A little back ground about my gear. I have just been adding smart devices here and there and controlling with Alexa. TP-Link smart switches, Smart locks, Alarm-Com home security, Blink cameras, and a Honeywell thermostat. Some of these items I have made "smart by adding Alex skills but I most somewhat force to work, I never really understood that hub and a needed hub protocol is needed to really unify these items.
I need the good people here to let me know if this hub and its software can better unify my hardware with voice commands. I want to tell Alex "Lock the house for the night" and have it turn on my Blink Cameras, lock the front door and tell alarm-com to arm. How possible is this with Hubitat and what limits will I still have given my mix of hardware.
First rule of home automation: There is usually not a "one hub" solution when you are mixing different products.
With what you described, you could use Hubitat in tandem with Alexa, but you'll still need various skills in Alexa to make them work. So, you could add your lock and switches to Hubitat, but your Blink cameras aren't compatible. Alarm-com can also be added, but AFAIK, there hasn't been a port of the ST app that linked alarm.com and HE together. It can be done, there just needs some coding work to make it happen. However, given that Alexa supports skills and custom routines, you can add Hubitat to your environment and start to build off of it and then add devices into your HE environment.
By adding Hubitat to your current environment, it isn't going to do much to improve what you already have, but it would allow you to add a broader range of devices going forward.
For the devices that you are able to add to HE, it will make creating certain routines much easier. For example, you could create a virtual switch in HE that would trigger several devices to turn off/locked/armed/whatever. Then, create a routine in Alexa to flip that virtual switch.
So for example, "Alexa, lock the house for the night" -> Alexa turns on Virtual Switch -> VS triggers the camera, lock, and alarm system. From there you could have those systems automatically turn off at a certain time in the morning, or turn off when you flip your bathroom light in the morning, or by saying "Alexa, good morning" (or whatever phrase to trigger the VS off).
The current limitation would be which devices are supported by HE.
Hubitat works best with Z-Wave and Zigbee devices.
It's really great for those.
For WiFi devices... Not so much...
And that's because they're not officially supported.
Most of the drivers are ported from SmartThings which can cause a lot of problems in Hubitat.
Running the TP-Link (Kasa) driver I noticed major slowdown issues.
Same with the Belkin Wemo integration.
But as I said they are ported from SmartThings so they're really not made to work with Hubitat. Yet.
I have a few so I'm hoping one day, until then I'll keep them connected through IFTTTT
I think where hubs like Hubitat and SmartThings add value to the mix is by creating an integration point for the devices that use the low power local radio signalling of Zigbee and Z-Wave. If you are not using those devices I'm not sure how much value it brings.
I have to agree with Bill that there probably isn't a "One Hub" solution. Not that I have seen yet.
Let's just say that the wife wanted to check them out and it was either me letting them quote us or risk a REALLY low WAF... I let them quote us. I nearly died laughing when the guy gave me his quote.
