Thanks everyone for the thoughts and experiences, I've read them all and will respond to those that are particularly relevant to me.
Howdy, I'm curious as to what those issues are?
Yes, all of my z-wave devices are supported thankfully.
The device that I'll have to ditch is my Honeywell D6 Pro Wifi Thermostat (I have a Sensibo Sky that I'll use instead with the community driver). My 2x nest thermostats may cause me issues due to google being idiots with WWN.
Vera is also fully local but they've done stupid non-standard things to the z-wave implementation and it also doesnt cope well with internet outages (although this has improved greatly with FW 7.31).
I run all my gear on UPS and am able to remotely shutdown my Vera Plus remotely using a scripted ssh command at the same time as my servers shutdown. I did once come very close to bricking my Vera by pulling the power out and had to do a full factory reset and restor to get it back (twice).
I've been watching Hubitat from afar and I like the direction it's going in too.
I have z-wave devices in every room of the house (usually more than 1) so I dont expect this to be an issue for me.
Im surprised to hear that, Reactor for me is very, very easy to use as it's very visual and has good separation between "conditions" and "activities.
I have watched some good videos on automation with Hubitat and I can definitely achieve a lot of automation with the "simple cousins".
Rule machine looks good too and has a lot of great features, it also looks like you need to click through a lot more pages to get things done than Reactor. This doesnt bother me as once stuff works I dont tend to mess with it.
Yeah I did notice that the app and dashboard UI is, to put it kindly, crude looking. This doesnt bother me as The app will be 95% for gefencing (Home / Away etc) and 5% for doing things like opening the garage door. My wife almost never uses it at all.
Yeah that does not surprise me at all - I have a weekly scheduled reboot + morning Luup reload to keep mine running "well". And also a bunch of tweaks to the rubbish z-wave implementation to remove the nightly z-wave network heal's, excessive polling and device wake-ups, etc.
Im quite surprised to hear anyone call Vera a "great z-wave platform" - it has to be one of the worst I've come across due to all the non-standard things they've done to it. eg, nightly network heal's, aggressive polling, aggressive wake-ups of battery devices and massive issues with z-wave collisions and "stray node" reports (whatever the heck they are).
I only started out with Vera because I was new to HAC's and it appeared to be a good learning platform (and it has been).
Same but imo the new Vera owners have been putting too much effort into their mini "Ezlo" controllers and not enough into their full size controllers like the Plus and Edge. I have my test Edge running their RTOS and so far it's been unimpressive due to the lack of a Web UI and resulting no 3rd Party app support.
That's quite true, Vera support have been historically rubbish and every time they've touched my Plus they've made a mess! Luckily the Vera community is really good and very helpful.
Depending on what your experience is with Z-Wave platforms and how they are implemented there's a lot of things Vera did really right and a few things they did wrong.
Nightly heal was a legacy item from Z-Wave before Z-Wave Plus. This was done due to bad mesh's and user problems.
Aggressive polling. Same thing. Pre Z-Wave plus and was done the same as many other platforms (including SmartThings) to poll those older devices. Not friendly to newer Z-Wave Plus devices but was necessary for "User" appeal when they are looking for a control solution and not automation. They want to see the little Icon flip on/off when they change a switch and they want to see it NOW.
Vera has a bad issue with "device offline" and still does. This is flakey with them and never got to the bottom of it.
"stray node reports" What's this? Please expand on it.
Some other things Vera did very right was their backup/restore of the system and z-wave DB. It worked. Also they had one of the first working implementations for a multiple radio connected solution. Today HE has this with HubConnect but it's native with Vera, Fibaro, HomeSeer, and many other systems.
I have not been impressed at all with what Ezlo is trying to do. They are trying to build a cloud based system and have for the most part ignored Vera Plus and local needs. I did see they have a newer Vera Plus in beta and still local. However I'm not holding my breathe just yet
I KNOW RIGHT!?!?! Mind boggling really!
Vera support was either really good or horrible never an in between. The community used to rock! Just like the HE community. Then most left....
Yeah, the local backup/restore is great and saved my butt several times!
Their multiple radio solution was daft tho as it relied on the two hubs communicating via the internet (just dumb) and neither hub could see the other hubs devices in the UI etc.
Many Vera community superstars have actually been banned from the forum eg rafale77 who actually cajoled the dev's into adding options (via code) to disable many of the bad z-wave behaviors. Talk about stupid!
Ahh... lots of different acronyms that people use so I wanted to be sure.
Interesting.
I had my 2 Vera Plus setup in this manner without Internet access and from the "Master" I could see all of the Slave devices. One thing that was wonky was how apps were handled in this manner as you had to either install the app on both hubs or copy/install the device icons on the master otherwise you would get broken icons in the web interface. Now I could go on and on about the Vera apps... they sucked the only good one's were 3rd party community apps.
WTF? Rafale77 was banned? Man now that's pushing things. I know cybrmage went MIA and actually showed up here with HE for a few months but has now gone MIA and taken his toys with him (again).
This was actually a strong reason for leaving Vera. The Vera app is great if you only have a handful of devices. Once you have a whole house of switches in there, the lack of customization (and obscene use of screen real estate) makes it unweildly to use.
I had a Vera Plus, but switched to HE in May/19. HE is a great platform with much more widely supported custom development (largely due to the fact that it uses the same language and similar structure to ST). Furthermore, the built-in functionality in Dashboards and RM outstrip the default Vera tools by far. Once you bring Vera up to that level (adding Reactor and perhaps AltUi), it can't handle the load.
Add to that, the lack of any real support or updates from MiCasaVerde / Ezlo, and it's a happy move to HE.
Fair enough - I run my Server, Comms and Home Automation Controller on a UPS so I dont expect it to be a big deal, as my Internet stays online during power outages (reverse powered FTTC with a micro-node in the pit out the front of my house).
I was on Vera at 2 different homes since about 2008. It worked well, but updates were scary as they broke things frequently. The UI sucks. I had over 100 devices on it (~130) and it sucked to scroll through that list to do something with a device. Altui made it a bit easier though. Also, their reverse ssh tunnel they use for a cloud connection was suspect. When I was at defcon a few years ago, someone figured out how to gain access to other people's Vera devices via that tunnel. I always kept mine on its own vlan and isolated from the rest of my network because of this.
That said, until HE arrived, I was pretty happy with the Vera. I still don't have control of my lighting system with HE, except for some things that are not on the system and use zwave. But I am close to having a solution to that if I can find another afternoon to work on it.
Also, I hate Groovy and the lack of documentation on how to build an app or driver. And the HE UI isn't awesome, especially for building rules. But it's still better than Vera. Lua on the Vera was super easy and writing complex automation rules in pure Lua was pretty awesome... Even though it was Lua.
Are you still using Vera in conjunction with your HE? I imagine it'll take me weeks to migrate across and I'd like to link them together to start with if possible.
