It never ceases to amaze me that supposedly technical people who write these reviews can get things so wrong (and so obviously technically incorrect). Where did he get the idea that the hub has to be plugged directly into the router? And why would this ever be necessary?
Then there is the implication that it's more complex to setup because you have to use a web browser (there being no mobile app). That doesn't make it more complex, just different.
He points out the failure to connect to his Lutron Caseta (non-Pro model) hub but doesn't mention that this is an essential design choice in order to maintain local execution.
I usually like the writing on Tom's Guide but this review is pretty p!$$ poor (IMO).
Their reviews have seriously gone down hill over the years. If you don't have an expectation that the reviewer is actually technically competent then it's fine and just like any other click-bait worthy ad machine.
I thought this was funny too. The author recommends the hub for a more technically savvy user, like the kind that either already has switches or WiFi bridges on their LAN, or could easily add one.
The Apps menu is where most of the action happens; here, you pair your smart home devices with the Hubitat,
Uh...adding devices is really best done from the Devices page, not the Apps page, though you can get to the "Discover" page for Z-Wave and ZigBee from any page. No wonder he had problems. 
it could not find a Fibaro Z-wave smart plug; the Samsung SmartThings hub recognized the Fibaro plug almost instantly.
Who wants to be he originally had it paired to ST and didn't properly exclude it?
connecting smart home devices to the Hubitat isn't as simple as telling it to scan for new devices. First, you have to enable Apps within the Hubitat interface.
OK, this I can kind of see. It makes sense to me since I consider "devices" to be ZigBee and Z-Wave, protocols that he later notes the hub excels at. LAN devices generally require an app to get them set up. I guess I just "know" this and could see where a beginner would wonder where they need to go to do what, though they've made it clearer in recent versions that the device "discovery" page is just ZigBee and Z-Wave.
While he does mention that it keeps your automations running when the internet is down he doesn't mention that Smartthings outages aren't (or weren't) exactly infrequent even when the internet is working. This makes me think that he really doesn't use his Smartthings hub much at all, or has been phenomenally lucky.
For most smart home owners, it's enough to get the simpler and more user-friendly integrations that come with Samsung's SmartThings or even Amazon's Echo Plus
Dare I say it, none of those people are smart home owners. Yes, I dare 
Review rating: 1.5/5 - actually 1/5 since he didn't mention that the issues with the Nest integration are down to Nest being completely useless.
IMO, anyone who's deep into HA and knew nothing of HE would see some of the same things we saw in the review that made you want to slap the reviewer in the face with smartbulb (metaphorically of course). All publicity is good publicity.
IMHO, it was a good review because it shows to HE management that they have to "polish" their product.
Let me stress the fact that as we all know, HE has made incredible strides in just 1 year. The dedicated staff has overcome many obstacles to get to this stage where their product is being considered on the same level as the much older or greater backed competition.
In addition, I don't think that it would violate any design goal if they would:
a) put into the next version of their hub, a built in wifi chip to enable the HE to be "placed anywhere"
b) add the mobile app (which everyone knows they are working on)
c) add to the "built in" stable of apps a number of apps like the Cobra apps, or the ones from BPTWorld, etc. (these apps would add a degree of "polish" or "sophistication" or "ease of use" to the HE product)
These "small" design enhancements would neatly answer all of the reviewer's issues, and would really give HE the positive exposure that we all know that it deserves.
All in all, this is actually a fairly positive review.
Setting up these rules is more or less intuitive; each step is presented as a drop-down menu where you pick, for example, the device you want to control, the triggering event and what happens when the trigger is activated. It's far, far more than you could ever do with SmartThings.
This statement always surprises me.
For most smart home owners, it's enough to get the simpler and more user-friendly integrations that come with Samsung's SmartThings or even Amazon's Echo Plus
I have not used the new SmartThings hub or app, so maybe it's easy now? All of us that are used to an interface might declare it's intuitive, but I still don't think it is. Wink is somewhat intuitive. Hue is fairly intuitive. ST though, I don't personally think it's very intuitive. Then again, maybe he means the new stuff.
I think it’s a fair review. HE isn’t exactly a hub for the inexperienced as its user experience isn’t as polished as others, its appearance isnt’t as appealing, and it could be difficult to work with. However, it does have several key advantages, mainly being local control and the ability to build complex automations. Seemed like the overall message was pretty fair and accurate.
I think we need to consider what was the user type that the review was proxing? The begginer of average Joe? If so than is review is flawless. He was certainly not proxing any of the users that lurks here in the foruns.
That being said HE is not yet a HA product for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of polishing, but that takes time.
It will required a better user interface (let's get real on the app age nobody wants to use old webpages to do anything 
)
A better user Experience:
- Adding a device has to be seamless either is a WiFi, Z-Wave or ZigBee. For the user a device is a device not an app. A good example of the discovery process that the user expect us for example the discovery of Chromecast devices.
- Apps should be installed though a marketplace either HE or community based. The user should have not to go through foruns to discover and install drivers and apps. But let's be real not even ST has mastered this one.
- Failsafe, automatic backups would be ideally. Either to an SDcard or network location. Speaking of complete image not only DB. Supposedly you get this on ST but is internal only for ST support.
Just a few points
I beg to differ: this is much better than being forced to use a mobile app to set up automations. To ease porting from ST, Hubitat pretty much reverse-engineered most of the ST app runtime environment but made it web-based rather than app-based, and because they didn't make all the design choices for how the UI works, I do agree with what might be your general point that there are some less-than-desirable aspects to it.
