Hi, I guess this is sort of an intro and a recommendation request from users with a similar circumstance.
I setup a ST hub a few years back circa 2018 and collected a few dozen smartthings devices along the way. I also have hue, lutron, leviton, rachio, ecobee, konnected, google home, and a few other things all over the house. My zigbee and zwave meshes are strong, and for what it's worth wifi is an orbi (nice and strong). All in all, I had around 70 devices hooked into ST and functioning really well and then it all slipped and time got away from me, batteries died, yada yada... I'm putting everything back together now with Hubitat, I bought a C5 hub over a year ago and 'finally' moving everything... I even purchase a caseta pro bridge the other day so I can get all my lights back together.
My conundrum is this... For all the ST devices (to include all buttons and motion) I have, and the dozen wemo mini plugs I use during holidays... what are the pros and cons of setting ST back up for all those devices? Is there a way to get ST and HE to work together without coding problems, logs/bandwidth congestion? Or would it just be easier to scrap all that and go with items that integrate natively with HE? My kids mostly, but me/wife too are missing some of the buttons and motion automations we had with ST.
Thanks all for the read and for comments, I'm really digging the changes made to HE btw... I'm a new user but I've been messing around with the hub since the C5 was launched. All in all I love what I'm able to do with local and can't wait to have everything setup.... I was an actiontiles user, I liked and miss the design flexibility it offered in screen display... I have a couple tablets wall mounted for control... but I am very happy to get away from all the cloud integration problems it caused.
I don't see a specific reason that you'd need to keep ST online, or is it just for devices that Hubitat doesn't natively support? You can certainly run both, and the community HubConnect app is a popular option to help you share devices to/from both platforms (although unless that is updated, it will eventually stop working when ST cuts off its traditional Groovy development environment; however, ST has yet to announce a specific date for this or really much of a plan for devices/DTHs and only a bit for SmartApps so far from what I can see).
For Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, I'd just connect those directly to Hubitat--they should work, with rare exception (weird Zigbee group-broadcasting-only remotes?)--and probably work better since you won't have the cloud involved. That's an issue with this method of ST integration: like most things on ST, it will require cloud/Internet. If you have specific other devices you're concerned about that aren't officially supported, searching the forum may help you find out if others have got them working on HE. Otherwise, you could certainly use HubConnect, though again I'd save that for devices you don't have a way to get on HE directly. (That's just my recommendation for the reasons above; technically, you could use it for anything, including "Z" devices, though with those there is the issue that you'll be creating a mesh on HE as you possibly destroy yours on ST.)
For the time being you should be able to use HubConnect to connect ST and your C5 without issue. ST is however in the process of removing groovy from its environment which means that without a rewrite HubConnect will, at some point, cease to be a viable option. Many of the refugees from ST have used HubConnect as a bridge to ease the migration of devices and automations from one platform to the other.
Given that I was changing residences and given that I was going to have to rewrite most of my automations given ST's "New App" direction anyway, I just did a straight exclude from ST, include on Hubitat and then recreated the automations that made sense. Wife just thought the automation outage was due to the move so not a lot of issues with the WAF.
I've migrated most everything to HE, only the smartthings branded devices and wemo mini plugs won't cutover. Everything else is either configured or waiting to be configured. I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to transition to HE, the speed on everything is very very cool.
Thanks for the tip on HubConnect, I'll definitely look into that as a temporary solution. The whole idea of ST dropping support down the road was always a turnoff... part of the reason I let my house get away from me to begin with.
There was a pretty good stretch of months where I tinkered with automations and after a year or so of use, the keepers sorted themselves out. I definitely want to get them back up and running, I'm going to check out HubConnect right now. I also used IFTTT in the past and that helped some but it was always just another vein for latency and troubleshooting when something didn't work. I'll probably look into phasing out all the st branded stuff completely, I don't mind doing a little maintenance here and there on these things but don't want to get caught in a situation where everything just stops one day.
IFTTT is going to a pay to play model (for any more than 3 applets), so you may want to limit your use of it. Seems to be a fair amount of support here for Node-Red on the rPI as an alternative.
Most SmartThings devices are Zigbee HA 1.2 or Zigbee 3.0 devices that will pair to Hubitat and are listed as compatible. One exception I know of is their current thin, rectangular smart plug, which is Wi-Fi (the square-er one is Zigbee). The other exception is most co-branded ST/ADT devices if you happen to have the ADT hub. I'm assuming you've checked or tried your specific devices, but just thought I'd mention this in case you haven't.
I know Wemo devices aren't natively supported on Hubitat, but I know people have cobbled together various things for some type of integration. I'm not sure if anything works better than anything else (IFTTT is one option but also becoming problematic for some if it wasn't already!).
I've also had no issues migrating ST branded devices over... but I do often need to disconnect them, then do a reset once or twice. After that they generally come over. I also have a bunch of lutron switches and I have the regular hub, not the pro hub... so I use hub connect to the ST and then use the ST to get to the Lutron. However, that just creates complexity I don't need, so I have a lutron pro hub on order.
Guilty here in that I didn't try to migrate the ST devices first... I did try moving the ST outlet (2018 version) and it didn't work so I just assumed.... I'm going to have to try all the devices now! And I know the feeling on the Lutron hub... one of the main reasons I didn't cut over a year ago was the angst I felt looking at my caseta investment and no native support, after seeing everything else work on HE though, it made purchasing the bridge pro a lot easier to do.
I'll definitely try to connect all the devices now, thanks for the list, I've reviewed it before but a refresh never hurts. With IFTTT going pay to play, I'll probably not even reconnect with them. Regarding the WeMo plugs, I'll drill down on them and see if I can't find a solution - if not, I'll probably just start swapping out outlets - I use the same ones every year it seems and it'd be fewer than a dozen I need control of. Thanks!
