So far, I have just found a way to do things in Hubitat.
For example, I already wrote a Google logger device driver in Hubitat that calls an app-script in a Google sheet and sends it log data. Great for charting and seeing trends. So many ways to do logging, so there could be opportunity in HA for that, I will take a look.
I was about to install HA last year for my Roborock vac, and then a community integration popped up and it has been working great, but I will see what HA can do for me when I have some new thing I want to do, and see which gives side me the best or easiest way to do it.
I don't want to unwind anything I am doing in Hubitat, but HA will get a good look for new things.
I just have so many hours of time entrenched in Hubitat Dashboards, I looked up all the hacks and figured out some of my own over time, so they are very interactive with lots of data, and custom icons, but ultimately I probably would have gone HA given the choice at the beginning for dashboards. I admit when starting out with Hubitat, I was really surprised how archaic the dashboards were, and the time it took me to build what I wanted was too long.
I do not actually plan to disconnect HA, just joking since it is currently idle. Plan is to find something I want to do with it. I was thinking dashboards at first, but looking at what it would take to reproduce what mine do now is daunting as well and not worth it.
Great examples. I can see where HA helps people connect things in so many niche cases like that, so a need like that I'm sure will come my way. HA can idle for now, and I will explore it more when I have some time, and a need will eventually arise.
I had many years with st as well, and when they killed Groovy and thus Webcore, I had all my automations for st in Webcore. I was looking seriously at ha at the time, but the ability to run Webcore on Hubitat, and transfer my 200 pistons of automation logic over, is why I went Hubitat.
I think next step for me will be to add Zigbee to HA, as I think back now to some devices I skipped over because I couldn't find a community driver on Hubitat. I would just find a different device that did the same thing, that had a driver available, so it has not really limited me, but I like the idea of opening up options for future Zigbee devices.
Like others, I found that there were a couple devices or services I could use with home assistant but not Hubitat. And I found their dashboards with graphs to be easier to use.
Nothing wrong with using whichever tool works best for a given task.
With that kind of control over HA, I'm not sure why people are so happy that HA is open source. Most users are not contributing to source code, and I think the really scattered UI experience may be a result of things just getting patched-in by too many people over time.
The fact that community integrations go through HACS really got me, they sort-of gate them off so it isn't just easy to use them without doing installs first, and then I had to click so many warnings about using HACS and confirming I was OK with killing my system.
As someone who started writing HE apps last year, I can tell you that Hubitat has some really good error handling for the Groovy code! As I have been learning writing apps and drivers, I've cause so many exceptions when testing them and getting them working, and the errors were always caught and handled, with a good log entry for what I did wrong. I have not even locked up my hub, much less brick it.
Just an observation on the overall systems. I used to read how people bricked their HE hubs using community apps, but maybe HE has addressed that with better error handling now.
I use HA to actually interact with my devices via HA dashboards and for trends and stats. I use Hubitat for all automations - those things that happen without manual intervention.
I use HA for dashboards and for certain integrations that Hubitat doesn't have or fails at (hello, LIFX, looking at you here). Someone has written great HA integrations for my weather stations allowing me to pull via local API vs cloud (always a win), there's a great iC3 app that allows me to track Apple device presence better than anything else I've tried.
My system is a mix: Hubitat for the bulk of devices, HA for my iblinds and the aforementioned fillers, and MSR for my rules engine.
Another good reason for HA: You can add control/status of Nest Protect devices. Now Hubitat can alert me when the smoke alarm goes off or if CO levels are high, or use Hubitat to automate turning off the "Pathlight" feature which my mother in law hates when she stays over to watch the kids. yay!
I had an unused raspberry pi 4 I bought 4 ? yrs ago for some hobby work our club was doing. I pulled it out and added HA to it about 6 months ago. I use it - like others here - for integrating things HE can't do. In my case my roborock vacuum, my washer, dryer and smart oven, my TAPO cameras, my legacy Tuya WIFI switches, my Vizio TVs I use for monitors in my office, my direcTV units etc. The two in combo are a great one-two punch. I use Actiontiles for my dashboards so right now no interest in using HA for that.
I use HA with Hubitat to get several of my lights working with my Logitech Harmony remotes. I have 2 Harmony remotes that have home control/lighting buttons.
I use MakerAPI in Hubitat and the Hubitat HA integration (via HACS) to bring the lights I want to control into HA.
Once my Hubitat based lights are in HA, I use the Emulated HUE integration in HA to get my lights into my Harmony remotes. My Harmony remotes natively support HUE lights and Emulated HUE mimics a HUE hub. With this setup, I can press different buttons on each of my remotes to turn specific lights on/off or dim them. It also gives me the ability to have lights turn on/off, or dim when turning on the TV at night or when pausing or stopping a movie.
And remember..if you have Hue Lights and Hue hub, you can intergrate Hue with Harmony and control lights with those remote buttons. No need for Hubitat and no need for Home Assistant.
I wondered when someone would ask... I had TERRIBLE experience with iblinds and Hubitat. It felt like there was too much congestion or the lift was too big for Hubitat. Constant failures, delays, etc. It smoothed out with a Zwave stick and HA.
Mind you - still not perfect. iblinds still need some firmware help, IMO. I run 13 of them throughout the house.
