HomeSeer or Hubitat - Why?

So I'm mixed between choosing HomeSeer vs Hubitat.

I've trialed out HomeSeer, and I've managed to get it working, and bridging it over to Homekit for manual controls

The problem I have with HomeSeer, is the cost! Plus the plugins I'll need which will easily add up an additional $200 on top of the software.

Now from what I understand, Hubitat is on sale right now for $100 plus I won't have to purchase plugins! Much cheaper solution! However, I want reliability and I'm willing to pay. I don't want to be messing around with the system all the time, because something breaks.

The following devices I have are listed below. Can you tell me if these are supported, and if they require a subscription?

EcoBee
Rachio
Lutron Caseta Pro
MyQ
Roomba 980
Z-Wave Door Sensor
Axis Camera

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I don’t have most of the devices you listed, but if you have a lutron caseta pro bridge, you will really like the integration with Hubitat. Commands are sent with telnet and allow automations to run very quickly. And you can integrate pico remotes in many interesting ways, there are some community members who bought a caseta pro bridge just for access to picos.

Z-wave devices like your door sensor should work just fine, too. For the remainder of your integrations, there might be other threads already, you can try searching for keywords with the magnifying glass icon if you haven’t already.

As for homeseer, I’ve looked into it in the past, and was turned off by the costs. I would be surprised if all the extra charges for plugins resulted in a system that was substantially more reliable than what Hubitat can accomplish, but I haven’t actually used Homeseer so I’m sure it’s possible.

Right now there are no additional costs associated with using the HE platform, apart from the addictive nature of buying and setting up new devices! Unclear if that’ll ever change in the future, but if they began charging some kind of subscription I would strongly consider paying it. And it’s always possible that a community developer puts access to their device drivers or apps behind a paywall, there were a few SmartThings developers that did that (though their code was generally regarded as very good).

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All supported. No subscription required.

As I understand it, there are "workarounds" for the MyQ, but it is not natively supported. Further, it doesn't align with Hubitat's local execution only policy and does require a subscription for integrating with various third party services: https://support.chamberlaingroup.com/s/article/Information-about-Premium-subscriptions

As for the Axis Camera, right now, there is no native camera support available in Hubitat. There are some community supported integration, but nothing native.

Personally, I would go with Hubitat (duh), but everyone's use cases are different. In my case, I've spent years building up my smart home with devices that I know are easily integrated into nearly every platform on the market (including open source ones). For me, Hubitat has been extremely reliable and I don't have to tinker around with things unless I want to (which is actually more often than I want to admit :wink: ).

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The two systems are in very different categories. If cost of entry is the problem then you will have to decide what cost/features you want.

I would suggest spend the $100 for the hub and install HomeSeer 30 day trial and do your own comparison and determine which works best for you.

The controller at the end of the day is the cheapest component of the total solution and comparing a $100 hub against what could be a several thousand dollar server investment for all of your automations are not comparable.

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I'm a Homeseer hardware fan, but I think their software leaves a lot to be desired. While Homeseer is a mature product and community, so there are a lot of solutions to implement, they're often convoluted and difficult to do so, and each costs money to add. They are incredibly proud of their ancient framework, so they charge an arm and a leg. In the end, I've been able to achieve more, more easily, with HE than I did with Homeseer hub and at a fraction of the cost.

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Awesome information! This just confirms my choice I made.

I kicked off a purchase for Hubitat!

Thanks for he info.

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I actually use both. I like HomeSeer for the reliability and for ZWave devices. It just works. I use Hubitat for A few Zigbee Devices.

I use HomeSeer as well. Excellent Z-Wave support. Still lacking in the ZigBee but getting there through integration with deCONZ. I also just added a lot of Insteon to the mix.

The systems are completely different and in different categories. Hubitat is a consumer hub designed for that purpose and albeit is restrictive in what can be done and what should be done. HomeSeer is a not a consumer product and is a framework that can do anything you want if you either pay for the plugin or write your own.

