Okay, I've been a Home Assistant user for years, but, after a couple of Sonoff Zigbee dongles decided to fry themselves, I thought I'd switch over to Hubitat where the Zigbee radio is built-in, and in my mind more reliable.
My inital experiece with Hubitat is, well, not good. The system seems incredibly slow to respond, it seemed to lock up twice when trying to set the hub up from the mobile app, but generally went okay from the desktop web interface.
Added a few devices, a Shelly relay and a couple of Hue bulbs (all of which took less than a minute to add and configure in Home Assistant and all worked correctly first time), and was really unimpressed.
The Shelly needed a channel device to be added, and then needed the device type setting, as well as being INCREDIBLY slow to update device status (which it isn't in Home Assistant or the Shelly web interface), and the Hue bulbs only respond to on and off (Colour temp and brightness don't work, on any Hue bulb device type).
I understand not all smart home hubs work in the same way, but the Hubitat seems highly unintuitive. I've worked in IT for years, and I'm a very technical person who has no issue addapting to new systems, but the overall Hubitat UI/UX seems very poor on first blush.
Can someone offer any advice here, or tell me I'm doing something wrong? Am I am fully ready to send my C7 back.
This usually means you have a set of expectations about how software should work, and what interfaces should look like. So yeah, Hubitat is probably never going to meet those expectations. However, it's worth noting that a huge number of Hubitat customers would say the exact same thing about Home Assistant, and there are a lot of users here who fled HA. To each his own, choice is good.
I have being using Hubitat since c5 and things been rock solid for me now. I don't have Shelly so I can't say what you did wrong there. Only problem with C5 was with z wave Schlage lock due to the lack of an antenna.
Another option is to return C7 and get c8. I think if you eleborate more on the problem you have I am sure people in the community here is more than happy to help you. I had multiple people helping me with various issues in the past. It is not perfect in anyway but the community is awesome.
No overgrown lists of entities, services, YAML here
To the main issues:
If you are pairing your Hue bulbs directly to the hub then you should know that older Hue bulbs can cause Zigbee slowdowns as they attempt, but fail at being Zigbee repeaters. Best advice is to use a Hue hub. Hue bulbs work great with Hue hub and Hubitat. When you use the Hue hub there are 3 different main integration apps. The native Hubitat integration works OK. But the other 2 have more advanced Hue capabilities. (Note that Hue motion detectors work fine directly paired to Hubitat.)
There are multiple drivers available for Shelly devices too, some Hubitat official, some community. I don't have any Shelly so I can't comment on the plusses or minuses of any of them.
You'll find that Hubitat supports a huge number of devices, both official support and community developed support. But Home Assistant does have a larger number of devices. Hubitat has fewer cloud-based and reverse engineered integrations. The list of officially supported devices is:
There's always an adjustment period when switching systems. Hubitat's UI is focused on making automation work. And as clickety as it is it works well once you understand the flows. Home Assistant has more functionality around dashboards and things like graphing. Hubitat requires supplementary systems to get similar output. Some people use Hubitat as their main automation system but push devices to Home Assistant for the dashboard and graphing capabilities.
One area that I think Hubitat does a much better job of is community support. You'll always get answers to questions.
For a direct control of Hue bulbs, I would recommend this new driver : [RELEASE] Philips Hue Zigbee Driver (not using Hue Bridge). Just make sure the bulbs are never physically powered off.
I personally use a Hue bridge and the community CoCoHue app to control all of my Zigbee bulbs.
The best way to install the driver is via Hubitat Package Manager ( similar to Home Assistant HACS ).
Good stuff here, but I would just add that not all Hue bulbs should be paired direct -- the older ZLL bulbs are bad players if paired direct, so pay attention to the chart that Jonathon has at the start of that driver post referenced here.
I have a couple recent-generation (ZB 3.0) Hue bulbs paired direct using this driver, and they've been great (both as repeaters and overall performance).
Interesting to hear. I sometines consider going the oposite way and switch to HA or to use both systems together. Mostly because HA has a much bigger userbase here in Sweden and /or Europe than Hubitat so it is easier to find someone who have done the hacs that you need when it comes to devices not sold in the US. (I’m not working with IT so I’m kind of dependent on others to do what I want to do sometimes...)
So how would you compare both systems UI and eease of use?
Well, not really. I expect a good UX, and so far, that's not what I've had. I've worked across hundreds of platforms on all technology types, so I'm perfectly happy working with a huge number of different UIs, and while yes, there are some I prefer more than others, I can still work with them.
Sure, if I stick with Hubitat, I'll learn to live with it, but I don't feel happy making that compromise.
