New user here looking to finally upgrade an old Nexia hub (bought a home with Nexia/z-wave devices and see no reason to keep paying Nexia $10/mo).
I’m curious thoughts on the soon-to-be-released Ezlo Plus and Ezlo Secure vs. Hubitat. They look pretty interesting, especially the Ezlo Secure with battery backup and option for 4G service too. I’ve gotten the impression the old Vera hubs weren’t the greatest, but at least on paper these devices seem to be grounds-up new hardware and software.
Any beta users here with feedback?
PS - I’m an avid Apple user and ultimately looking to get everything into HomeKit. There are well-documented ways to do this with HomeBridge with Hubitat. I’m assuming this will also work with Ezlo....
So I noticed that both Ezlo hubs have much less RAM and what seems to be a slower CPU than the Hubitat C-5 or C-7. I have no idea what implications those have for local automation or speed of execution.
Are there any published specs for the HE? I never saw any on the website.
I see it's a pre order product so until it actually gets into people's hands I'm not sure how having owned a Vera gives any better insight as to the performance of the product?
Ezlo acquired Vera, and the Ezlo hubs represent the new direction for the Vera platform as I understand it. There are quite a few ex-Vera power users here who migrated to Hubitat in part because of frustration with the direction the Ezlo platform was heading.
Fair enough - however from what I can see on the website, it seems like it has a pretty decent feature set (local/siren/433Mhz/battery backup/4G although not sure about 4G unless you are planning to run a primary security system off it which frankly I wouldn't with any HA device including hubitat)
Yep, I’m one of them. Vera / Ezlo is a hot mess. They are dumbing down and already poorly thought out platform and repeating the same mistakes they made on the old platform.
Vera is not a bad place to start for noobs, but it’s currently a pretty poor experience for anyone wanting everything to just work no matter how crazy big their zwave network is etc.
Their Vera Plus hub was a good example, it had great specs including a quad core CPU, however the platform was single threaded!
I'm another ex-Vera User (not power user). Ezlo seems to believe that efficient software is more important than powerful hardware. Even though hardware is cheap and getting cheaper, and developing software is expensive and getting more so. They seem to underpower their hardware. They are also favoring more cloud-based operation. Finally, the Vera Forum is not very healthy.
I am very happy with my decision to move to Hubitat. It has been rock solid for me, which is something I never found with Vera. The Forums have been incredibly helpful and friendly.
But for me I need 2 primary things as a documented given in any home automation hub:
Ability to create user drivers
A published API to get device data in/out of the hub
Past that, I don't really care that much what the interface looks like, if they have a phone app, if they have dashboards, what cloud integrations they support, etc.
If I move on to my 2nd tier wishes, not requirements:
Full backup/restore. Some disaster recovery that does not require re-pairing all devices. This is sorely missing in the marketplace in general...
Stability. Need to be able to leave it alone and it not crash every few days. This should probably be in requirements actually, but I'm too lazy to move it.
Updates to underlying firmware (especially radios and application frameworks)
Ezlo doesn't meet my requirements list, nor my wish list... so...
As I like to say at least 1 nice thing, I will say the Ezlo hub is (subjectively) prettier than Hubitat's.
They've totally missed the boat imo and new HW isn't going to fix their rubbish software stack and their poor non-ZW plus style network mgmt practices.
Not to mention Vera is missing things like the ability to natively understand "Presence" and associated "leaving" and "arriving" concepts. The hacks I had to implement to get presence detection working on Vera were a PITA!
I've jumped into HE with both feet and my home automation has never worked better! I'll not be leaving anytime soon.
I like Hubitat but I've kept my Vera running just for my cameras. The new ezlo hub says it will load wifi switches from Alexa so you don't need to do Tasmota. That's interesting.
I'm not sure, but I don't think it is possible on zigbee though without doing "debug level tricks" on the radio/firmware side of things - luckily those are a lot easier to re-pair.
