Why I'm leaving for home assistant

Good luck, a small reading here, HA in second place

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Excellent post.
Captures most of the reasons I want a HA setup.
Every time I dive into it I really don't make as much progress as I feel I should.
It's definitely more frustrating to set up but maybe more robust in the end.

I think I need to reset my setup to a fresh install and start again.
It wouldn't even automatically discover Tasmota devices as I hear it is supposed to.

Very competent and apt review.

It's clear you are a bit more than the average consumer, and for that I'm sad to see you go, rather than seeing you committing to the excellent community by putting together some of the missing functionality and sharing it. That said, I get that many of your points cannot be overcome with ingenuity alone.

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A very excellent summation of the state of things by the OP... I certainly agree wholeheartedly on several points, like restricting verbose logs to support staff, limitations on backup and restore, and the sluggish UI..

That said, Hubitat and Home Assistant are two completely different beasts. Hubitat is a (relatively) mass-market product, while Home Assistant is targeted towards IT geek/tinkerer market. Hass.io attempts to at least simplify the installation, but the actual configuration is still cumbersome and complex.

Back when I was having issues with Hubitat Zigbee I spun up Home Assistant, first on a Mac, then a PI, then back to the Mac as I couldn't get Zigbee to work on the Pi. It literally took me 5 minutes to pair a SmartPlug and create the entities, and I still didn't have power reporting working. Yaml is the biggest strength and weakness due to its complexity and sensitivity to syntax. At the end of my experiment, I concluded it would take me months to rebuild my 400+ device system on Home Assistant.

That's not to say Home Assistant is bad or inferior... It depends on the use-case and what the intended goals of Home Automation.. For me, it's all about achieving the longest maintenance free operating period. I have 3 months out of a calendar year (Jan-March) in which I have enough downtime to work on pet projects. RV travel season starts in mid-April, and we open our cabin in May. From April-November we travel to one or the other, each and every weekend. During that time home automation becomes an even more critical system, but has to work as an appliance that should not require any care and feeding outside of changing batteries.

I do hope the Hubitat teams take note of your feedback as it contains some excellent suggestions to make Hubitat even better than it is.

Good luck with Home Assistant!

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I spent almost 4 years with HA. One of the reasons I left was the constant underlying changes. Originally there was an update every week. There were always breaking changes. Sometimes it was just a wording change and you could do a global search and replace. But other times it was a change in how something functioned or structural changes or how Zwave devices were handled and it could turn into hours and hours or even days of fixing.
In the past year, it has become a bi-weekly update schedule but there are ALWAYS breaking changes. Some updates don't have changes that apply to your setup but most do. And there is no benefit to skipping updates. You still need to go through all the updates you skipped to check and fix all the breaking changes within the missed updates.
The most recent change to HA has been most disturbing from a "stand back and observe" perspective. Support from the community has always been crucial to the success of HA. As in the forums here, it is where the collective knowledge and understanding lies. Over the last year and a half, looking at the senior forum members participating in the community forums, their numbers have dropped off significantly. Really significantly.
Today all the activity is in Discord chat. Sadly the collective knowledge and understanding scrolls off the screen and is lost.
Today I am pleased to have a supported platform. I may not have everything in the world combined into one hub what I do have is manageable.

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That is the one thing I always tell people when they ask me about home automation recommendations. There is no one hub solution. There might be somewhere down the road, but today, there just isn't.

Interesting write-up. and I can definitely see why you might prefer Home Assistant! I actually came here from the other direction: switching from Home Assistant to Hubitat. Home Assistant was a lot of work to set up and maintain (I used Hassbian; Hass.io would at least save me from becoming a part-time Linux sysadmin but didn't support everything I needed at the time). As someone else mentioned, some updates also introduced breaking changes for me, so a careful read of the (long) release notes is necessary. You also say it works with more devices, but that really depends on what devices you're talking about. I'd say that Hubitat is mostly targeted towards Z-Wave and Zigbee users with the occasional LAN device (Lutron, Hue, etc.) or cloud integration. Home Assistant works well enough with most Z-Wave devices but has at least two ways to do Zigbee/ZHA, and the one I tried (ZHA component/bellows) did not support nearly as many devices as Hubitat, and unlike Hubitat, there was no way to import a custom "handler" for unknown devices. (This was also true for Z-Wave, but being more standardized, it would at least communicate properly with them and I could use templates to fix weird behavior.) Home Assistant certainly has an impressive list of other integrations/components, though I'm not sure Hubitat is targeting that market.

I was quite happy when I switched to Hubitat because it worked with all of my Zigbee and Z-Wave devices (except a couple where support was added; I got one of the first hubs very soon after launch). I actually kept a lot of automation on Home Assistant, and if I ever decided to go back to Home Assistant, I'd likely keep using Hubitat as a Z-Wave or (at least) Zigbee radio since it's so much better at that. All my logic has been migrated to Hubitat now, though. For many of my automations, I resorted to AppDaemon over YAML, but in either case, you might be interested in custom code for Hubitat over Rule Machine (I agree the UI can be a bit cumbersome)--not sure if you tried, but it's about equally powerful.

