ZigBee was developed to serve very different applications than Bluetooth and leads to tremendous optimizations in power consumption. Some of the key differentiators are:

• ZigBee:
  • Application level standardization
  • Very low duty cycle allowing for very long battery life
  • Static and dynamic star and mesh networks, supporting more than 65,000 nodes, with low latency available
  • Ability to remain quiescent for long periods without communications
  • Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum allows devices to sleep without the requirement for close synchronization
• Bluetooth:
  • Moderate duty cycle, secondary battery lasts same as master,
  • Very high QoS and very low, guaranteed latency
  • Quasi-static star network limited to seven clients with ability to participate in more than one network
  • Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum is extremely difficult to create extended networks without large synchronization cost.