Well, I followed the process to add what should be a supported device according to the compatibility list, and in my mind, that should be sufficient to at least get the device working, but apparently not.
I don't think my issue is with the hardware (although external antennas are generally always a good idea), it's with the UX of the platform.
Regarding the systems, HA is very much my preference so far. I like the fact that of all the devices I used it with, 99% of them just worked. No muss, no fuss, they came up as a device and several entities when I added them, and I could control them immediately, as well as make use of the entities for additional sensors.
The only thing I would say is while yes, HA has a community across the website, Reddit, and Discord, folks aren't actually that helpful, beyond "Well, do this thing and if it doesn't work, you're SOL" but I did find it pretty easy to resolve most issues on my own.
I echo your sentiment, and I've also been in IT for decades.
Not much here is very intuitive for some reason (especially Rule Machine) and I've seen other examples of this attitude from users here who I believe are the owners (Staff?).
I'm trying to be a good soldier and sticking with it. If you do the same it should all eventually make enough sense to be usable (while still frustrating). The tradeoff of improved reliability/uptime and local execution is worth it to me, and hopefully you as well once you sort out your issues. FYI I came from SmartThings and primarily Wifi/cloud devices.
Good luck, the forums here are an amazing resource with alot of helpful people.
I work in IT too, I manage Linux servers for a living… and I could not be happier to not have to manage a Linux server for my home automation. I do have home assistant, and it has been anything but reliable, with integrations that required me to add a rule that if X stops responding, reboot the whole HA.
Rule Machine takes a bit of getting used to, but it beats the crap out of yaml files, and is pretty much as flexible as any code. If you don’t like coding through a form, I guess have a look at webCoRE. I am more used to coding in text than by a form, but by the time webCoRE came to Hubitat, I already had things setup in rule machine, and I can’t be bothered to do it all again in webCoRE.
The only reason I still use HA (and I bridge it’s devices to Hubitat), is for BLE devices (AirThings), and some web integrations that don’t exist in Hubitat and which I am too lazy to implement myself.
The solution I've found to work for me is to use both. Is use hubitat for the zwave/ZigBee bits with maker API talking to home assistant for all the automations, node-red, dashboards, etc..
@Jives Exactly what I do. I find some things, like Room Lighting way more difficult to do than with Home Assistant (in HA I would need node-red and other things to get even close). However the scalability and UI of home assistant is better. (I have 4 hubitat C7's with hub mesh and 100's of devices - z-wave and zigbee)
I think of Hubitat as the back end and Home Assistant as the front-end at this point.
I find even trivial automations, such as « flip a switch when attribute X of device Y changes » to be a nightmare with Home Assistant:
virtual switches ? No, look for helper, input Boolean
flip « virtual » switch ? No, look for call service, input Boolean turn on
want to change on an attribute value ? No way to get it through the rule engine, or through the device page, gotta go dig deep in the developer tools to figure out what are the internal state values…
What the hell is wrong with HA developers! Hubitat is far from perfect, and it’s UI leaves much to be desired, but god it seems like HA goes out of its way to make things extra complicated…
Sure, HA’s UI is more sleek than HE on the surface for things like dashboards, but the only time I look at the UI is to write automations, not for dashboards, and the automation part of the UI is FAR WORSE in HA than HE…
I can’t imagine using HA to do something as advanced as what room lightning does…
FWIW, I went from Vera hubs to HA, to the Hubitat C7.
HA has a pretty UI (On the surface) and better LAN/ cloud device support, but trying to automate anything is beyond painful!
I’m in IT and really like YAML, but I shouldn’t need to use it to do any meaningful configuration.
Regarding speed, sure HA is really really fast, but I’ve been running it on (and off) on one of my servers for the last few years. It certainly wasn’t that great when I ran it on Pi’s early on.
So to sum up, the UX on Hubitat is far far superior to HA. Is it perfect, no, but it’s still excellent.
I've got both, I bought the HA green just for the heck of it to play with. It has some very useful cloud and camera integrations which I can't get to be as reliable in Hubitat. But I don't like the HA dashboards at all. They take up too much space and you usually have to open a tile/card before you can interact with it. I love the neat little MakerAPI dashboard created by JPage for Hubitat. Each tile is clickable for its most obvious action and openable for more details and control. And you can get loads of tiles on one phone screen.
I connect the HA and the HE by the MakerAPI integration. I offer virtual devices from Hubitat to HA and let HA update them based on events that end so I only need the integration one way, and in the event HA goes down the virtual devices are still safely on HE still connected to their rules. So basically Hubitat is still my master controller.
