What’s Bluetooth?
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless communication technology that allows devices such as mobile phones, computers, and peripherals to transmit data or voice wirelessly over a short distance.
Bluetooth include Classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low energy (BLE) Module.
What’s Zigbee?
ZigBee is an open global standard for wireless technology designed to use low-power digital radio signals for personal area networks.
As the power consumption in Classic Bluetooth devices are high. The following as difference between BLE and Zigbee:
What is BLE
Bluetooth Low Energy was first introduced as a personal area network (PAN), its purpose is to be able to connect to devices near the user, in 2017, Bluetooth SIG released Bluetooth Mesh specification which is based on BLE. BLE’s data rate is higher than Zigbee. The data rate of Classic Bluetooth is up to 3 Mbps, and the data rate of BLE is up to 2 Mbps. When they are not working, they are in a "sleep" state, with the lower power consumption , ZigBee does not have this function.
At present, BLE is also supported by many operating systems, including Android, iOS, Windows 8/10 and OS X, Zigbee couldn’t support it.
Zigbee
ZigBee is a mesh network protocol designed to transmit small data over medium distances. It runs on a mesh topology network, which means that information from a single sensor node will be transmitted to the gateway in a mesh mode.
Although ZigBee has a wider range of applications, it is not the best choice for industrial IoT applications. Due to the mesh topology of the ZigBee network, it has higher latency, which cause congestion when multiple nodes try to reach the gateway through a single node. Because of this, ZigBee is not easy to use in the case of dense nodes (such as in a factory). ZigBee faces more competition, such as mobile equipment, large parking lots, etc. With sufficient budget, ZigBee will not work.
Following as comparison Chart: Bluetooth (BLE) Vs. ZigBee:
