Hubitat vs HassIO

Isn’t @jason0x43’s integration one-way? I didn’t see a way to say, access my custom water valves on HA to use them in an app on HE.

Honestly I don't know. I only work with a one way flow of information andI didn't realize till you pointed it out. Good to know the cons of my setup. Though for my use, it isn't a problem.

I keep things as simple and easy on my Hubitat. I avoid complexities on my HE. I had slow down and too frequent need to reboot the HE. I keep HE to stock apps minus CoCoHue (sp?). I don't have but a few zwave devices. I have simple automations on HE cause they were there first and don't seem to be a problem.

I mean HA has issues of it's own. Like every update means something breaks.

I'll admit I traded off my reliability issues from HE to HA. Nothing is perfect but I like it so much more than before with HE alone.

I wouldn't call the HA integration "one-way"; it's basically just a driver for HA to control a Hubitat device. I mean, I guess it is a one-way control flow, but we don't normally call device drivers one-way. Potato, potahto. :smiley:

For HE to have any control over HA, you'd need a Home Assistant integration on the Hubitat side.

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I made the switch just in the past few weeks, and from reading the forum history, I can understand how anyone who tried HA more than a couple months ago probably has a different experience from even the past few weeks. They've had a big push toward making things easier on new users (to the frustration of some of the power users), the z-wave infrastructure is being replaced, and even the community add-on "store" has had a very recent face-lift.

I understand the previous complaints about YAML, but they've phased out so much of it, that I only needed YAML for my Arlo integration (I'm using node red for my automations). I haven't experienced anything breaking with any updates other than the items that are specifically listed in the release notes and breaking changes.

I made the move because I've had slowdowns on HE from day one, and a year later with 3 HE hubs (1 z-wave, 1 zigbee, and 1 for "everything else"), I still had to reboot pretty regularly. My main motivator for trying HA was seeing Jason's HA integration and also seeing some of the posters/coders on this forum that I'd come to trust start appearing over there.

I started out keeping all of my Z-Wave and Zigbee devices on HE and connecting them with the integration. I was content with that... until my HE hub which only had a handful of smartplugs, a few glass break sensors, and the HE Maker App installed still managed to stop reporting after a few weeks. So, I've started moving my devices to HA natively using a zwave/zigbee stick, though I still heartily endorse using Jason's integration as a starting point to make the migration so much easier while learning the ropes.

If you already have Hubitat, the great thing is that with the integration, your only investment in evaluating HA is a $35 RPi 4. You can spin up HassOS, import your devices, and start playing around without breaking anything on HE.

I started a thread over on the HA forum that I'm trying to keep current regarding the conceptual differences and gotchas when moving from HE to HA. Might be another worthwhile resource to check out for anyone considering a move.

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nice. i wonder what's causing your HE to hang up that requires a reboot

Probably the same that's causing the hundreds of other HE's to hang up and slow down. It's a very very common issue, so much so that there's a few apps that have been written to reboot the hub regularly as a bandaid solution.

I know this has been beaten to death in other topics, and I'm not saying it again to beat the dead horse some more, but I find the HE hubs to be under powered. The specs should theoretically be powerful enough to run any system without missing a beat, but real world application shows that just doesn't happen. If the hub had all kinds of power to spare, you wouldn't hear over and over that simple automations should be done in apps with less overhead than rule machine or you wouldn't hear about hubs slowing down after a day or 2.

The slow downs, and what I call the general clunkiness of rule machine (I came over from WebCoRe so RM is like torture to me) is what made me make the jump over to HA using @jason0x43's integration and I have never been happier with my setup. I'm running it on an entry level NUC with a celeron processor, 8gb ram and an ssd. I know very limited YAML but I don't need to really learn much of it since I mainly do everything in the GUI now.

The icing on the cake for me... all the automations happen in HA, jason's integration sends the command over the network to HE through maker api, then HE sends it off to the respective device. The fact that there are now extra steps in the process should add delays. But it doesn't. It's faster. Like WAY faster. Even the wife has noticed the speed increase. This just speaks to the fact that a little more power under the hood is really what's needed to make HE shine.

If Hubitat ever releases a more powerful hub (ie: a pro model like has been suggested over and over), or goes down a similar path that HA does and allow the software to be run on your own device, I may look at moving my automations back. But for the time being, HA will handle all the work load and I'm still using HE for it's radios.

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I have used HA for 5 years and still have a tiny toe in the water there. It becomes a real chore after a while. There are always little breaking changes that you need to keep up with at every update (every couple of weeks).
The "making it easier for newcomers" is great until you have been on the platform for a while and no longer a newcomer. Then there is some wholesale change in how things operate, ostensibly to make it easier for newcomers, the group you no longer belong to.
If you are just looking at it now, all those "new" changes can be exciting. I went through far too many wholesale changes and finally decided that a supported stable platform was where I needed to be.

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I disagree and I don't believe that is the issue... it's deeper than that.

Jason's integration is great and works really well but actually further relegates HE to the peripheral market. It does the platform no favours and should be a HA discussed topic rather than on here. It's designed to move users to alternative platforms. HA is no panacea either .. just different.

I use both too.

Rule Machine should be the automation engine of choice. It needs to meet that responsibility and the fact people are using HA, Node-RED, Web Core or other engines and finding them more performant, reliable or better featured needs addressing by Hubitat.

What I think, and this will disaffect me with Bruce probably, is that it hasn't scaled well in terms of the UI to deal elegantly with what HE currently provides or needs. A lot of this is to do with the restricted UI capabilities of the system. We're pushing legacy issues here and need to evolve.

