A Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer

SONOFF ZBDongle-P review: the $25 stick behind my whole Zigbee network

ByRandall

Disclosure: I bought this with my own money. SONOFF didn’t send it. There are no affiliate links in this post. How I review

Short version: Since April 2025, a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, the ZBDongle-P, has been the coordinator for every Zigbee device in my house: fourteen sensors from Third Reality and Aqara, running through Home Assistant’s ZHA on a Raspberry Pi 5. For about $25 it does exactly what a coordinator should. When my network had problems, the stick wasn’t the cause.

A Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer
Stock photo: a Raspberry Pi 5, the kind of board a USB Zigbee stick plugs into. Not my setup. Photo: SimonWaldherr, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What it is

  • Chip: Texas Instruments CC2652P, which Home Assistant identifies on its own.
  • Firmware: ships as a Z-Stack coordinator. SONOFF also offers a web flasher if you ever want to turn it into a router instead.
  • Software: works with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT, among others. Pick one: two systems can’t share the same stick.
  • Price: $24.90 on SONOFF’s store as of this writing.

Living with it

Everything paired without a vendor hub. Third Reality motion and temperature sensors and a mix of Aqara leak, contact and presence sensors all joined ZHA and show up as normal Home Assistant entities. My busiest motion sensor logs thousands of state changes a week through it.

The one real scare came when I audited my Zigbee network and found half my sensors offline. It’s tempting to blame the coordinator for that. It wasn’t the stick: my network had no routers at all, so every battery sensor had to reach the dongle directly through walls. That’s a design mistake on my end, and it would have hurt any coordinator the same way.

Set it up right

  1. Use a USB extension cable. SONOFF recommends one, and Home Assistant’s own docs warn that USB 3.0 ports and nearby electronics cause interference. Get the stick away from the Pi.
  2. Add routers. Mains-powered Zigbee devices like smart plugs relay for everything else. A coordinator plus only battery sensors isn’t a mesh.
  3. Choose ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT up front. Switching later usually means re-pairing everything.

P or E?

SONOFF sells two sticks under the “Dongle Plus” name. The -P (this one) uses the TI CC2652P; the -E uses a Silicon Labs EFR32MG21. They cost the same. SONOFF’s newer Dongle-PMG24 adds Thread support if you want one stick for both. If all you need is Zigbee on Home Assistant, the -P has been a set-and-forget choice for me.

Verdict

Cheap, well supported, and boring in the best way. Just give it an extension cable and some routers to work with.

My rating: 4 out of 5

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