Accessing Hubitat away from home

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1

Hello,
I am looking into going from smartthings to Hubitat. With smartthings I can access it and change and do what ever i want to it where ever I am. Can I do that with Hubitat? Or no since everything is based locally in my home?

2

Yes, you can.

Dashboards and the mobile app will work wherever you are. Control of existing devices and notifications do not require you to be on your local LAN.

If you need to add new devices or create new automations, you will have to be:

  1. On your LAN, or
  2. Subscribe to Remote Access, or
  3. Setup your own VPN (or equivalent)
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4

OK can i alter/ change/ update automations not on my LAN?
adding devices seems logical since i would have to be at my home anyway.

5

In order to change automations, you will need one of the following solutions as mentioned by @aaiyar

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6

The short answer is yes. However, because Hubitat Elevation is a local first platform, we don't send your data to an undisclosed location outside of your home, therefore accessing your home's data remotely must be explicitly authorized.

We offer free remote control of your devices via our built-in Dashboard and Mobile apps. We also offer Remote Admin, an add-on service that enables you to manage your hub's administrative tasks (create rules, install apps, add devices, etc) without using a cloud relay for your data. Instead, all home automation processing remains local on your hub for speed, reliability and increased privacy. For more details on this and other Hubitat solutions, please check out the following post:

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7

I use VPN to access Hubitat remotely.

8
  1. Use Chrome Remote Desktop to access a home computer where you can open a browser local to the Hubitat (similar to VPN, but less to setup)
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9

As others have noted, If you know how to setup and manage a VPN, that's a good, generally inexpensive solution. If not, just subscribe to remote access. It's still fairly cheap, works great, and is almost as fast as if you were sitting at home. I often use it even when I'm at home, simply because I keep Hubitat and other IOT things on a separate VLAN from the one I usually use for other things, and it's just easier to use remote access.