I actually still kept Home Assistant around, mostly for the UI and the cute, short-term device history graph it provides by default. Won't be sad if I lose it, and there are ways I could use it more to supplement Hubitat if I wanted, but I'm quite happy as-is. I can see where you are coming from, however, and wish you luck!

PS - If your hub is for sale, I think several people here may be interested in buying another. :slight_smile:

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Sorry to see you go. Have you taken a look at Homeseer. I use it in conjunction with HE for the things HE can't do right now. Some devices HE can't control and they use plugins, but they cost. More for the programmer like yourself. If you can write your own plugins that might be the way to go.

My Arlo camera was "hacked" with Home Assistant. I followed old YouTube videos for an install. HA just updated so no new videos existed. I followed the video and improvising when things didn't match. The security steps were out of date but I thought I did a well enough job. Apparently I didn't and they gained control of my camera. I only added just the camera to HA and nothing else.

I powered down HA and had to change my Arlo password. They couldn't change the password cause I don't use the same password twice so the Arlo email password was different. But lesson learned, HA is not a safe platform to tinker. You have to know what you're doing or you run risks.

Ah, I forgot to mention that the Hubitat community is awesome :slight_smile:

A few things to clarify:

  • All the SSL / authentication stuff is used when accessing my hub (HA or HE) from the LAN or through VPN. There is no remote access. SSL because otherwise Chrome and Firefox will annoy the crap out of me with their "insecure website! don't put in a password!" warnings. Auth because I don't want to manage subnets for guests (chromecasts get too complicated). Yes there are still some devices they could tinker with directly (Wemo, for example), but for the most part that limits damage from adding a compromised device to the network.

  • 5 GHz WiFi has existed for a while, and I try to use it exclusively, so Zigbee interference should not be an issue, while still giving me the freedom to move the hub around (for pairing or re-arranging furniture).

  • And finally, my hub is not for sale, because as pointed out, I'm still watching HE and might be back if HA turns out to be too much or if HE improves significantly. That, and I'm intrigued by many references to using multiple hubs (most with smart things, but HE should work too), using one as a proxy for zigbee/zwave from HA. It even has the nortek stick that I could use directly, if necessary.

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I think that’s more of an annoyance than an actual issue if it’s all local or through VPN.

I run so much stuff internal only, or only allow specific outbound traffic, that browser warnings are just something I have to deal with. You can always manually verify they are kosher every once and a while.

Besides having external verification via LetsEncrypt and feeling safe, not too much gain. I’d rather keep and know that my HE hub is talking only to the HE cloud via 8883 and 443 and that’s it. These days I like to just keep things dead simple rather than have complexity hidden behind simplicity. That’s probably why that other user wound up in the Arlo camera situation.

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I too have started to increasingly use HomeAssistant - and it's obviously a very different product to HE. They have made large changes to their UI options recently that make it look far sexier, and it has been mainly solid on an NUC. But Z-Wave and inparticular ZigBee are troublesome and many are using other hardware hubs for this functionality connected back to HA e.g. Zigbee2MQTT or DeConz.

But I am noticing that Hubitat is becoming a standalone peripheral to my system rather than the centre. In thinking over my journey I think now this is mainly because of the lack of decent MQTT integration provided by HE as that is central to my home now. But It really is a labour of love using MQTT within HE. We need a well integrated MQTT client.

I was thinking back over my HA frustrations during the last 20 years and just realised that now for the first time almost everything is do-able and does mostly work. I have more tasks now that just require time and attention to complete - and not tech advances or decent products. I feel HA 'arrived' during last year - but still only for the techies. A vehicle for mass adoption still eludes.

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I did try writing apps and driver code. I had a composite garage door that used multiple sensors + relay to simulate a garage door, and it worked really well. I'm sure some of my RM UI annoyances could be solved with purpose built groovy apps instead.

It's just that once I started putting more and more stuff in the proxy machine, I realised that I could just run HA on it and skip Hubitat completely :wink: . As you said, some of these cannot be programmed around.

I have a VLAN that is exclusively for home automation devices. It is behind a completely separate (and hidden) SSID specifically for security purposes. Guests that join my network are segmented into another locked down VLAN that has specific rules to be able to access Chromecasts, Echos, and Sonos devices on the HA VLAN and that's it. Other than that, there is no crossover to my main network from the HA network, so I don't really worry about SSL or authentication on my HE or other ha devices. Nearly everything that doesn't require internet access is blocked at the firewall and almost all telemetry is blocked via pi-hole.

If anyone were to breach my HA network, they'd be hard pressed to do any real damage as I have nmap running in a 30 second cron and alerting when new devices join any of my networks.

Personally, I'd support HE having SSL capabilities, but in my specific setup, it really doesn't afford me much more security than I have now and would only confuse normal users that don't have a background in enterprise networking (:wink:).

Valid point.

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Or proper documentation on the ws://[hubitat ip]/eventsocket. I'd much rather use websockets for event notifications and actions versus MQTT. It takes one more piece of software out of the equation. :slight_smile:

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27 posts were split to a new topic: Nmap running every 30 seconds

Home automation should make things easier and less work in the end, Home Assistant seems like it adds much more complexity and work, which kind of defeats the purpose of automating things if you have constant upkeep.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Need MQTT for Hubitat Elevation

14 posts were split to a new topic: Need MQTT for Hubitat Elevation