Spent my New Year weekend moving my devices and pistons from SmartThings to my Hubitat Elevate.
I wanted to check if I needed the Remote Admin subscription in order to use my phone as a presence sensor and to receive push notifications. I have the Hubitat app installed on my Android 13 phone.
Specifically:
I have pistons that trigger when my phone leaves my geofence and changes my presence to Away
Want to be able to receive push notifications on my phone for certain events I have defined in my pistons when I'm not on my home LAN.
All the features you mentioned come free with your Hubitat Elevation hub. The Remote Admin is needed if you want to install a new app while you are not at home, for example.
Check this post for more details on Hubitat solutions:
Be aware that Hubitat has a split conceptually between "Administrator" and "User".. without actually naming them or making the split dead obvious.
But it's a difference from SmartThings, for sure. Anyone with the ST App on their device could decide to delete devices, for example. You spend all that time joining a device, adding it to Automations and any 3 year old can leave Netflix on Mom's phone and start deleting devices after stumbling into the ST app.
The Hubitat App and Dashboards are for controlling devices and automations without the ability to add and delete devices. To me, it's a huge advantage. If the admin of your Home Automation system want's "away from home" access to browse around the Hubitat GUi and build out a new automation, then you need a mechanism to have your mobile device to get back onto your home's network. A large number of us have our own VPN-to-home all worked out and don't need any help with it. For those that do, then Remote Admin gets to the goal.
