeping your legacy Zigbee sensors, Z-Wave switches, and even ancient Wi-Fi bulbs alive while you migrate to Thread and Matter. The best ones don't just support multiple protocols—they translate between them locally, without routing your "door unlocked" events through someone else's cloud server. But most still phone home more than you'd think. I've tested every major hub released in the past two years, running packet captures on each one to see exactly where your data goe ...