Agree with this. You are on Hubitat forum so most of us would steer you toward Hubitat. Give both systems a try and see which one is fitting best for your case.

Regarding the MyQ integration, I don't find it to be a loss.

I had the ST MyQ integration, and frankly the add on tilt sensor provides 100% of the value.

The monoprice tilt sensor integrates nicely with HE, so I know when the door is open or closed, and if I really need to know whether I closed the garage door when I'm away from home, I can install the MyQ app.

In fact, my door opener dropped off the wifi (SSID changed), and I didn't notice for months. Oops.

YMMV of course.

The benefit would be to open and close the door.

Zwave and Zigbee are mesh protocols and really benefit from having more devices to talk to. Other than my Hue lights I don't have much experience with Zigbee and how Zigbee devices perform.
Most of my devices are Zwave and I will say that you really need to plan your deployment. You mention a Zwave door sensor. A single Zwave door sensor may be OK depending on the situation, but Zwave (and Zigbee) radios are very low power, good for battery life, but not so good when you are trying to communicate very long distances. Even short distances can be troublesome depending on intervening walls and furnishings. So, plan your deployment before you buy anything.

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Yeah, thats why YMMV, i have a button in the car, and a button on the wall. I see no reason to use my HE to open the door. I suppose if you really used presence to open doors, that might be a reason, I just don't see a need for it myself. Just using HE to monitor it's status is enough for me!

Were you hoping to use Presence type activities to automatically open or close the door based on rules?

Sometimes I will have deliveries put into my garage when I’m not home. I will open the garage door remotely.

Cool. I'd use the MyIQ app for that, but now I see where your're headed.

I've seen people suggest door timeouts too...as in, if the door is open This Long, close it.

This thread might help: Chamberlain MyQ Garage Door Support

I haven't read the whole thing, but there could be a way to get it working in there.

Scott

I just moved over from Homeseer to Hubitat, I loved Homeseer until the software crashed horribly on a rasperri pi when I was away for my job.

My wife just went bazonkas because it wouldn’t boot back up, by the time I got back home 10 days later she had tossed it in the trash and said I would be next if I didn’t move to something that worked, luckily my son saved it for me and when I ran some test I found the sdcard had gotten corrupted so the system wouldn’t boot.

I loved the fact that Homeseer was local I probably would have stayed there but I would have had to get one of there systems instead of doing a pi myself again but there hubs are just to damn expensive and my wife said hell no so we discussed HE and felt that HE had what we needed for the price we wanted and we needed a reliable home security system as well.

That was the real main sticking point in the end you can do a security system with Homeseer but it’s hell of hard to setup and maintain, the HSM feature in HE sold my wife on it and so far she loves it she just wants them to hurry up with the phone app.

So if I had to give advise on purchasing Homeseer or HE my advise would be save the cash and get HE, hope this helps.

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Does your wife use iPhone? You could setup Homebridge and then she can use iOS Home app to control things. I think there’s still an issue with the HSM control, so use Virtual switches and rules for that instead.

[Edit] Just don’t set it up on a RPi, she’ll kill you! :crazy_face:

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You could have installed on your own raspberry pi, or gotten a stand alone license to run on different hardware. The SD card issue is an SD card issue and can/will happen to all Raspberry Pi based systems or embedded systems that use a low cost flash memory..... The cost is higher even for the software alone compared to Hubitat and when cost is the decision maker then it's a single direction.

It's never fun though when a hardware issue or software issue kills everything. Been there. Lesson with HS is keep a backup on a spare sdcard when using the rPi. I run my system on a standalone system.

I recently tested one of these mini PCs. Decent little PC for the price. Not too slow. Didn't work for WMC on Win10, but for running a node.js server, it would do just fine.

We just switched over to Android, man I just don’t want to go into the whole iPhone thing.

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