About CompatGrid
Who publishes this site, what it is for, how it is funded, and what its findings are based on.
What CompatGrid is
CompatGrid is a research desk for Matter and Thread smart-home compatibility. It exists because the single hardest question in smart-home buying — "will this actually work with what I already own?" — has a documented answer that is scattered across certification databases, firmware release notes, developer documentation, and vendor support pages, and almost nobody puts it in one place.
So that is what this site does. It reads the specifications, the certification records, and the vendor documentation, cross-checks them against each other, cites every source, and publishes the comparison. When a manufacturer's marketing copy contradicts its own manual, we say so.
What we are not
We are not a review site, and we do not test products by hand. We have not personally used, installed, or lived with the products described here.
That is a real limitation, and we would rather state it on the About page than let a byline and a photograph imply otherwise. Specification research can tell you whether a device is certified for a Matter device type, which ecosystems it can pair to, and whether it routes Thread traffic. It cannot tell you how it feels to use, how reliable it is after a year, or how it looks on your wall. For that, read people who own the thing — we will often link to them.
The full method, including the checks that stop a page publishing, is on the Editorial Policy page.
Who publishes this
Publisher and editor of record: Michael Joshua Makhool
TODO(owner) — fill in this section yourself. Do not have it drafted. Everything below must be factually true of you. An honest short bio is worth more here than an impressive invented one, and an invented one would violate the same FTC rule this whole site is built to satisfy.
- TODO(owner): photograph. A real photograph of the real person, added to the site's assets and referenced here. Not stock, not generated, not an avatar. Google's guidance on identifying who authored content, and AdSense's review, both look for this.
- TODO(owner): two or three sentences on who you are — what you do, where you are based, and why you are the person running this.
- TODO(owner): relevant background. Genuine technical or professional experience that bears on smart-home standards, networking, software, or research. If it is thin, say what is true and stop. Do not pad it.
- TODO(owner): credentials or qualifications, if any are actually held. If none are relevant, delete this line rather than inventing one. Omitting a credential is fine; inventing one is not.
- TODO(owner): professional profiles — LinkedIn, GitHub, or similar, if you want them linked. These let a reader verify you exist, which is the point of the page. Add them to the structured data at the top of this file as `sameAs` at the same time.
- TODO(owner): why this site exists, in your own words — the problem you kept hitting that made it worth building.
"Publisher and editor of record" is a real role and it means something specific: responsibility for this site's editorial standards, for the rules its publishing system enforces, and for correcting what turns out to be wrong. It does not mean having handled the products. Our articles carry a publisher's byline, not a reviewer's.
There is one real person behind this site. We do not invent staff writers or contributor personas.
How the pages are made
Pages are produced by an automated research pipeline that uses AI, working from cited sources, with automated checks that reject uncited claims, invented measurements, first-person testing language, and unsupported superlatives before anything publishes. We say so on every article rather than leaving you to guess.
We think that is a defensible way to build a compatibility database and a terrible way to write a product review — which is why this site is the former and not the latter. The details are on the Editorial Policy page.
How this site is funded
Two ways, both disclosed: display advertising (including ads served by Google) and affiliate commissions when you buy through one of our links. You pay the same price either way.
Commissions do not affect what we include or how we rank it — the selection criteria are published and applied before commissions enter the picture. Nothing here is sponsored, and no advertiser sees a page before it publishes. The detail is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
Getting in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — email [email protected], or use the Contact page for anything else. If we have a fact wrong, we would like to know before the next reader does.