Home Assistant & Hubitat?

Or buy the Homey hub and you can combine anything under one hub: Homey - A Better Smart Home

A quick glance on their community forum indicates very similar issues to what I've seen here - devices not pairing, hubs going offline, dashboard issues ... all the usual fun stuff. Home automation is not a simple thing no matter how hard a company tries to make it seem so.

Since it's not available in the US afaik, still on the 500 series Z-Wave chipset (I think?) and very expensive I'll stick with my very affordable, reliable and flexible Hubitat + Node-RED combination.

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They have problems yes. Mostly related to 3rd party apps. If you stay with all the manufacturers different apps itā€™s a lot more stable. Their biggest problem tough is that many people have reported poor connection with devices and have been forced to modify their hubs with 3rd party hardware to correct this.

Their still on the 500 chip and indeed Homey is very expensive. Those two factors among other things whas what made me choose Hubitat.

What I do miss that Homey has is the abillity to communicate with most of the Wifi and bluetooth stuff out there and their graphical interface. Homey is a bit more plug ā€™n play and user friendly than Hubitat if you are not a very skilled user. Those two things is something I would like to se in Hubitat in the near future. Also I miss some european stuff that doesnt work with Hubitat yet.

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As an owner/user of both Homey and Hubitat I can say that Hubitat is a much more solid and reliable platform.

Yes Homey has BlueTooth (kind of) and a nice graphic UI and I would say it's a little easier for new users UX. However Athom are appalling at listening to users, responding and fixing bugs and leave their community users alienated. Even their own inbuilt apps have long standing bugs with no fixes.

Hubitat are so much more responsive and fix things quickly and that is an overriding reason to choose their controller. It's also easier to code for - however Athom win the better technical documentation accolade by a long way.

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Do you mean developer documentation? I'm just looking at the getting started documentation and it's pretty sparse. There are videos, but that's not documentation. Can you point me to what you like from them? Genuinely curious to see an example of what you find better.

I don't like posting about competing products on other manufacturers websites - but hopefully it will help improve information.

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Very interesting to read this thread and your post in particular.
I am landing on a very similar setup where I have all my zwave/zigbee devices in HE, but have started to integrate other (ip/wifi) devices in HA, and use a mix of HE and Node-Red for automations.

I do notice youā€™reusing MQTT to share devices with HA, though. I am using the Hubitat community integration in HA, which relies on MakerAPI. While it was easy to set up, I am having trouble getting my zigbee/zwave devices to properly notify their state changes to HA, which means they often get out of sync in HA dashboards.

Just curious to know if youā€™re finding MQTT to be more reliable that way.
Also, has anyone experienced similar issues with the MakerAPI HE-HA integration?

Thanks

I've noticed that my HE Hub mode does not always get reflected properly in HA.
This morning HE was in Day mode while HA said it was still in Night mode.

I did have an issue at one point where if I was too quick with light setting changes via a HA dashboard, I would see JSON errors on the HA side.
I just tried it again and it's working fine now.
Not sure if that was a HA issue, Maker API issue, or a bit of everything.

Keen to hear who has moved ZigBee devices to home assistant? My hubitst hub is old and I'm looking to upgrade. I have a syn Nas ready to run it all. I only have ZigBee devices for motion and blinds and locks . And then lifx no z wave at all

DSM 7 dropped USB support so unless youā€™re staying on 6ā€¦

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Good to know. Quick search shows there's work arounds tho.

Everything is pulled apart now until we move into the new house, but just prior I had moved all my Xiaomi devices to HA with a ConBee 2 and used HA Device Bridge to bring them back into HE where Rule Machine and Basic Rules are a pleasure to work with.

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I'm running a C7 hub with a C4 hub as child, Mostly just devices connected to them, almost no rules at all.
I then run Home Assistant on a virtual host in one of my Dell R720 servers. There I run almost all of my rules in Node-Red.
I then use the Maker API plugin i Hubitat Elevation to connect all devices back to HA. I have lots of Zigbee lights and motion detectors + a lot of Z-Wave door sensors and outlets, even got some Philips HUE stuff and some WiFi devices, as I said, All devices are connected through HE.

