Monoprice Z-Wave: Door/Window Sensor $21.25, Garage Door Sensor Expired

For motion and window/door sensors, the ones by Xiaomi at urlhasbeenblocked are around half price of these. They work great with Smartthings. I got 5 of them combined for ~$40 shipped and they all work well.

Amazon has a tech overview

https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=mh_s9_acss_cg_shres_2a1_w?ie=UTF8&node=6962852011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=mobile-hybrid-10&pf_rd_r=D52NYT829F3ZYD3Q0A1E&pf_rd_t=1201&pf_rd_p=261549b6-6c27-4c03-b9fd-8a1049650fbd&pf_rd_i=6563140011

Short form is that all home automation breaks down to the communication tech (zwave, Zigbee, insteon, caseta, x10, Bluetooth, wifi) and the controller.

The controller is the brain. In some cases the brain is in the cloud others you have rules running games on a local computer. Lots of WiFi devices depend on IFFTT as the controller. Smartthings and Wink can control some things locally but need the cloud for complicated stuff. Vera/Homeseer/Insteon/caseta all do local processing.

Everything but WiFi will need a device in your house to bridge between the device-level communication and your phone/tablet/pc. I most cases that is the same as the controller. There are some dumb bridges that don't have any smarts and rely on another device for the rules processing but you almost have to go out of your way to find them.

Some controller can use more than one techhnology. Not all are created equal though at a radio level most are pretty similar.

Zwave - the USB of HA tech. 99% of the time it works out of the box. Lots of manufacturers so lots of options for features and price. Due to the routing logic, it can have issues when you get more than a hundred devices.

Zigbee- it SHOULD have been the open standard of HA but it was slow to market and allowed for proprietary commands for industrial uses that resulted in 90% of Zigbee devices being manufacturer specific. The only exceptions are lights, like Hue.

Insteon - a sole-source standard where the devices are sold by Insteon Inc. They are guaranteed to work together but your options are limited.

Caseta/Radio radio - protocols from Lutron for primarily lighting.

Bluetooth and WiFi. There are not yet common standards for these devices so they depend on apps or, for WiFi, web servers. Both present security concerns as they can attack/invade phones/laptops/other WiFi networks.

As for controllers, Wink & Smartthings rely on the cloud for some rules processing. If your internet acts up (or their server is "far" from your ISP) you can have delays or things just not trigger like they should.

The non-cloud zwave alternatives to ST/wink for zwave/Zigbee are

Vera- fiddly but cheap. Lots of inexpensive add on apps.

Homeseer-pricey but solid. Lots of somewhat pricey apps.

Zipato -in the middle but requires a cloud-based rule generator. Meaning your automation rules run on your device but you can't add new rules without their cloud.

Universal device ISY - mostly known for insteon support, they have zwave controllers. About the the price of Homeseer but with fewer apps and more home theater integration.

OpenHAB- opensource fiddly with a couple of missing features from the newest gen most of the time.

Control4- rock solid but a contracted system (aka SUPER Pricey as you pay for programming changes) and zwave is not their preferred tech.