Your motion sensor turns the lights off while you’re still sitting at your desk. That is the problem every PIR sensor has: it reacts to movement, so the moment you settle in to read or work, it decides the room is empty. A millimeter-wave presence sensor fixes that by watching for the tiny motion of a person who is otherwise still, down to the rise and fall of breathing, and it holds the room “occupied” until you actually leave.
The radar inside most of these sensors is similar. What separates them is how the data gets to Home Assistant. One speaks ESPHome over your Wi-Fi, another joins your Zigbee mesh, a third runs over Wi-Fi with a cloud app, and the newest ones talk Matter over Thread. That choice decides how local the sensor is, whether it runs on batteries or mains, and how much tuning you get. We picked seven sensors that cover every one of those paths, confirmed the specs against each maker’s page plus a Home Assistant community source, and pulled live prices and stock so you can match a sensor to the way your setup actually connects.
Quick picks
Every sensor here runs fully local in Home Assistant with no vendor cloud in the loop. The one exception to the “mmWave” label is the Sonoff, which uses a coarser 5.8GHz microwave radar and earns its place on price alone. Prices are what the listings showed when we wrote this, so check the live price before you buy.
| Award | Sensor | Radar | Home Assistant path | Power | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best overall | Everything Presence Lite | 24GHz mmWave | ESPHome, Wi-Fi, local | USB-C | ~$35 to $40 |
| Best for tinkerers | Apollo Automation MSR-2 | 24GHz mmWave | ESPHome, Wi-Fi, local | USB-C | ~$38 |
| Best Zigbee value | Aqara FP1E | 60GHz mmWave | Zigbee (ZHA / Zigbee2MQTT) | USB-A mains | ~$43 to $50 |
| Best for zones | Aqara FP2 | 60GHz mmWave | Wi-Fi via HomeKit, local | USB-C mains | ~$75 to $90 |
| Best for Matter | Aqara FP300 | 60GHz mmWave + PIR | Matter over Thread | Battery (2x CR2450) | ~$50 |
| Best budget | Sonoff SNZB-06P | 5.8GHz microwave | Zigbee (ZHA / Zigbee2MQTT) | USB-C mains | ~$18 |
| Best battery | ThirdReality R2 | 24GHz mmWave | Zigbee (ZHA / Zigbee2MQTT) | Battery (3x AA) | ~$20 to $40 |
How we picked
We did not bench these units side by side in our own lab, so we will not pretend to measured detection ranges or false-trigger counts we did not record. What we did do was confirm every spec against three sources: the maker’s own product page, a live retailer or Amazon listing for the exact model, and one Home Assistant community source such as the ESPHome device database, the Zigbee2MQTT device page, or a hands-on reviewer who tuned the sensor in a real room. Amazon prices and stock come from the Creators API on the date above, quoted as bands because they move.
We also left a few things out on purpose. The flood of unbranded Tuya pucks that only work through Zigbee2MQTT and swamp the mesh with traffic did not make the cut, and neither did sensors whose buy pages had gone dead. Where a vendor claims a feature we couldn’t verify, such as the FP2’s long-promised Matter support, we say so rather than print it as fact.
The picks
1. Everything Presence Lite: the best overall for Home Assistant
This is the sensor we would put in most rooms. It pairs a Hi-Link LD2450 24GHz radar with an ESP32, ships pre-flashed with ESPHome, and Home Assistant discovers it the moment it joins your Wi-Fi. No hub, no cloud, no app. Because the LD2450 is a coordinate tracker, it reports each target’s X and Y position, speed and angle, which is what lets you draw up to four detection zones and two exclusion zones inside Home Assistant itself and track up to three people at once.
That coordinate data is the real reason to start here rather than with a cheaper Zigbee puck. The request goes straight from the radar to Home Assistant over the local ESPHome API, so zone changes apply instantly and nothing leaves your network. It carries a light sensor but no PIR, temperature or humidity, so if you want those in one unit, step up to the Presence Pro. Buy it direct, since there is no Amazon listing; it runs around $35 to $40, so check the live price.
Pass on it if you need temperature or humidity readings from the same sensor, or you cannot run a USB cable to it, since it is mains-powered only.
2. Apollo Automation MSR-2: best for ESPHome tinkerers
Apollo builds the MSR-2 for people who like to tune. It’s one of the smallest presence sensors made, runs open-source ESPHome firmware you can read and change, and packs more than radar into the shell: a light and UV sensor, a temperature and pressure sensor, an RGB LED and a buzzer, with an optional CO2 module if you solder it on. The radar is a single Hi-Link LD2410B, which detects presence out to about six meters.
The trade-off against our top pick comes from that radar. The LD2410B is a binary presence chip, not a coordinate tracker, so the MSR-2 tells you the room is occupied or empty but will not map where a person is or follow more than one. It only clears when the room is completely still. Tuning happens in the HLKRadarTool app (the default password is “HiLink”), where you enable engineering mode and set a threshold per distance gate. It sells direct for around $38 before any add-ons, so check the live price.
