For zigbee, you could either obtain a zigbee/usb dongle (interact over virtual serial port to send zigbee commands - tons of libraries exist to provide an api s

For zigbee, you could either obtain a zigbee/usb dongle (interact over virtual serial port to send zigbee commands - tons of libraries exist to provide an api surface), or obtain a hub and figure out its api. Zigbee also has functional mesh features that wifi doesn't. One is designed for high bandwidth single point communication while the other is designed for low bandwidth long range.