I m getting very frustrated because ever since I got my forts smart stuff setup (some years ago when i bought my C4 hub) I dont feel like I can fully trust my lights/rules to work. This has gotten MUCH better after I moved the rules over to HA.

Now to my question :laughing:

  • Will I see smoother and more stable Z-wave usage with a Z-wave controller directly connected to HA? Like Aeotec for example...
  • And the same for Zigbee?

Don't like running multiple hubs when I feel i have all I need in the HA universe (even though I am still a fan of HE)

Anyone got some experience taking this step?

So am not clear - Why is HA being used in this scenario? Devices are paired with HE but then you bridge them over to HA and then use Node-RED to control them?? Why not bridge HE directly to NR using the node-red-contrib-hubitat nodes? Or are you using NR as a Home Assistant add-on so get HA for "free" with your NR?

If you like HA and have the technical skills and patience to handle the missing devices / edge cases / breaking updates then I say go for it.. Pair all your devices in HA directly and for those that are problematic use HE. You could even use the community HA bridge app if you wanted to still use HE for things like the dashboard or other fun stuff.

For me it's too much of a time-suck though so am not likely to go all in. My current setup is NR as a centralized rules controller that connects to HE, HomeBridge and (occasionally) Home Assistant. My devices in HE have been very stable except when I mess around with stuff or a device dies. Likewise in NR my rules work for the most part.

I have been noticing an uptick in some Z-Wave devices not fully responding usually after a reboot but am still looking into this and cannot say that it is an HE issue.

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Iā€™ll answer horriblyā€¦
Nodered - because nodered
Hubitat because everything is already paired and itā€™s simple to get them to act as antenna for HA
HA - because options, non HE integrations, and reallyā€¦ Lovelace.

It took a day or two of basic Lovelace playing around before my wife installed it on her phone and has her own interface, controlling Christmas lights that arenā€™t already automated and even the kids internet access. She never wanted to even have the HE app installed or touch HEs buttons at all, and now sheā€™s poking around to the point that Iā€™m this close to poking back with a sharp stick.
It just looks miles better than HEs UI and of course allows way more integrations than HE does and is quite responsive; HE just doesnā€™t have that.

Anyway thatā€™s why I have all 3 currently running.

I am in a similar scenario mostly because of a similar progression.

I started my home automation with HE and initially loved it. Really simple to pair devices, do simple automations.
I hate the dashboards. Yes they work, but I do not have the patience to write and maintain a CSS solution to make them suitable for the Significant Other (Boss).
I initially installed HA just to make some decent dashboards, but then we got solar & battery which can only be integrated with HA (through MQTT integration) and I had to create some custom controls to adjust settings which I could not do on HE (lack of Groovy skills).
I have since bought an Aeotec z-stick and am waiting on a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus. I will be setting up Zigbee2MQTT and Zwave2MQTT on HA. This is mostly because any device I have paired to HE which has monitoring capability such as my smart plugs and light switched (power usage, etc) does not send that data across the API link.
My SO works in the environment, and this is what she is currently pestering me for so we can measure what impacts the environment most, and what we should invest in to reduce that impact.

I think it is a shame but likely in the next 12 months I will have completely moved off HE for that reason.

David

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I already got my Sonoff Zigbee stick running though I used zha first to test it. FYI HA flipped out when it thought the device moved USB ports (passing through proxmox) but since I moved it to other ports itā€™s been fine. Iā€™m also using an Aeotec stick for zwave and Iā€™ve had no freak outs, been solid but I found things like my zooz double plugs responded horribly when paired normally - but paired with no security they work great. ( theyā€™re the only devices that have acted up)
I agree that Iā€™m getting off HE soon, I never really had an issue with HE but HA has more options for me, and the UI brought much more ā€œacceptance ā€œ from the wife, especially with stuff like the live front door camera view and buttons to interact with to lock/unlock etc.

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This is the reason I'm now getting started with HE. For me zwave had been very flaky on HA, especially with the move to zwavejs. Devices disappear, or they suddenly get a different, default name, causing my dashboards to be flaky. Fingers crossed that I can get the best of both worlds.

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