So many things to improve and not enough resources.

Choice is great though .. not knocking that

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The fact that HA breaks so frequently on update now - and the minor ones are every other day and top level version ones every couple of weeks is a real concern for me, meaning I often stay on older versions to avoid a day of fixing until .2 or later are released. Even then features get deprecated and break - and I mean really break - won't load ...unless manually redone

HE doesn't break .. although a feature or two might be impacted.

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This :point_up_2:

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I have been on HA since October of last year. My initial goal, and up until a couple of months ago, was to use HE as my zigbee/zwave controller and have HA do everything else. I am using an Intel NUC and I have been using the Nortek stick that came with my Hubitat C3 to control my devices in HA. It's been absolutely fantastic and I no longer plan to use HE as my controller. I keep my eye on @jason0x43 great integration so I have a fallback just in case.

HA Advantages (from my experience)

  • Integrations - feels like anything you can think of is there...and probably is.
  • Dashboard - the flexibility to make some beautiful dashboards is there. It's amazing what can be done. This benefit is also a downside, as the flexibility comes with complexity. There is a learning curve and as mentioned before some updates can break certain custom parts of dashboards.
  • Scaling - as your needs expand you can scale your hardware to handle the new load. This can potentially be expensive, but I prefer the option to buy my way out of frustration.
  • Cameras - camera feeds in my dashboards...this alone was enough for me to invest my limited time in learning yaml for lovelace dashboards.
  • Performance - with the right hardware, HA FLIES. The occasional delays and persistent crashes I had with HE are completely gone.

HE advantages (again for me)

  • Groovy - I have learned groovy over the years with ST and HE. This allowed me to write custom drivers and apps for my specific needs. For HA, I have no intention to learn Python, so I have to rely on others.
  • Drivers Interface - how HE exposes driver settings is much simpler and doesn't require advanced knowledge of zwave and zigbee commands to make simple adjustments.
  • Alexa/GH - provided free of charge. On HA is costs $5 per month for Nabu Casa (which I happily pay because it also provides web hooks and other great features). There are ways to integrate them for free but it requires more than I am willing to invest in time and more than I am comfortable with in terms of exposing my automation appliance to the Internet.
  • Community - this one cannot be discounted. The HE community is by far the most helpful community I have been a part of and why am still check in every day.
    HA has a great community as well but HE just always feels like home.
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I'm only using HA to integrate with my ring doorbell. Other than that, I'm running everything from HE. I then decided to play around with HA a bit more since I had it running to see what else it could do. I do like the fact I was able to add RTSP cameras to the feed as well

I’m using two HE hubs, HomeKit (mainly for my Nest thermostat), node red and this week just installed HA. This is more of an experiment. As I have a lot of Xiaomi devices which we all know don’t play nicely.

I’m hoping I’ll have better luck with using them on HA with a Zigbee stick (literally just arrived). If all works out, then I’ll tie them both together in nodered, so I can have them on my HE Dash and HSM etc.

I do like HA and this is my second attempt, the first resulted in me binning it in less than a day :joy::joy: sometimes I’ve just no patience. This time, I’ve taken my time and explored it more. I’m liking it a little better. I doubt I’ll use it a whole lot, it will be for the odd things I need. Such as printer ink level alerts, maybe more multimedia things.

I hope to play more next week, and refine some of my ideas :wink:

To use those add ons and intergrations id need full hassio and not the home assistant standalone?

I 100000% agree with this as reason alone..

I've got cheapie cameras that run RTSP firmware and they work fantastic in the MotionEye integration.

Then I have a Node-RED flow going where I can shoot a command to Telegram and in turn HA (and MotionEye) will take snapshots of each of my cameras and send those back to me there in Telegram. I know I know, I could just use the app for the cameras but I love the thought of everything working together. I haven't quite dialed in MotionEye's motion detection yet, but I will someday I have time and then can kick off an automation. For instance, I would love for Alexa to notify me that someone pulled into my driveway using the ME's detection feature.

I did have an issue with the HA Hubitat integration the other day that required me yesterday to scorch the earth and start over with my 40 devices on HE... ah well, that happens lol.. I'm a huge fan of HE, HA, ME and NR, there is nothing I can't do or integrate

I don't know if anything has changed recently, but this did not use to be the case. I had standalone Home Assistant with lots of integrations (including Wink).

The only difference in the naming are the "Install Methods" not the functionality of Home Assistant. There are several different methods for installing add ons and components which can vary by install method.

As @jeubanks and @aaiyar mentioned, there are quite a few install methods (one of the more confusing parts of HA initially) but they can all function the same way in the end..it's just a matter of preference and skill level. All methods have the same basic built in integrations and other method have access to a huge list of custom addons. These addons can all be configured manually, but there is a certain convenience to having them built into HA (they can be backed up alongside everything else and have most of the HA related configs already done for you). If you want full/manual control of everything you can use the bare bones HA (Core) and then attach separate integrations giving you full control (for good and bad). There are MANY options and choosing the right one is very intimidating at first but in the end it's not hard to migrate from one method to another as you understand the benefits of each. I've migrated my configs 4 times with minor pain involved.

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I deleted it, lol. My only reason for using it was to use my harmony to control a zigbee light lol

Definitely not trying to have this be a HA setup guide. Just asking people's preferences. I'm sure the conversations about integrations and configuration can be had in HA forums.

I'm just asking which people prefer and their reasoning.

I do like that I can put cameras in HA but also don't like how Lovelace is annoying to lay out. I like the straight forward layout of HE, but do desire more to have it be a complete experience for the smart home