I hope some day, they consider making a "v2" app environment that will free us from these limitations. I think they are quite apparent in Rule Machine (and to a certain extent anything with dynamic pages, especially if it looks like the whole thing reloads every time you make a change)--just try making a complex rule and see how awkward it is. I don't know what such an environment would look like, but as long as they keep the "classic" environment around to ease transition and porting (and keep existing apps), I imagine they could create something much better without the constraints imposed by the existing app model.
I think this would be great for new users. I see the reviewer's point, and ST is able to "discover" some LAN devices from the regular discovery screen, including Hue (I think via a UPnP lookup, which Hubitat could probably do too). I'm not sure what other devices would support this (Sonos, Lutron, etc.), but it might help eliminate some confusion. Or asking the user what type of device they're trying to add might help too (sort of like ST does while also allowing a generic Z-Wave and ZigBee pairing mode).
I think their real goal is to provide everything they think you'll need either with native apps or easily accomplished via Rule Machine. But I suspect that will never happen for many people, at least not those of who want everything super-customized (and don't want ten million rules). Also not sure of a good way to do this (ST's idea of users being able to submit apps for consideration into the "marketplace" never took off, as you note), but they've at least made custom app importing a bit easier with the ability to provide a URL for raw code.
In the meantime, several community attempts at organizing apps have sprung up--forum threads, a Wiki (my personal favorite), community GitHubs, even personal developer websites, and whatever else I might be missing. But if new users can't do most of what they want out of the box (and seek custom solutions later for oddly specific desires), I'm sure that's an issue they'd love to address.
Well, I'm pretty new to HE, so new in fact that my hub hasn't even arrived yet lol. I waited to order from Amazon for a variety of reasons but I'll chime this particular review from the smartthings perspective.
I had v2 smartthings but moved and somehow the mom in law took it over so I got the v3 hub last year. It being able to connect via wireless has been great for me but overall it's still the same smartthings. I prefer the old app to the new one but love the new smartthings sensors. I would say if a new user sticked to directly supported devices, smartthings can be quite simple to use and configure for basic things but for advanced stuff it will have a learning curve just as I assume it is for HE.
My hub comes Friday and based on my experience with smarthings and specifically webcore I don't anticipate any issue.
This is the key aspect.
We really differ here. Just a reminder that I'm talking about the new user that is not that tech savvy.
Also let's not forget that tablet and smartphone sales keep rising and laptops and pcs are declining ( except for China and development countries apparently), what is a good indicator of customer preferences. Last year there was 97.8M pcs, 161.6M laptops and 163.7M tablets sold.
You can use the web interface on a mobile device too (and the v2 interface made this a bit better). People seem to forget this. 
But for the less tech-savvy who might have problems finding it, hopefully the upcoming mobile app will make it easier for them to access. I imagine it won't do much more than put a "fancy" wrapper around the existing web interfaces, more or less like the Home Assistant app does (which also provides notifications, etc.).
As far it works and customers are happy it's all that matters. How they do it us up to them.
P.s as far is not a wrapper that has bugs loading the information, that has buttons not showing, text hidden outside of screen, etc than all good. There are god raps and bad raps
The article isn’t completely off in some respects, it is a bit ignorant to many things.
When I got to the statement:
Even with as much experience as I have, I had some trouble when I tried moving the hub from one router to another
I really couldn’t take it seriously after that.
I think reviews like this fail to take into account that specifically purposes devices are just that. The “cons” he mentioned are cons for only certain people in certain use cases. This goes for everything you could review.
If you own a construction business you don’t buy a fleet of Sports Cars, you buy a fleet of Pickup Trucks. But when reviewing Pickup Trucks, you don’t say that their size is a con compared to a Sports Car.
I agree it was mostly positive.
Some thoughts reading the comments here:
Having just started with converting my lighting controls to Lutron Caseta (Pro) I have to say their process for adding devices is elegant. You select the kind of device you want to add, you press a button, you assign it to a room, and you name it. I realize this is much easier to do in a closed ecosystem that is far more limited than what we all want to connect to our Hubitat hubs.
On the other hand, I was depressed when I realized I had purchased yet another product that forces me to do almost everything though an app on a smartphone. I'm not saying one or the other is better but I will say we should have a choice. For me, it is much much easier to work with a large screen than the small screen on my smartphone.
As someone mentioned, these reviews do point out where the product needs polish (I'm betting most of these issues are not surprising to the staff).
Completely agree with everybody that prefers the web based interface to a smartphone app. There are just so many instances where it is awkward to use a phone, and not just with Hubitat. I am probably in the minority, but my phone is mostly used when I am away from the house, when I am at home I use a 27" monitor with a Windows 10 PC. And I want to do pretty much everything that needs to be done at home, on that PC. I even get my phone notifications and texts on the PC. The web interface in Hubitat is what sealed the deal for me, I thought it was genius that they had that instead of a smartphone app. The only thing I really need when away from home is the dashboard, and now that I have set up a VPN I may not even need that.
Yes. The web interface is much more sensible for a Home Automation platform. I was frustrated on ST that I had to use an app for most things and a poor web interface for anything serious.
My goal is to not ever have to use a touch/type interface at all once the system is working. I'm getting there ....
