Hi everyone,
Considering buying a Hubitat for my smart home, and have tried to find answers to whether it would suit our needs. First I will explain my journey through home automation - feel free to scroll through that if you only wish to answer questions
-Story-
My smart home journey started with the trusty HomeKit and Hue years ago, and things were simple back then.
I then started using Home Assistant, and feel like I have wasted way too much of my life on it. I felt that everything was way too complicated, and I spent so much time that I would rather spend on my family on doing meaningless things like fixing breaking changes.
Using a system that was free and open-source was never a priority or makes it quality for me. Actually I would much rather pay a decent amount for a system where someone else has done the hard work for me. This is in line with everything else I buy, own and use. I mean, as a comparison, most people probably prefer a good reliable car, that is fully featured and easy to use as well, instead of one where they need to fix stuff daily and watch a YouTube video every time they need to do something. So what I wanted was a good consumer product, and I have never been interested in having home automation as a hobby and spend much time on it.
To try and get out of the DIY home automation loophole that I never wanted to get into, I started looking into consumer systems. It seemed that my options were primarily SmartThings, Vera, Homey and Hubitat. I did, what I was was enough, research and concluded that Homey was the strongest system out there for my needs.
Now I must admit, changing to Homey was at first extremely pleasing. What took my years in Home Assistant was quite literally done in a couple of days in Homey, and I felt confident this was the place to be. The only thing I initially saw it lacked was a dashboard, so I used Home Assistant to present the things I needed through MQTT along with a Dakboard to show calendar, weather etc. on a wall mounted tablet. At the same time, I started buying more and more tech to try and cover all our wishes around the house. Quickly I started to really feel the shortcomings of Homey, and eventually decided that it was going on sale. There were actual dealbreakers that forced me to look elsewhere, and there were minor annoyances that just did not align with my needs. Some of the things that made me change, are going to be obvious from my questions. Furthermore, it is just more complex than I expected. For example, creating flows is simple enough, given what you want to do is extremely simple, but as soon as it gets just a little bit complex, it is really tedious. I suggested a flow community where people could share “common flows”, rate them and reuse them, so people don’t have to invent the same things over and over - but I never heard back from Athom or anyone.
Finally, I decided to migrate all my ZigBee devices back to deconz on a conbee stick, as that has evolved greatly while I have been gone. I pretty much decided to go full on HomeKit, so I just went all the way back to that, and used HomeBridge with deconz for the zigbee devices.
So this is where I am now. My Z-wave devices are still in Homey and it is not working great. Everything else is pretty much just in HomeKit. So in the search for a Z-wave solution, it gave thought to whether I should consider Hubitat - either only to connect Z-wave devices and run them to HomeKit - or to give it a full try like Homey. Either way. The possibilities would always be there if I bought one.
-Questions-
- Does Hubitat support ZigBee scenes?
By that I mean, can I predefine lighting scenes in terms of color/temperature/brightness that can then be called directly on bulbs. On Homey, this is not possible, so a bulb must always turn on at its previous setting and then change. This makes awkward results.
- Are the Hubitat Z-Wave and ZigBee antennas alright?
The ones on Homey are extremely lacking, and I quite literally had to pull a Fibaro dimmer out of the wall and lay it on top of Homey to pair it. Adored Z-Stick pairs it 30+ meters away through 4 brick walls.
- Are there any integrated tasks or must all automation be defined completely from the ground up?
On Homey, creating flows for something as simple as using motion sensors for lights is extremely tedious and there seems to be no perfect solution. In deconz, this is easy as the functionality is built it. Dimming lights by holding switches is the same - close to impossible to do good in Homey.
- Does Sonoff devices work well?
This is very specific, but I could not really figure out how that integration was made. On Homey it does work great, and connects devices over MQTT to Tasmota. Therefore I need my Tasmota Sonoff devices over.
- Is Shelly(or other brands) detached mode supported?
Specific as well. Relays like the Shelly 1 support detached mode, where the switch is completely detached from the relay function. This is great for installing in light switches to be able to soft-toggle them, while keeping the relay to be software toggled to change bulbs etc.
- Are integrations on Hubitat mostly reliant on 3rd party developers or Hubitat?
A thing I quickly realized with Homey, were that all the good integrations, that everyone use, are made by 3rd party developers. This means I cannot expect other updates than what the developer personally needs, and often the developer left the platform or integration and it is therefore pretty much dead.
- Does Hubitat evolve quickly currently, and does the developers listen to the community?
It also quickly became obvious that development on Homey is really stale and extremely slow. Updates coming out are not in line what the community asks for, and there is no road map on what to expect.
- What’s the progress on MQTT - is it your feeling it is going to be good on Hubitat?
While everything was there and did indeed work on Homey, it just crashed A LOT. Also I only figured out when something was not working anymore and had to reboot the MQTT apps.