What? Homeseer doesn’t support Alexa TTS? What? For several hundreds of dollars they don’t offer this ?
Nope... they don't. I've complained to them repeatedly and provided links to documentation to enable it. Sadly their voice assistant integration is weak and reliability sucks.
So my findings so far... It doesn't make sense to spend all this cash if the following don't work?
Price w/ plugins
$249 - Homeseer Standard ($79 for the pi to hs4 standard edition sale is on now)
$60 - Lutron Caseta
$40 - Ecobee
$30 - Easytrigger (This should be built into HomeSeer)
$35 - MyQ (Should be able to bridge with HomeKit)
$40 - Hubitat
$$$ - For hardware... I can host it via a VM
Total: $454 plus tax (US)
Missing/Broken Features
- No IF/ELSE (EasyTrigger and HS4 will help with this)
- TTS via Alexa is not supported
- IFTTT isn't reliable. Setup IFTTT to kick off my Roomba. Took over 2 hours before IFTTT saw it. Looking through the forums I found a lot of people are having issues with this (they have a roomba plugin)
- Lack of ZigBee support. Requires hubitat and maker API. (This one is fine, we can use hubitat)
- Lutron Caseta Pico remotes currently don't support HOLD down button presses.
I think that list is already long enough to stop me dead in my tracks. lol
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So I took a bet on Homeseer because of their announcements of HS4.
I have a couple things I’ve gathered over the year, the USB smartstick and Zflash software. The new hs4 upgrade path for $80 seems like a really good deal. I grabbed a couple plugins which costed me some additional money.
I plan to use both Hubitat and Homeseer.
In terms of a cost comparison here’s the break down.
I have $60 to spend on the Lutron plugin still. HS4 plans to include free built in plugins like Ecobee which I won’t need to spend money on now.
- HS4 Upgrade (pi to hs4 standard) - $80
- Smartstick - $40
- Zflash - $30
- EasyTrigger - $30
- Hubitat - $40
Total: $220 (us)
$220 just for plug-ins? Holy crap!! That's ridiculous!
No that’s everything. HS4 plus the required plugins and the USB zwave single.
What I mean is that's not the hardware....so no devices...just software. That's absolutely nuts.
Yeah it’s not cheap.
In my situation I will run it as a VM off my esxi server.
I haven't followed this thread very closely, but from what I have, I have yet to see what is the advantages of Homeseer. In other words what are you able to do with Homeseer that you cannot do with Hubitat.
I have yet to find anything (for my needs) that Hubitat can't accomplish, wondering what would justify such an expensive price tag for Homeseer?
From what I’ve seen is you can call up custom scripts outside the software, and their plugins seem to be more mature.
But in all honesty, the reason i wanted to move ahead with Homeseer is because originally that was always my plan. Also due to the hub lock ups and what appear to be slowness with motion lighting and the constant need of reboots you keep hearing about. I thought it would be best to take advantage of both systems.
My plan is to have Homeseer do all the automations and use Hubitat as a bridge to zigbee devices.
Here’s something that may throw people off. I have several iris motion sensors and they respond faster using Homeseer and Hubitat as the gateway. Using Hubitat the motion lighting slows down within a couple days and requires a reboot.
Just things like this, and Homeseer has been able to spin a profit and stay in business for 20 years now.
I love Hubitat and plan to keep it around but pair it with Homeseer as described above.
But to answer your question, I’ve yet needed anything outside of what Hubitat can do.
You will be able to link them either via the HomeSeer Hubitat plugin - which I believe you've purchased (one way IIRC) - or the free mcs MQTT HomeSeer plugin and my free HE MQTT app, (when released and two way). The former is more 'user friendly' from HS.
The Hubitat Plugin for HomeSeer is bi-directional for device status/control
Typo corrected should of read "IS bi-directional"
Former ?
Here's something Homeseer can do that Hubitat can't - automate with X10 or Insteon 
Just a facetious remark
So HE devices are mirrored into HS virtual devices and HS devices created as HE virtuals ? That’s neat, I hadn't appreciated that.
I would recommend your plugin then over having to set this up manually via MQTT. It’ll be much more straightforward.
K
You really don't want to be going that route though - except for legacy reasons and you already own a lot of devices.
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No.
HE Devices are Mirrored to HS. Their status/control is realtime. NO HS devices are replicated to HE at all. Not even going there.
Ahh - a difference in how we meant bi-directional I guess. I guess it depends on whether you want to replicate some HS devices into HE then as to which which path you would choose.
Yup... maybe talk the other guys into adding HS support into HubConnect???
