I use Xiaomi Bluetooth and Aqara zigbee sensors from cloudfree.shop
Bluetooth are cheaper but need an ESPHome proxy in range. Zigbee is a little easier because of the automatic meshing, which can be done with a few Ikea smart plugs.
I had one in my freezer and the temperature seemed close enough, but the battery didn't last as long.
My research said z-wave is better than zig bee, why did you go with zig bee?
Can you controller the esp home from home assistant?
It's what cloud free was selling at the time. It looks like there are more options for zigbee devices than z-wave right now.
There's an integration for ESPHome. I'm not sure if it supports everything that ESPHome can do since I've only been using it as a proxy. Updating firmware seems to require a chromium-based browser
