I connect Hubitat and home assistant and love it. You get the pros of both worlds and minimize the cons of both.
The biggest con is not being compatible with all Ikea devices. However super cheap Iris v1 devices is very nice. Home assistant with deCONZ, ZHA or Z2m, does not support Iris v1. They started to explore it than just gave up.
If you don't use Hubitat, avoid that zwave/zigbee combo Nortek stick. I have it and every time I dust it off and tried ZHA. I am affirmed on how much better Hubitat is. ZHA is just missing so much in terms of their quirks and it couldn't handle my smartthings button. It kept having problems with registering the difference between press and double press.
I, recently, just tried ZHA with a Ikea remote. Nothing else connected just the remote and it would drop after a few hours.
I don't know about deCONZ or Z2m. I'm wanting to test them for fun sometime.
I agree that a system built upon open source technologies does lack the spirit of the concept and that is disappointing.
On the other hand it's hard to imagine HE being able to survive long term if the code was available, likely they'd be spending valuable time and resources dealing with a whole bunch of forks and competing devices - not saying it can't work just that it's another layer of difficulty.
A fundamental difference with ST though is even if the company changes direction you can retain your functionality for as long as you want. You do not have to upgrade, you don't need the internet beyond the initial installation and you can write your own apps/drivers for non supported devices etc. Your hub should last as long as it can hold up physically.
I think the advantage over HA is it provides a quicker path to get things running and things are maybe a bit more straightforward in terms of basic rules etc. HA is really nice because of all the things you can do with it but it is also that much more overwhelming (potentially).
I appreciate sharing your experience with this! It greatly helps me in making my decision.
I purchased a separate Aeotech Z-Stick Gen 5 to use with ZWave and that has been working good so far, and I have a cheap ZHA stick coming from AliExpress. I don't have the highest hopes for that, though - especially after seeing your experience.
However, I am the type of person who would want to further develop that plugin if I found issues with it, which is part of the appeal of Home Assistant to me. I just realized there was a LOT more work to be done on the SmartThings side to support the ecosystem I have. I was really pushing the limits of what WebCore could do.
I assume deCONZ or Z2m are different Zigbee plugins for Home Assistant?
It's definitely a different mentality. To me, Hubitat appears to be a great platform focusing on local networks and privacy, which are good things. It's definitely an improvement over the SmartThings platform in many ways that I can tell.
SmartThings, in my experience, works quite well for ZWave and Zigbee devices. Really haven't had much of an issue there. However, when it comes to integrating other devices and frameworks, it's quite lacking. There isn't as much of a developer base behind SmartThings so most of these things are just unsupported.
It's a bit of a personal preference for me as well, with HA being Python, and ST being Java. What language is used for Hubitat development?
I could see Hubitat being the ZWave/Zigbee hub for my local automation, as it seems like that is something that other people here are doing and it's working well for them. Considering the price is around $75 for both ZWave and Zigbee with a Hubitat hub, it seems like a solid value proposition.
Like SmartThings HE uses Groovy for Apps and Rules. Very similar to javascript. Also (like HA) you will never have cloud outages that impact the functioning of your local devices which is nice.
You can do a lot of stuff externally with HE - using async http calls and the maker api. Also WebCoRE has been ported over as well (though HE won't support it).
For me HE was more of a pragmatic choice - I wanted to make the change but HA at the time was not as mature and it was a quick way of changing things over while keeping a lot of compatibility.
Also have you seen @srwhite's HubConnect? It can share devices between ST and HE (and also HE & HE) .. you can use that to transition devices over OR keep certain cloud compatible services on ST for ease of use. very nice work.
deConz is the home automation software for the Razberry (Raspberry PI Z-Wave daughterboard) and Conbee (USB Z-Wave stick) interfaces, made by Dresden Electronics in Germany.
Z2m is an abbreviation of Zigbee2mqtt, which is firmware for the cc253x zigbee development boards which allows the board to attach zigbee devices to a mqtt client.
I think the overtone you will hear I would summarize as;
This community is AWESOME.
The platform is awesome, specially running things locally with decent cloud options
Everything runs on your Hub device, so from a complexity, number of devices stand-point, keep that in mind. I know many power users have multiple HE hubs (or pair it to ST or HA). That is the pro/con of local survivability. I have roughly 100 devices connected to it, and many community apps, and am purring along just fine. But I'm probably at my upper bound for a single hub carrying that load, but I also expect that as it's a cheap and small hub running everything local!
I love HE, its super flexible, wicked fast, very programmable, tons of great community apps, and this community is incredibly active.
That is what brought me to HE, and has kept me super happy here. But I can't stress enough that you need to take into consideration that EVERYTHING is running on this tiny (awesome) piece of hardware you are buying for pretty cheap, there isn't any off device processing happening (outside of your cloud apps, tools, etc.). And for those who use more than one hub (I'm not there yet) there is an awesome way to connect your HE to another HE or ST.
