I have been reviewing the many options for integration of my different smart home devices into Apple HomeKit. Currently I have Hue lights, Ecobee thermostat, Arlo cameras, MyQ garage door opener, August door lock and Nest doorbell (soon to be replaced with Ubiquiti doorbell). I will be getting IKEA motorized shades to add to my smarthome.
I've become very interested in Hubitat and wonder if it will fit my needs to integrate everything into Homekit. Home Assistant seems a bit too "involved". Any thoughts, suggestion or opinions to help my decision would be appreciated.
I’ve been very happy with my purchase of Hubitat. It is a great true automation solution and the HomeKit integration has been working very well for me.
As with most solutions, it requires some time to initially set everything up, but there is great support from a very active community if/when you get stuck.
The community also provides a lot if integrations, custom apps and drivers which makes it a very versatile solution.
I have not tried using Home Assistant, so will let others comment on how it compares.
While Home Assistant is indeed "involved", it's not actually that hard once you are used to it. However, I rely on Hubitat for my automations, as it is far easier to create complex automations with Hubitat than with Home Assistant.
For integrating HomeKit only devices, I would lean towards HA, but for bringing non-HomeKit devices into HomeKit, I prefer Hubitat with Homebridge since its device support is very broad and not limited to only the devices and features Apple allows.
Last time I looked at using Homebridge with HA, I couldn't find an integration. I'm sure this is because HA has a built-in HomeKit integration, as well as a HomeKit Controller integration (turns HA into a sudo HomeKit hub, but without the secure remote HomeKit control that an offical Apple HomeKit hub offers). However, there's a catch for Home Assistant's HomeKit integration that I really dislike. Unlike Homebridge, you cannot choose which devices on HA you want to expose to HomeKit. It's all or nothing. So if you use the HA HomeKit integration, your HomeKit Home app becomes a mess of devices you might not nessecarily want exposed to HomeKit.
But there's a place for both of these hubs. I use the HomeKit Controller on Home Assistant to bring my Aqara FP2 into Hubitat by way of the Home Assistant Device Bridge integration, and I also bring in Aqara, Mijia and IKEA Zigbee devices into Hubitat via HADB since they're extrememly stable on HA. With the exception of a few other cloud integraitons, everything else I own is joined directly to Hubitat, or connected via some other bridge integrated into Hubitat. I've got better things to do with my spare time, and I don't like having to struggle to integrate anything. Having both Hubitat and Home Assistant affords me the ease of integrating just about anything I want, with very little effort.
I use Apple HomeKit primarily for a simple, native user interface on my iPhone and iPad. I personally use the native Apple HomeKit integration provided by my Philips Hue bridge, my Lutron Caseta Smartbridge Pro2, and my Ecobee Thermostats. So, those are simple for you as well.
Hubitat's built-in HomeKit integration is great for bringing in Switches, Dimmers, Contact Sensors, Motion Sensors, Leak Sensors, etc... into HomeKit. Hubitat's built-in HomeKit integration will not expose Door Locks or Garage Door openers. You can use Homebridge to help bring those devices into HomeKit, as has been mentioned earlier.
As for the Ubiquiti UniFi Doorbell, I have one of those as well, along with 4-5 other UniFi Protect cameras. I use Scrypted on a Raspberry Pi to bring those cameras into Apple HomeKit. It works really, really well.