Not the one if you want to track more than one person or need their position, or you want humidity, which Apollo left off deliberately because the reading was unreliable on so small a board.
3. Aqara FP1E: the best cheap Zigbee sensor
If your house already runs on Zigbee, the FP1E is the easy answer. It’s a 60GHz radar that joins any Zigbee 3.0 coordinator and reaches Home Assistant through ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT with no Aqara hub and no cloud. In Zigbee2MQTT it exposes presence, movement, target distance, an adjustable detection range out to six meters, and a motion-sensitivity slider, which is plenty for a single room like a bathroom or a kitchen.
Keep its limits in mind before you buy more than one. There are no zones, no light sensor and no detachable cable, so you’re placing a fixed radar with a two-meter tail and powering it from USB. One setup note worth knowing: the FP1E runs a Spatial Learning calibration that needs the area cleared of people, pets and moving air for about twenty seconds, so run it once the room is empty. At around $43 to $50 it’s the cheapest reliable local-Zigbee presence sensor, so check the live price. If you’re still choosing how to run your Zigbee network, our comparison of ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT covers which one exposes more of these settings.
Look elsewhere if you need zones, a light reading, or battery power. Illuminance never made it into the FP1E’s Zigbee2MQTT exposes list, unlike the pricier FP2.
4. Aqara FP2: best for zone detection
The FP2 is still the one to beat for mapping a room. Its 60GHz TI radar covers up to roughly 40 square meters and splits that space into as many as 30 zones, so a single sensor can tell Home Assistant that someone is at the desk, on the sofa, or standing at the stove, and run different automations for each. It tracks up to five people, though it’s happiest with three or fewer.
The way it reaches Home Assistant is the catch and the saving grace. The FP2 is Wi-Fi only, but you add it through the HomeKit Controller integration using the device’s pairing code, and once it’s on firmware 1.1.6 or later it runs locally with no internet. Each zone then shows up in Home Assistant as its own occupancy entity. You still create those zones in the Aqara app, not from Home Assistant, which is the main friction. Aqara has promised Matter support since 2023, but we found no confirmation it works on the FP2 as of this writing, so treat it as planned, not shipped. It runs about $75 to $90, so check the live price.
Avoid it if you want battery power, a pure no-app workflow, or Zigbee and Thread. It is mains-only, and the zone setup lives in Aqara’s app.
5. Aqara FP300: best for Matter and Thread
The FP300 is the pick when you want a presence sensor that drops into a Matter setup without a bridge. It combines five sensors in one body: a 60GHz radar, a PIR, plus light, temperature and humidity. At onboarding you choose Matter over Thread, plain Zigbee, or Bluetooth, and the Matter path lets any Thread-capable Matter controller add it as a standard occupancy sensor that Home Assistant reads locally.
What makes it interesting is that it runs on two coin cells for two to three years, which radar normally can’t do. The trick is a two-stage design: the PIR runs continuously and only wakes the power-hungry 60GHz radar when it sees motion, so the radar sips power instead of draining it. The limit is on the Matter side. Advanced tuning and any people-counting live in the Aqara app over Zigbee, so a pure-Matter install gets presence plus the environment sensors but loses the fine controls. At around $50 it’s a genuine Matter-over-Thread presence sensor, so check the live price.
The wrong pick if you need true multi-zone mapping, which this point sensor does not do, or you want every setting exposed over Matter without touching the Aqara app.
6. Sonoff SNZB-06P: the best budget pick
One honesty note up front: the SNZB-06P is not millimeter-wave. It uses a 5.8GHz microwave radar, which detects a stationary person the same way mmWave does but far more coarsely. It earns a spot here because it’s reliable, dead simple, and costs about $18. It joins Zigbee through ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT, acts as a mains-powered router that strengthens your mesh, and exposes occupancy, an occupancy timeout, a three-step sensitivity, and a dim-or-bright light reading.
Treat the firmware version as part of the purchase. On releases before 1.0.5 the minimum hold time is 30 seconds and the sensor can stick permanently “occupied,” with 1.0.3 singled out as misbehaving, so update over the air to 1.0.5 or later to get the 15-second clear. After that it’s the most set-and-forget of the cheap group. It runs about $18, so check the live price. For the coordinator that puts it on your network, see our picks for the best Zigbee coordinator for Home Assistant.
Steer clear if you want true mmWave micro-motion detection, zones, a numeric light level, or a clear time under 15 seconds. It’s the coarsest sensor in this guide, which is the price of being the cheapest.
7. ThirdReality R2: the best battery sensor
Almost every radar sensor needs a wire, which is why the R2 stands out: it’s true 24GHz mmWave and it runs on three AA batteries for up to three years. That makes it the one to reach for in a spot with no USB power, like a bedside table or a guest bathroom. It joins Zigbee through ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT with any hub, detects from one to five meters, and has five sensitivity levels you set on the unit.
Being battery-powered shapes what it can do. As a Zigbee end device it does not repeat the mesh the way the mains-powered sensors here do, and it reports presence without the distance or light data you would get from an FP1E. It also has no native Matter; the only route is ThirdReality’s own Zigbee-to-Matter bridge. It launched recently enough that we couldn’t find a settled Zigbee2MQTT device page, so check how your coordinator maps its attributes before you rely on them. It runs about $20 to $40 depending on sales, so check the live price.
