Homey review: Don't sell your Hubitat

Pretty interesting read as the author seemed to know home automation and has experience with Hubitat among other hubs.

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"There’s nothing wrong with it—if it’s what you want"

Hey, not bad.

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It is much more Europe device maker focused, just as Hubitat is very US device maker focused. In the US there are much more zwave devices available than here in the EU and Hubitat lacks (good) drivers for several of the larger EU brands. For Homey it is the opposite. Also devices like Roku are not available here so hub makers like Homey will not have support out of the box.

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I am sure Hubitat would like to support more brands and more devices, however I am not sure the team are even aware of some devices, or what is popular in regions outside the USA.

If users would contact these manufacturers, and ask they work with Hubitat, some of these gaps in device support might get fixed. Frient was an example of one company that was very proactive in contacting Hubitat. Other companies may not even know Hubitat exists unless people contact them and request to integrate their devices with Hubitat. These companies don't have to do much except provide sample devices to Hubitat staff, but they could provide their own drivers for Hubitat if they wanted to.

The other option would be to see if there is an old Smartthings driver (when they were still on Groovy code) that could be ported to Hubitat.

The final option I could think of would be for someone to take the reins and write a driver themselves, or hire or ask someone on this forum to develop a driver.

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Interesting note. I do like drag and drop...

"Its interfaces are not as customizable as its free and open-source alternatives, but they are rather easy to grasp out of the box. This especially applies to the browser-based interface, which allows for dragging and dropping devices between rooms. For some reason, every other home automation system I’ve used—Home Assistant, Hubitat, Alexa, Google Home, and Home/HomeKit—makes creating, managing, and assigning rooms tedious and redundant. Homey Pro puts the rooms next to the devices and lets you make some devices favorites, and it works wonderfully."

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Would love to be able to set a device’s room directly in the device list, similar to how one can select a device’s attribute for the “status” column directly from that table.

GIF by Charly Bliss

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I don't mind the Room menu, but having a list where all the devices are in a single bucket is harder to use than I'd prefer. Since it's possible to know the device type, why not allow the user to add from list types (e.g. Bulb, motion sensor, dimmer, etc.). Or the user definable device status attribute could be used to break them down into smaller lists.

If I'm going to add bulbs to a room, I'd rather look at just a list of bulbs, instead of a list of everything. If for some reason the bulb wasn't there, then I could look at a separate list that displays everything, or use search.

Agreed however

  • I don’t think such categories exist currently
  • there is a decent workaround for this : you can filter the list with the search box. Choosing a device naming scheme that facilitates such filtering.
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Sure, this is how I name devices and it works very well. I'm thinking of the average joe or newbie that doesn't know to do this, or just doesn't want to name things that way. Choice is good.

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Dragging devices into rooms in the Home app (HomeKit) is pretty magical actually.

I've just jumped in to the Homey ecosystem and agree with many of the article's points. Here's where I find myself today as an owner of a Smartthings Hub, Home Assistant on Pi, Hubitat, and Homey Pro.

I'm ready to retire the Smartthings hub. I got the Hubitat so I could transition my ZWave devices out of Samsung's ecosystem and that has gone well. I started really leaning into HA as my primary ecosystem, but have gotten frustrated with some platform inconsistencies around Matter so I thought I'd give Homey Pro a try.

Since I was getting a Homey Pro, my hope was that the Hubitat would be the next to go because I could transition ZWave devices from the Hubitat to be controlled by Homey, but I've already run into issues.

Homey really prefers to utilize ZWave Plus. It's not that you can't add earlier ZWave devices to Homey, but that support is limited. I'm in the midst of seeing if an app developer can restore OTA dimming to my non-ZWave Plus dimmers. Fingers crossed that they can.

When performing the Smartthings -> Hubitat transition, I had to "leave a device behind" in Smartthings (a ZWave Fan controller) because Hubitat's implementation rendered that switch non-functional OTA. Homey is able to onboard and control that device!

Now I'm executing the Hubitat -> Homey transition. That ZWave Fan Controller works great in Homey (oddly it can adjust speed dynamically, when the dimmers can't). But there's always a catch! In this case, there's no support for my Schlage FE469X so Hubitat gets to live another day...I think.

My ultimate plan is to utilize HA for the tremendous dashboard and integration capabilities; areas where Homey can struggle a bit. Homey is then my automation controller due to their great Flow implementation. But to make Homey the boss, it needs to see all of my devices. No sweat getting devices that can only be onboarded into HA to appear in Homey with some apps, but I can't figure out how to expose my Schlage lock to Homey from Hubitat. That's why Hubitat may not survive in my ecosystem. With only the lock in Hubitat and no way to expose it to Homey, I might as well enjoy it as a keypad lock until it dies and look to something newer as a replacement (funded in part by the sale of the Hubitat).

Am I missing something? Is there a way to expose Hubitat-controlled devices to Homey so I can automate them there?

I'm guessing that the overlap of Hubitat owners with Homey users is teeny. You may not get an answer to your question.

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No, I don't know of any Hubitat to Homey integration at this time. Hubitat's Maker API is there and readily available if someone wants to make a bridge between the two though, like was done for Hubitat to HA.


I'll just throw this out there...

I think your money would have been much better spent replacing old/crappy non-plus Z-Wave devices, rather than $400+ for the Homey Pro...

Now you have a nice shiny new hub, but still have shitty old non-Plus devices and the issues they present (on ANY hub). That seems backwards to me.

:man_shrugging:

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I agree with Jason that you probably would have been better served to update old devices, although I'm not certain that would have been the more economical route. Why don't you put your Schlage lock into HA? Since you bought a Homey Pro, can't you import devices from HA to Homey via local IP?

I setup Nabu Casa which allowed me to import many (but not all) HA devices into a Homey.app Premium account so I could play with the capabilities of their Advanced Flows.

While it's pretty slick and I would still favor a new HE Rule Machine that worked in the graphical flow manner (without the terminology like inject and other pointless extra steps of NodeRed), I did find that Homey Advanced flows showed their weaknesses pretty quickly. For example, there's no way I can see to create a variable from a device, and/or to write one to a device or another variable. I use this in several RM rules. This can be done on HA, but you need to go into YAML to do it as far as I'm aware. :nauseated_face:

Homey Advanced Flows could pretty easily substitute many of the simple RM Rules, but those RM Rules were simple to build, and are simple to adjust if needed so I don't see much of a gain in that aspect alone.

If one were to try to add this as their primary hub in North America, I can see how you might be frustrated by the lack of device support, but I do have to say that there's a surprising number of North American devices available, and some integrations that I wasn't expecting to find are also available, such as Lutron, Sengled and Ecowitt.

There are some integrations I have that would be roadblocks.

  • No SinopĂ© support (would need to be joined to HA, but then displaying outdoor temp on the device would force working in YAML, whereas on Hubitat this was very simple).

  • No Insteon support (OK, that one doesn't surprise me at all, but it would required passing HE devices to HA and then to Homey, which is the workaround to many of these other devices).

  • No Inovelli support (Would need to add via Home Assistant).

--

Hubitat Elevation may not be the prettiest hub, but she sure can cook. :wink:

"You’re as pretty as any of them, you just need a nose job." - Cosmo Kramer
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Interesting side note:

Hubitat Virtual switches passed to HA will show up in Homey.app, but they don't show up as a device you can select as a trigger or an action. The workaround is to instead share a virtual dimmer to HA.