There is a particular kind of house that gets ignored by consumer smart home products: one with excellent automation infrastructure already in the walls, running software that feels a decade old.
These are KNX homes, and there are a lot of them across Europe and increasingly across Asia. The hardware is superb. The experience of living with it, often, is not.
Why the hardware is not the problem
KNX gets described as legacy, which is unfair to the point of being backwards.
It is a wired bus: twisted pair to every switch, sensor, and actuator, carrying data and power. It is an international standard rather than one vendor's protocol. Most importantly, it is decentralised — devices hold their own logic and talk to each other directly, so there is no hub whose failure darkens the house.
The practical consequence is a lifespan nothing wireless can match. A KNX installation commissioned twenty years ago still works. Its actuators were not discontinued, its bus did not require a firmware migration, and no vendor switched off a server it depended on. Compared with the smart home graveyard described in our post on cloud dependency, that is a remarkable record.
The trade-offs are real and well known: it must be planned during construction or a serious renovation, devices cost considerably more than wireless equivalents, and commissioning requires a trained installer with dedicated software. Nobody retrofits KNX into a flat on a weekend.
But the reason people with KNX are frustrated is almost never the bus.
The gap is the layer on top
Changes require the installer. Rebinding a switch or adjusting a schedule often means booking someone with the project file and the software. For a homeowner who simply wants the hallway light to behave differently, that is a disproportionate amount of friction.
Visualisation is dated. Many KNX interfaces still look and behave like building-management consoles, because that is their heritage. They are dense, technical, and clearly not designed for whoever else lives in the house.
Logic is static. KNX executes exactly what it was commissioned to do, faithfully, for decades. It does not notice that the household's routine changed two years ago. The configuration reflects the family that lived there at commissioning.
It does not speak to the wireless half. Most KNX homes have accumulated Zigbee sensors, WiFi cameras, and Matter devices alongside the bus. These are typically two parallel systems with no shared context, and the split is invisible to the wiring but very visible to the people living there.
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What a modern layer could add without touching a wire
This is the part we find genuinely interesting, because the fix does not require disturbing the installation at all.
A shared context across both halves. A Zigbee presence sensor should be able to inform a KNX lighting group. The bus is perfectly capable of receiving that instruction; nothing has been coordinating it.
Plain-language control. "Warm the study" should not require knowing which group address corresponds to which actuator.
Logic that adapts. A commissioning file is a snapshot of one moment. Software that observes how the house is actually used can propose adjustments that the original configuration could not have anticipated — while leaving the underlying KNX programming intact as the reliable floor.
Changes without a callout. Not every adjustment should need the installer. The safety-critical and structural parts, yes. Moving a scene half an hour later, no.
Crucially, all of this sits above the bus. The actuators, the wiring, and the commissioned logic stay exactly as they are, and keep working if the software layer is removed.
Why most products skip KNX
Consumer smart home companies target retrofit, which is where the volume is. KNX is a small, wired, professionally installed market with a high technical bar — so hubs support Zigbee and Matter and Thread, and leave KNX to the building-automation vendors.
That leaves an odd gap: the homes with the best automation hardware get the least modern software attention.
Where Nexop stands
Nexop supports KNX natively, alongside Zigbee, Matter and WiFi. That combination is the specific reason: a house with a bus and a pile of wireless sensors currently runs two disconnected systems, and joining them is a software problem, not a wiring one.
To be straightforward about scope: Nexop is a layer on top, not a replacement for KNX and not a substitute for your installer. The commissioned logic remains the reliable base. We are not proposing you re-engineer a system that has worked for twenty years — we are proposing something better on top of it.
And the usual caveat: Nexop is pre-launch. Note also that Homey Pro, which we recommend elsewhere for its breadth of wireless protocols, does not support KNX — so if you have a bus, that particular comparison goes differently.
If you live in a KNX home and this describes your experience, book a demo. Genuinely — we want to talk to people in these houses, because they are the hardest and most interesting case we are building for.