Wireless home automation systems have drawn conside rable attentions of the researchers for more than a decade. The major technologies used to implement th ese systems include Z-Wave, Insteon, Wavenis, Bluetooth, WiFi, and ZigBee. Among these technologi es the ZigBee based systems have become very popula r because of its low cost and low power consumption. In this paper ZigBee based wireless home automation systems have been addressed. There are two main par ts of this paper. In the first part a brief introdu ction of the ZigBee technology has been presented and in the second part a survey work on the ZigBee based wire less home automation system has been presented. The perf ormances of the ZigBee based systems have also been compared with those of other competing technologies based systems. In addition some future opportuniti es and challenges of the ZigBee based systems have bee n listed in this paper.