Do not buy it if you want always-on mains reliability, distance or light readings, or a confirmed attribute map today. Buy it for wire-free presence where running power is not an option.
Why presence beats motion
A PIR sensor detects changes in infrared heat, so it fires when a warm body moves across it and goes quiet when that body stops. That is why your lights drop while you sit still. A millimeter-wave radar instead bounces a signal off the room and reads the reflections, which lets it catch the micro-movements of someone who is otherwise motionless, including the chest movement of breathing, and hold the room occupied.
Radar is not free of downsides, and the big one is false triggers. An always-on radar will happily pick up fans, HVAC vents, swaying curtains, a monitor playing video, and the cat, and read any of them as a person. The common fix in real installs is to pair the two: let a PIR wake the room instantly on entry, and let the radar decide whether the room is still occupied before the lights go off. The FP300 bakes that pairing into one unit; with the others you combine a cheap PIR and the radar in a Home Assistant automation.
24GHz or 60GHz radar
The frequency on the box matters less than the marketing suggests. Lower-frequency 24GHz radar reaches further, which is why it suits wide rooms, and it has the deepest ESPHome support through the LD2410 and LD2450 modules. The finer distance resolution of 60GHz comes from bandwidth, not the frequency itself: the 60GHz ISM band carries twice the bandwidth of the 24GHz one, so it resolves position more precisely. That is useful for tight zoning and for fall or breathing detection.
The part people get wrong is assuming 60GHz automatically means zones or fall detection. It does not. The tracking algorithm in the firmware decides that, not the band, and a 24GHz LD2450 does true multi-target zones while plenty of 60GHz sensors do not. Pick the frequency for range and ecosystem fit, then check the actual feature list rather than the number.
Match the sensor to how it reaches Home Assistant
This is the decision that matters most, because the integration path sets how local the sensor is, how much you can tune, and whether it runs on a wire or a battery. You’re mostly choosing effort against money, not capability tiers. The four paths break down like this:
- ESPHome over Wi-Fi. The most tunable and the most local. You get per-gate thresholds and zone editing inside Home Assistant, and the data travels over the local API. The cost is that you flash firmware once and run the sensor on mains power. This is the Everything Presence Lite and the Apollo MSR-2.
- Zigbee. Cheap, local and often battery-friendly, reaching Home Assistant through ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT. Retail Zigbee radars expose fewer settings than the ESPHome boxes, and Zigbee2MQTT usually surfaces more of them than ZHA. This is the FP1E, the SNZB-06P and the R2.
- Wi-Fi with an app. The most polished zoning, still local in Home Assistant through HomeKit, but you trade firmware control for the vendor’s app and pay a premium. This is the Aqara FP2.
- Matter over Thread. The most interoperable and genuinely shipping in 2026, with certified radar sensors Home Assistant reads as standard occupancy devices. The catch is that zone and multi-target data usually is not exposed over Matter yet, so advanced features still need Zigbee or ESPHome. This is the FP300.
If you’re building the Home Assistant box these sensors report to, our guide to the best mini PC for Home Assistant covers the hardware, and you can get the software going with our walkthrough of running Home Assistant in Docker or a full Home Assistant install on Ubuntu.
Where radar sensors go wrong
Most of the pain with presence sensors comes from a handful of predictable problems. Knowing them before you mount anything saves an evening of chasing ghosts:
- Radar sees through thin walls and glass. Left at full range it will detect the neighbour or the next room. Cap the maximum range at the room boundary so it stops at your own walls.
- Fans, vents and curtains cause false triggers. Cut the range on the gate that contains the moving object and lower its sensitivity, rather than desensitising the whole sensor.
- Zone tuning is the real setup work. One builder spent two to three hours per room dialing in the gates with engineering mode on, starting at maximum thresholds and lowering them. After that pass, the false triggers stopped entirely, so budget an evening per room.
- There is no real pet immunity. Radar does not filter pets the way a good PIR can, and vendor AI pet-filtering claims are hit or miss, so plan placement and zones around that.
- Most radar needs mains power. Always-on radar draws too much for a coin cell, which is why the battery options here pair a PIR with a duty-cycled radar. If you need battery, that is the FP300 or the R2.
Which sensor fits your Home Assistant setup
Start from how your house already connects, and the choice makes itself. If you want the best local control and don’t mind a one-time flash, the Everything Presence Lite is the sensor to buy, with the Apollo MSR-2 close behind if you like to tinker and want extra sensors on board. If you’re already all-in on Zigbee, the FP1E is the cheap, no-hub answer for a single room, and the Sonoff SNZB-06P is fine where you just need coarse presence for a couple of dollars. Reach for the FP2 only when you genuinely need zones, and the FP300 when you want a Matter-over-Thread sensor or battery placement without a wire. Whatever you pick, set the range to your own walls first, pair it with a PIR for instant wake, and the room will finally keep the lights on while you sit still.
