Just a sanity check here. got the email from ST saying they were changing something called groovy which i thin is a programing language but no real idea. Anyway if my ST is going away i"ll be moving to HE. The question is do I really need to or not? I have a small system mostly for lighting control nowhere near what most of you guys have. Since my house is older and has no 3rd wire, I have just done everything with bulbs here's my setup: 2 zwave bulbs, a mix of types of zigbee bulbs(12), 3 zigbee ge door sensors, and 1 GE TAPT switch for the front porch also 2 zigbee sylvania wall plugs/repeaters (each one about 50 ft from the hub location(pretty much dead center of house)) So are ST changes gonna screw me over like wink did? or or will I get lucky and everything stays happy. No fancy specialized apps but i do have a harmony hub and alexa I can add to the mix. Some idea of my experience--old retired network IT guy, bought wink the first chance I had then switched to ST when wink wanted to charge me. my little network stays up 99.9 percent of the time so no issues. But then I'm kinda hey lets spend bucks and start over just for fun. After I get the WAF satisfied. . Hate to wait till the last min so $100 now may save me a couple of weeks headaches later. All opinions gratefully accepted. Not a fanboy of any particular system. And what the heck is Groovy? Kinda like LUA (have used that for some fancy macros in the gaming area.
If it helps to know, you and I could be twins, and so could our home setups. Except I came over to Hubitat from a ship that had sunk even deeper (thigh deep, one might say), called Vera (now Ezloâ„¢).
To put things in perspective...
- THE MOVE AWAY FROM VERA – onto an intermediate logic platform (known as Multi-System Reactor), leaving the old hub to act as just a Z-Wave Radio – TOOK ME 10 MONTHS!
- THE MOVE TO HUBITAT – swapping over devices, setting up rules/scenes/apps – TOOK ME LESS THAN A WEEK!
In other words, it was the best $125 I ever spent, and I've never been happier to decommission a (somewhat still-working, but antiquated) home automation product as I was with that Vera Plus hub.
Once on Hubitat, everything became so butter smooth, even the Exclusion and Inclusion functions (yes, I used HE to help me sever hardware ties with the ol' Vera). One by one, device by device, I got each switch and bulb and plug-in dimmer transferred over.
From there, the world has been my oyster. Want Alexa integration? Cake. IFTTT? Simple. Ecobee? Done. Tuya/SmartLife? Harder, but doable! Roku? Sonos? Child's play.
All things that my aging Vera hub either could not accomplish at all, or required a hope-and-a-prayer using some long-abandoned 3rd party plug-in that lacked half the features I wanted/needed.
Hubitat is evolving quickly, and it's not uncommon to see User Feature Requests acknowledged and sometimes even implemented the same day!!
We welcome you over here. I say don't wait...
- Libra
I would go on the SmartThings forum and determine if there are new edge drivers for your devices. If there are, then it might be simpler to stay with ST.
If these are the devices you have, you're likely going to be okay with the transition to Edge. The stock drivers will most likely cover everything. The GE Quirky TAPT switch might be an issue, I'm not sure off hand.
The bigger issue is the automation logic itself. Those that used webCoRE (a Groovy based smartapp) to create rules and logic are best served under a platform that can run webCoRE (like Hubitat). If you use the Smart Lighting smartapp, the replacement there is Routines and the Rules API, you'll need to see what logic you have.
The cloud integrations (Alexa, wifi devices, etc) aren't going to be that affected (there are caveats of course).
HE is a great option and you may consider migrating away from ST. Each person's configuration and needs are different.
My personal choice is that I run both ST and HE. I'm going to stick with ST thru the Edge transition as it may serve my needs, some of that is still to be seen. Other folks are flipping the table and switching to HE or Home Assistant immediately.
I think they are going to migrate Smart Lighting now. No need to redo this rules with routines or Rules API. Things seem to be very "fluid" over there.
Groovy is the development platform that SmartThings used since their beginning. It's Java based, with very fast execution. If you ever copied and pasted code in SmartThings ide interface, then those apps will stop working, and also some of their custom drivers called DTH. They are changing to LUA because it is light-weight, although less capable than Groovy, but easier to deploy and control for cloud based environments. Hubitat's development platform uses Groovy, but unlike SmartThings, it doesn't run in the cloud, but instead, it runs local, on every hub, so scalability is not an issue.
I too started my smart home journey with Wink, many years ago, then moved to SmartThings and came to Hubitat 6 years ago an never looked back.
I know so few programmers / app devs who've worked in both Lua and Groovy, that it warrants me posting links to their respective Wikipedia entries for comparison:
LUA – Lua (programming language) - Wikipedia
GROOVY – Apache Groovy - Wikipedia
As a layperson, I need to bring myself up to speed on their (many) differences.
After being a SmartThings user for more than 7 years, I started moving from SmartThings to Hubitat 3 weeks ago and my ST hub is now back in its original box and sitting on a shelf in my basement.
There are things I really like about HE and things I don’t like at all. If you or your wife use the ST iOS app, you should know the HE iOS app is nowhere near as polished or as capable. SMS messaging is also lost in HE unless you want to use a 3rd-party app. I moved solely because I’ve built an entire ecosystem around webCoRE and there is no replacement for it after Samsung kills Groovy. The move from ST to HE wasn’t terribly difficult but it was very time consuming and I feel I’ve lost some of the things I really liked about SmartThings.
That said, if you don’t have the need for complex automations or SmartApps and the new ST platform will support your needs, you may want to stay put.
I belive that non-US Smartthings users don't benefit from a SMS service either, and the US customers have a limit on how many messages can send per day. Hubitat decided that discriminating customers was not a fair practice to our worldwide users. As you mentioned, we do offer Twillio integration that allows all customers to send SMS messages.
Correct. One of the main reasons I purchased smartthings originally was due to the advertised sms feature.
Not long after purchase they removed this for us here in the UK.
Fuming.
Roll on a year or two and that platform became so poor I invested in hubitat (c7). Never looked back.
I rely on an android phone with a payg sim (£10 / 90 days) for smart texting. (Easy SMS Send)
I also run ST as well. From what I read, devices that have edge drivers(appears to be almost all your devices) will automatically be switched over, so you don't need to worry. All my ST devices will be fine, except for my Halo+ Smoke/CO/Weather alarms And apparently ST claims many devices will be local & fast(although they've been promising this forEVER)
The key aspect is IF you loaded custom drivers in ST, then is is possible those devices might not be switched over automatically.
I found the below very helpful.
Sharptools includes SMS messages as a feature and it works well for me - as does the rest of Sharptools. For me, Sharptools is the best way to make Dashboards.
Fair criticism, but if SmartThings had spent more time working on their local DTH and SmartApp functionality, rather than polishing the cloud-dependent mobile app interface and optimizing how they send consumer data to their corporate overlords at Samsung, many of us might not have switched to Hubitat years ago 
.
I too have been using Pushover since the inception of my HE use and love it. I am looking forward to being able to keep my Echo Speaks implementations working (pending either @tonesto7 reworking it to work without Heroku or implementation with a RPi).
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