Migrating from Homeseer

Has anyone migrated to Hubitat from Homeseer, any tips?

I have not - but what kind of things are you concerned about / interested in? Maybe can at least point you in the right direction or answer some questions you might have.

edit: I came over from SmartThings years ago.. I currently am running 3 Hubitat hubs, a companion server (Raspberry PI) with Node-RED and Homebridge and have an instance of Home Assistant running for giggles and experimentation. Hubitat can connect to each one using various custom (and free!) apps/drivers.

Interesting, I’m sure all of my z-wave appliances will work with Hubitat. From what have seen I will need a second hub for my barn that covers the lower portion of my property. What do you use the pi for?

Multi-hub configurations work very well particularly for Z-Wave. Mine are divided up by protocol (Z-Wave/Zigbee/Network and cloud) right now but I have done it by location which is also great. It is definitely overkill to do it the way I've done things but I had the hubs onhand and figured why not? By location makes more sense ultimately.

To answer your question a while ago I started using Node-RED as my rules controller. I like the flexibility and control it gives me with the added bonus of reducing overhead on the hubs (less stuff running, less memory used etc). I run Node-RED, Homebridge on the PI (and also Wireguard)...

I will definitely have to look into that, thanks.

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If you need any help feel free to pm me and also check out the Node-RED threads here..

Also welcome!

One other thing - You can always share devices between hubs by using a built-in feature called HubMesh.

I was a Homeseer user back in the early 1.x days (and really enjoyed it). I was less enamored with their 2.x and 3.x versions although I kept some version of it running for non-critical things even as I transitioned to the ISY-99i and then ISY994, which I used for several years primarily because I found Homeseer unreliable (many lockups and reboots required) the more complex they made it. I switched to Hubitat from ISY and simultaneously abandoned Homeseer completely over a year ago and have been thrilled. I now have three HE devices at our home property three different buildings) and have yet to find a reason to mesh them. I have a fourth at my wife's shop a couple of miles away.

The biggest difference I think you'll find is that the Rules engine for Hubitat is less intuitive than the Homeseer Events system. I was almost always able to figure out how to create a new event in just a minute or two, to do whatever I wanted, while Rules just takes longer and is often not at all intuitive. Even with that relatively minor complaint, I find Hubitat has the reliability of the ISY (much better than Homeseer in my experience) combined with a much better user interface (Dashboards) than the ISY. The best of all worlds, overall.

So, spend time getting to know Rules (now 5.1) and I think you'll be very happy. BTW, I also find the community here to be much friendlier and more helpful than the community that has developed around those other systems. It's very much like the old Homeseer community, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I really hope it stays that way. Welcome, and best wishes for enjoying your new HE.

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Thank you for your thoughts, that’s exactly what I was looking for. I started out with Wink, it worked OK, but was very limited. That’s when I switched to HS3 then HS4. It worked great, but here lately it has become very unreliable and that’s why I’m changing to Hubitat. The one feature of HS4 that I never could get to operate reliably was geofencing. I had to use IFTTT for those functions. How is the geofencing reliability in Hubitat?

:+1:

I use Life360 for geofencing and it works very well. It has been much more reliable than Hubitat’s Mobile App for geofencing for our iPhones. YMMV, of course.

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I'm using WiFi connectivity through the Unifi node in NR. For now just care about home arrival/departure. This is working well for me.

I do have OwnTracks set up but have had some difficulties figuring out how to configure the android side of things. Never sure which mode to be in etc etc.. still playing around with it though.

I've nothing to contribute re geofencing as I live on a small island with four residents and have a 15-second commute to my office (I walk down the hill about 50 feet). I did set it up once to see if it would activate when I kayak around the far end of the island, and it worked just fine. I just couldn't figure out what to do with it. I suppose I could make it lock and unlock the doors to the house, but that would require me finding the keys to the place. When we have guests in the summer they often lock the guest house when leaving. We get a good laugh from that.

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It’s been some time since I’ve been around. I moved off of Hubitat due to all the sluggish issues with motion lighting.

I find HS4 to be way more reliable then Hubitat, and much faster.

However, this was a while ago. How has the product matured over the last year and a half? Has the bugs related to constant reboots due to slowness been fixed? Has the constant database corruption for no reason been fixed?

I’m not knocking Hubitat, but curios where things stand these days.

If you like HS4 better, stay there. I experienced none of the problems you describe with Hubitat, so have no way to make such a comparison.

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Huh.. You asked a similar question last February... maybe the answer is kind of the same? Some of us have not had those issues at all so kinda hard to answer..

Check out the release notes:

There has been steady improvements to everything including an update to the Z-Wave firmware which replaced the old buggy DB. Are there still issues? No doubt! Are they getting prioritized and fixed? As far as I know - yes.

Also I would agree with @Madcodger - if you are happy with HS and it continues to suit your needs I'm not sure why you'd want to change? I'm sure HS has seen similar improvements over that time as well.

You might also want to check out Home Assistant - some members here run it in conjunction with HE and there are some nice community integrations available.

In my case I use Node-RED for my rules - I prefer the visual flow paradigm, flexibility and resource offloading it provides at the cost of added complexity of course. Even so HE continues to be the device controller/hub to beat imho.

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Okay? So it's been almost a year.

Just checking in on the status.

Why am I interested, because I enjoyed creating drivers and apps under this platform and was hoping in time things have become better.

I do run complex rules, well apparently, but I don't think so.

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I apologize - meant no offense! Checking back on the status is perfectly fine though the answer is still kind of the same. Yes there has been improvements but that is certainly true of most active systems out there.

You had some issues with motion lighting and you want to know if those kinds issues have been resolved/improved? Maybe?

correction - need coffee apparently. There was a Z-Wave firmware update that supposedly resolved some of the more cantankerous db issues. There is some other contention issue that Silicon Labs has yet to or maybe recently addressed but that affects all of their 700 series radios I think.

If you have a UZB-7 stick there is a firmware update available:

here is an explanation of the issues taken from the above thread.

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My issues were not z-wave related, but just the hub itself receiving and initiating motion lighting. I found most motion lighting events tooks a couple seconds where as Homeseer on a dedicated pc could fire these off a lot faster.

Lastly, the odd database corruptions, and constant need for daily reboots drove me away from the system.

That, and frustration with the staff....

Yeah that sucks to be sure. As I mentioned I use Node-RED and therefore the Maker API - motion events take no time at all, less than a second... I wonder if you tried the same in HS with the HE plugin?

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