It was pointed out I had taken another topic off course by asking this, so creating a new topic.
Another newbie question (I found this community because of the MyQ debacle.) Beside keeping things local (and not in the cloud) what do persons find is the biggest advantage of using the HE? (For instance, the use of MyQ Lite or SimpleCommands or IFTTT or even Siri Shortcuts work well albeit they are not local.
For me that is the biggest reason.
When I first got HE (C3 hub from an ST hub) I configured curtains to open/close and lights to turn on/off whilst away.
When away my internet died.
I had no more remote access to hub to look at dashboards etc. to confirm things were working OK.
Everything carried on working. (I confirmed this by looking at logs and events on my return).
If this was all configured using cloud based integrations (ST, IFTTT) nothing would have continued working.
For me this proves that local processing is a MUST.
I concur with what @bobbles said. Local control makes certain types of automation possible that are tedious when there is a cloud involved. Let me give you an example of several that all involve the act of watching TV:
When I turn the TV on, depending on the time of day, the lights in my living room immediately change to a low CT (2200K) and dim. Other lights in the vicinity (my hallway, my kitchen) automatically turn off. Concurrently, bias lighting behind my TV turns on at gets set to 6500K. The intensity of bias lighting and its CT are also dependent on the ambient lighting in the room. All this happens within 1 second.
While anyone is watching TV, all motion-activated lighting around my living room (kitchen, hallway) is either paused or comes on at a much lower intensity.
When I pause the TV (but it is still on), living room lighting automatically brightens, and my motion activated lighting comes on at full intensity.
When I turn off my TV, all my lights return to the state they were in before the TV is turned on.
If the AC or heat turn on while I am watching TV, the volume on the Sonos PlayBar attached to the TV automatically raises by 5, and then is automatically decreased to its previous value when the AC or heat turn off. Again, all this happens within a second.
These automations are just one tiny example from my house of why local control makes such a big difference.
WAF/SAF is one of the strongest reasons for me. When I was using a cloud based platform minimizing/scheduling service interruptions to when the wife wouldn't notice was impossible - the cloud platform would force updates whenever it chose to, internet connection would drop or degrade and actions would either not work or be so delayed that they caused more aggravation than if they hadn't worked. All of this comes back on "technical support" as bad karma.
By taking the external entities out of the equation and keeping things local, I can upgrade (or not) when it's most convenient for my household, and all of my critical and common automations work when the internet is having issues. May not have Alexa available to start an ad hoc automation, but everything else just works and the wife is happy.
I suppose my home is not yet quite so automated. I have a few lights that come on in the morning, go off later in the morning or early evening. Then some other stuff that uses sunrise/sunset automations. But, for me, one of the biggies is MyQ opening the garage when I'm coming home. I never use it to close the garage, but I suppose with notifications from the MyQ app I could feel more comfortable about that. I always have the old, standby MyQ device in the car, just in case. All that said about MyQ and garage, when things break, as they have four times in the last two years, local control seems to still be dominated by being able to use the MyQ API, and that is what has broken, and possibly will continue to do so moving forward. If my GD Opener wasn't one from Liftmaster with MyQ integrated, I would throw the darn thing out and switch to a plain ol' opener with Meross integration. I'll keep reading in this community. Perhaps the HE will be a solution for me.
Ownership of my data, devices, and activities. I don't have to worry that someone is logging everything I do and selling that data. And who knows what privacy polices are really in place.
Availability, every week there was a problem with the SmartThings platform. The more complex the machine to more difficult it is to maintain. Staying local simplified the machine.
Zero lock into any cloud vendors ecosystem, look how many times Google has taken things off the market or closed out integrations. If HE goes the hardware will still work.
You still have to choose devices wisely, I do have cloud for my thermostat integration due to Ecobee only allow Apple's home kit direct access and my weather station which support local access but only "streaming" of data and Hubitat doesn't support that so I have to pull via API. But if either of these two integration fail my lights and most of my critical automations will continue to work.
I mainly switched because I wanted local control, I also didn't like where ST was going. In practice, however, most everything we really use is going to stop working when the internet goes out. Me and my wife both mostly use voice commands, my wife more so than me. I'm not really that big on things turning on or opening automatically, I would prefer to do that myself.
My automations are mainly to make sure things are turned off or closed if we forget. Most of that is going to work internet or not. IMO, those are the more important automations, anyway.
@dreh.att For me it's I don't like interacting with anything, I just want it to work and work reliably. I don't like relying on my isp (Comcast, which is crap in my area) or someone else's servers (look at what just happened with myq). I don't like my data going out to someone else either. Things like Google/alexa should be secondary controllers whereas everything else just works abd works fast. As stated above I didn't even think about the updates at inopportune times. I've come home to no internet but all my automation makes are just churning along like it don't care.
local control gives faster response time. for instance, i was using a wyze sensor via ifttt to trigger a virtual switch in HE. it took about 30-40 seconds to respond. after using a community app, that response time is almost instant
The other aspects are longevity and control - The hub not having any real internet requirement becomes more like a household appliance and can last as long as the hardware holds out..
You won't be at the mercy of companies that drop services (or start/increase subscription fees) and force an otherwise perfectly functioning devices offline. Even IF Hubitat, Inc. changes focus etc.. it will NOT matter to your setup unless you want it to.
edit: a THIRD aspect is privacy. No data collection etc etc..
edit2: I see @ronv42 already covered some of this!!! Great Minds!!!
I switched because of reliable local automation control. I wanted my wife to stop asking me why the motion controlled lights didn't go on when she entered the hallway, only for my investigation to discover it was because ST had yet another cloud processing outage (due to some botched deployment or update or just play unreliable system).
Something someone changes somewhere else shouldn't cause my automation to fail.
I hear you!!! That was what caused me to jump ship from ST originally - lots of promises of local processing but the frequency of the outages seemed to increase. ST could do a lot of cool stuff but was so reliant on the cloud and now we see how that impacts things now that Samsung is giving up.
ST's new "Edge" local processing promises many of these benefits. ST has promised so much and delivered/executed so poorly over the years that I highly doubt their ability to build a whole new system in a way that will work reliably, initially or in the future. And I don't think their corporate structure (Samsung) and current development approach (UI team in Korea) will aid in making a good system built for the users.
For right now, this would be my end all be-all decision maker: With MyQ having changed the API to use Oauth 2 + PKCE, will the HE STILL control the MyQ would I have to wait until MyQ Lite is updated for that?
SmartThings sucked and was glitchy all the time and then shut down requiring me to buy a new hub. So thank goodness I stumbled upon Hubitat. Also Iām not sucking up my WiFi bandwidth using zigbee and zwave.
Oh and customer service... Should I mention that? I drop a message here, support email, or FB and @bobbyd , or Mike Maxwell, or Gopher or Bruce jumps in, has a solution at the ready (once they have all the info) and makes sure their end user is taken care of. Try getting that from anywhere else... It won't happen.
His name is Victor 
.
Hubitat will ALWAYS work if you invest in a z-wave or zigbee relay and a contact/tilt sensor. It'll work whether Chamberlain changes their API ten times over, and irrespective of whether you have internet access.
Look - that's the point of local control. I don't want my house to be cloud dependent. I don't want my data to be in the hands of Google/Amazon. I want things to work reliably and work fast. I don't want to deal with third-party changes that occur without my consent/knowledge.
Yeah I know but I tend to type display names 
Ditch the myq.... zen-16 + Liftmaster drycontact to security 2.0 button + tiltsensorm and it will all work along side your oem controls and be %100 local
Download the Hubitat app
