I currently have 2 Smartthings V2 hubs that I manage using 2 different locations.
We are building a new house, and I thought I still needed 2 hubs as the shop and house are seperate and I think the distance is too far to bridge for Zwave signals.
I was dissatisfied with the way ST worked with 2 different locations, as it was always a pain to have to switch views in the app!
So I bought a couple HE C8 hubs for the new property, as I was excited about the HE hub mesh feature, as I thought that would solve my problem.
However, I am quite disappointed with the lack of HE support for WiFi devices. Top Tier vendors like Kasa/Tapo, Shelly, and Sunoff seem to have clumsy support, especially given their popularity.
The HE app seems to be weaker than the ST app, and the hub mesh is also kind of a pain...
Now I see that ST actually does have the ability to manage more than 1 hub in a location, so I wouldn't have the hassle of switching between locations to get to all my devices.
So now the question is...What's the value in sticking with HE? With ST, it has fantastic support for pretty much every major manufacturer.
I'm an extreme techy by day, but when I come home, I just want my stuff to work, and not have to futz with it. HE seems to have a much higher futz factor than ST.
My personal opinion. I don't think wifi devices that are directly supported are clumsy at all. They do what they're supposed to. They are also supported 100% locally while a lot of the wifi stuff on ST is cloud based. Hubitat really isn't interested in supporting cloud based devices. They leave that to the community.
I have 4 hubs on my property, should be down to three shortly. I have a C7 hub that has most all my rules and any cloud devices. I have a C8 that connects to most of my home Z-wave and Zigbee devices, a few zigbee devices are still on a another C7 hub. I keep these going because I have a couple Iris V1 sensors and they won't work on a C8, but I should have those removed soon. I control all hubs through HUB mesh and one instance on my app. Although I mostly use the web interface. All automattions are automatic or voice commands.
I can't really speak to how it's better than ST as I haven't used it in over 3 years. The main reason I switched was because when I moved to this property I had the same issue you mention. I wanted control of my shop which is over 200' behind my house and there was no easy way to control two separate hubs with ST, which I was using at the time.
I heard about HE and, although this was before Hub Mesh, they had a user contributed app that let you tie hubs together basically as Hub mesh does now.
For me the only challenge was getting my network connection to the shop. Which I did via WIFI. I use CPE devices and I get a solid internet connection. I have a separate hub as an AP which sets up a another wifi network for my shop and the C5 hub I have in the shop ties seamlessly into my C7s and C8 at the house.
When I left it was local but only for their own drivers. If you had any custom code it went to the cloud. That was a few years ago mind it may have changed again.
The loss of webcore with Smartthings was the death knell for me. The transition to HE (and webcore) was almost painless after that, and I will never return to Smartthings.
Why not fire up the 2 ST hubs and decide it for yourself?
I have ST,HE and HA at various locations. There is no perfect system and the only way to find out is to test them yourself. You might even ended up using both.
I left ST 7 years ago, being an early adopter of ST before Samsung slowly destroyed their product and very talented engineers departed. I developed many user apps for ST and eventually ST killed their UI. I switched to HE, easily ported my user applications, developed new ones, and never have looked back at this decision to depart ST. IMHO HE is heads and shoulders above ST.
If HE has some deficiencies compared to ST, it is very unique, and trust me, Samsung is not "all in" for the Home Automations market except for their own products.
I switched most of my devices and apps from ST to HE about 20 months ago. The only item left on ST is my Samsung TV which I don't think HE can control. I have been very happy with the HE C8 hub and have been able to do more things on HE than were possible on ST. I have used community posts to help solve any issues I had encountered when either setting up devices or apps.
I had never really needed any support until this week when I found a Rule Machine app was not working with Firmware 2.3.9 and found out Hubitat does not have support other than the community and so far after 3 days I have had zero responses. I have downgraded my HE Firmware back to 2.3.8 and the RM app is now working again. I understand your concern about support and think 2.3.9 still has many bugs looking at the recent posts. Despite not having support from Hubitat, I still feel it was better to move from ST to HE.
Actually Hubitat staff are very active in the community, and there are avenues (Warranty Claims, etc) to directly interact if necessary. Many times the answer to an issue is already known by the community and it gets handled before HE staff see the thread, but they are always around when needed.
I only see one thread (Rule Machine Track Dimmer is not working in Version 2.3.9.166) from you and in it you said that you had rolled back to a previous version and fixed it. Likely it was read and skipped over because you were no longer asking for assistance on the issue.
Some time later, imo samsung slowly shagged it. I was fuming.
I appreciate however that Hubitat can be a little techy. You've advised you wished for a more click-and-forget it. So perhaps you're better off with ST for those reasons.
Due to past experience, I couldn't and wouldn't recommend ST to anyone, for any reason. If you put in a little effort, hubitat is unbeatable IMO.
I ditched ST in 2017 shortly after they dropped their support for windows phone (even though they had said they never would) and they were having all kind of issues keeping their servers up and running. When I First started connecting multiple hubs, I used hub connect. and that works fine(its still in development and supported by the developer). It was a bit overly complicated for me, but the developer is great about helping out. I just found hub mesh to be extremely easy to use instead.
The HE app is definitely weaker (yes even the latest version), but i really find I don't NEED the app except to add Zwave devices.
You clearly haven't invested much time in setting up your hubs. hub mesh is actually quite easy to set up, can you elaborate how it's a pain? You click hub mesh in the actual device, then go to the other hub, Go to Settings>Hub Mesh>Linked Devices and click the plus sign in front of the device. Pretty simple stuff. The only thing I add, is take the "on_Hub Name" off the end and replace it with a lock emoji, just so I know immediately it's a meshed devices and the actual device is on another hub and its aesthetically much cleaner to look at, but this step is purely optional.
I use ST in production with multiple V2 hubs in a location.
Most routines run locally on the hub now, as part of the switch from the cloud based Groovy implementation to a local lua one (branded as Edge.). I use Zwave, Zigbee 1.2/3.0 and wifi devices with it.
The mobile app has it's pros and cons.
Edge has been very stable for me and has a high WAF.
If you want to run both ST and HE for either a conversion or even long term, you could look at HubiThings Replica or Mira to provide a gateway between the two platforms. (Note: I'm the developer of Mira, shameless plug)
Then why don't they work very well? I see lots of complaints that Kasa devices aren't always working properly, or they aren't adding properly.
There apparently isn't any support yet for the lateest generation of Shelly WiFi devices.
Sunoff has a local API, but no support....
I'd rather have rock solid cloud functionality than flakey Edge support.
People keep touting "But But But what if the cloud goes down?" I can't remember the last time I clicked on a Kasa device and it didn't work, both through Smartthings or the Kasa app.
If you are building a new house WiFi switches would be the last on the list of my preferred alternatives. Any of Lutron, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter over Thread would be far higher. If WiFi is required then Matter over WiFi would be my preferred option.
That’s great news. But not everyone has as stable an internet connection.
And many people feel that forcing a cloud dependency into basic lighting controls, particularly with other great options available as @bill.d mentioned, is simply not a good idea.
