Hubitat - Behind the scenes

Hi there,

I am new to Hubitat, just purchased it a week ago. I got already many bulbs integrated, motion sensors, contact sensors, have my first rules etc. What an amazing product. For me, it is the perfect mixture of flexibility (complexity) and simplicity (e.g. Alexa integration).

I would be happy to understand Hubitat, the ecosystem, history, and company a bit more in detail. I read a lot in this forum, but maybe you can help me.

What I have understood so far is:

  • Hubitat is a closed platform driven by Hubitat Inc. Hubitat is written in Java. The frontend is jQuery.
  • Drivers are developed partially by Hubitat Inc., the officially supported ones. Other drivers are created by the community.
  • Drivers are written in Groovy as Groovy runs on the JVM which is used in Hubitat.
  • Hubitat seems to be influenced by SmartThings as they also had Groovy drivers in the past.

My questions now are:

  • What is the company size of Hubitat Inc.? Do they only earn money with selling Hubitat? Or who are the people behind Hubitat? :slight_smile:
  • SmartThings decided to stop using Groovy drivers. I do not know the background. Does Hubitat have a roadmap about features / directions planned in the future?
  • What were the reasons to use this technology stack? Personal preference? Flexibility of Groovy for drivers as it is a optionally typed language?
  • Sometimes HE is compared to HomeAssistant. Both platforms are of course different in their strengths, technology etc. And furthremore, they can be integrated. On the website HE is compared to SmartThings and Wink. For me, the Alexa integration and running out of the box (would be possible with HA yellow boy too) is the key feature of Hubitat. Is there are reason why HomeAssistant is not listed in this comparison table?

I really would like to understand the history and some background information of Hubitat. It is just an amazing product!

Regards,

Mike

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I'm just a user (of ST since 2015 and HE since 2020), but this is what I've observed.

SmartThings runs (soon: ran) user-added Groovy code (drivers and apps) in the cloud, not locally on the hub. This caused many problems, including issues with variable latency and correctness (because of many SmartThings bugs,). The Hubitat founders decided it would better to run all the code locally, so cloud server issues wouldn't result in end-user database corruption. They choose Groovy because they built a platform that was mostly compatible with SmartThings, and could leverage all the code that was already in use on that platform.

The original SmartThings developers (now long gone) choose Groovy because it ran in the JVM sandbox (security) and was easy to program in. I've used it in other projects as early as 2011.

But their run-in-the-cloud platform had huge unfunded costs and bugs. The current SmartThings developers couldn't figure out how to get existing local running drivers in their current hubs, and Groovy was seen as the "old stuff", and Lua was newer to them - even though Lua is much older than Groovy. They decided to build a whole new platform and deprecate all the existing code that had been externally developed for SmartThings. The "new" SmartThings architecture has Lua drivers running locally, but no way for apps to run on the hub - instead, you need some other computer to run apps on (and it's still not well thought out).

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Thank you for the kind words. Hubitat was born following a long and frustrating period of instability caused by the cloud based architecture that SmartThings platform was offering in 2015. Many of the current Hubitat staff are former SmartThings users, and were among the most active members of the SmartThings community. Among them is @bravenel, who is the creator of Rule Machine that was first built on the SmartThings platform in the fall of 2015.

Hubitat Environmental, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on October 16, 2016, and would later change its name to Hubitat, Inc. The first full-time employee joined the company at the beginning of 2017, followed by several others the same year.

While the company's headquarter is in Arizona, most of its employees are spread across the North America, working remotely.

@bcopeland is among the most recent employees who joined the company, and he began his Hubitat journey, here in the community, developing several popular apps and drivers.

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This is related.... A good read

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@miketech

Long before he became a Hubitat employee, my friend @bcopeland asked the same question. @bravenel responded with a brief history of Hubitat's beginnings in the post linked below. @bravenel's description personalizes the corporate history described in detail by @bobbyD. An enjoyable read - here you go:

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Hi,

thank you all for the insights. Very interesting.

I am curious about the next steps of Hubitat. At the moment, the product absolute fits my needs. Great Alexa integration, Z-Wave and Zigbee support, running out of the box, many different drivers... even the UI that seemed to be a bit "old-fashioned" at the beginning... it is very efficient...

What I am really confused about is: Until 2 weeks ago I never heard about Hubitat. Maybe, this product is better known in the U.S. or other countries. But I was looking for a smart home solution for months. I was using Alexa all the time and I knew Google Home, Home Assistant, Apple HomeKit, Homee, Homey, and a bit SmartThings. But also friends of mine never heard about Hubitat. Maybe, it is not very popular here in Germany. I was so thrilled when I found it :smiley:

Just another question: As ST changed from Groovy to another language... do you also plan to support this language so that we still have synergies with ST? Or is it not necessary any longer to easily convert ST drivers to Hubitat as the community is big enough?

Regards,

Mike

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ST moved from Groovy to Lua because their hardware was not powerful enough to run Groovy code directly on the hub (as opposed to the ST cloud). Hubitat isn't as resource limited as ST, so IMO there is no need to consider moving to Lua.

ST moved to Lua because their cloud computing costs were hurting Samsung. Hubitat has never had that issue.

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Spread the word!

Already working on :smiley:

ST moved from Groovy to Lua because their hardware was not powerful enough to run Groovy code directly on the hub (as opposed to the ST cloud). Hubitat isn't as resource limited as ST, so IMO there is need to consider moving to Lua.

ST moved to Lua because their cloud computing costs were hurting Samsung. Hubitat has never had that issue.

I thought more from a practical point of view. Thought, HE had a lot of benefits by reusing ST Groovy code. So I thought to have these benefits also in the future, maybe they also plan to support Lua.

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Yeah, this is true. But what's going to be in Lua that's not already in Groovy? Isn't it really the case that a lot of effort is going to go in to attempting to move drivers from Groovy to Lua, as compared to new local drivers originating in Lua? I could be wrong, but I sure don't see Lua as much of a future draw.

Haha, someone should just write a Lua to Groovy translator. :sunglasses:

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I agree with you that there is little to nothing to be gained by adding a Lua interpreter to the Hubitat platform. Just want to point out that a similar project is already out there:

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They don’t really have a public roadmap, and typically don’t announce their future plans much in advance. But they do allow users like us to beta test upcoming hub firmware releases, keep an eye on the announcements category for the next beta testing opportunity.

It looks like you’ve already found the announcement for the most recent Hubitat Live!, which they do sporadically. But sometimes they tease upcoming features there as well.

As you noted, Home Assistant as an off-the-shelf integrated hardware+software solution for home automation needs is a pretty new phenomenon. Hubitat may still be best-suited for a more tech-savvy or DIY-friendly crowd than SmartThings or Wink, but they have made a ton of progress in just a few years on improving the overall user experience.

I guess we’ll see what happens with the new SmartThings development environment, but IMO ST will always be mostly just a conduit for Samsung’s appliance divisions and a source of user data. Wink will eventually self-destruct completely, it’s most of the way there at this point.

Perhaps if HA Yellow moves beyond a pre-order fulfillment phase it would make some sense to compare to on the Hubitat website.

Welcome to the community!

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I hope not! Recent posts in the ST forum have people talking about their hub slowing down once they have 15-20 different Lua drivers installed (note: different drivers; not different devices).

Whew!

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