It't not clear to me whether the internal drivers they write are groovy or java and complied in, have a suspicion they reason the are closed source is that they are not groovy.
I have done the gambit from openhab, hass, pimatic, wink, smartthings, and now hubitat. I am getting a bit annoyed by we are not big enough answer, and their zigbee implmenation is so/so - I never had any problems with zigbee devices either on ST or Wink, did have problems with their cloud going out to lunch. I find HE zigbee to be pretty bad, and am keeping most bulbs on the hue hub. I had a fine mesh for years and with HE I had to put in extra repeaters, even then I constantly miss motion sensors and the delays seem be be longer for turning on lights on motion detectors in all zigbee then when I was doing hacked up X-10 drivers with ST on the cloud.
Also not a big fan on RM - I have a handful for rules and its taken more than an hour to just "code" a simple dimming rule for a button press like so -
Why cant I just use a scripting language like almost any other HA system.
The Pros for me are
- Local Control
- Packaged commercial stuff so for 90% of the things just work for basics
- Zwave and Zigbee Radios
- Maker API and websocket interface which gives abiltity to interface with other systems like nodered, Homebridge, influxdb etc.
Cons are:
- Increasingly getting opinionated about what they will support and what they won't
- Theri programming model doesn't really allow them to leverage the community as much as as ST did, they adopted a lot from ST but It seems like they have really cut off community from doing any real dev for Zigbee, unlike ST. Now I haven't delved into custom zigbee drivers much so just saying it based on cursory perusal.
- The undocumented websocket interface hope its stick around and becomes official
- And the is the biggest gripe rule definition is horrendous, non-portable and tedious, if you lose or have to do a device lost a ton of hours of work will be lost.
For me I will stick with HE for now because I have a mix of Zwave and Zigbee and it does give me a unified interface for them under local control. However I need to "extend' it and I am really looking for an alternative to HE may be something node-red would help, not too sure about latencies that will come in the system. But I just dont have time to define the rules that I need to do my automations, and i am not talking about complex things a simple 4-5 condition if-then-else switch take forever to define.
However with all other things going on in their universe i dont know how much of this is on their list.
