I have a Philips Hue hub to offload all my lightbulbs. I found connecting (particularly CREE) bulbs to my HE directly didn't help the health of the zigbee mesh at all. Apparently CREE bulbs (and most bulbs) are OK for repeating other bulbs but lousy at repeating other zigbee devices. By getting them all on their own hub I allow them to route other bulb traffic but they don't interfere with sensor routing.
I have a Lutron Caseta hub to manage my Lutron switches. I use these switches for two reasons. First, they are one of the few switches that can be installed without a neutral wire - that's a big plus for a house that was built before the days of AC wiring. Second, they're solid as hell and I love them.
And then of course there's the one hub to rule them all - the HE. The integration with the Lutron (PRO series) hub and the Philips Hue hub are all done locally - no cloud. It's fast and reliable.
Completed a migration of a two hub SmartThings to a two hub Hubitat. I had to do that because the Workshop / Barn is too far from the house. I have two locations connected wirelessly with cantenna's from about 5 years ago and will replace with Unifi Building to Building bridge if they ever get them in stock
I had somewhere around 140 devices (i think), multiple apps (maybe 20?) and rules in RM (Probably 50-60?). My C5 hub would need daily reboots because of the slowdowns. At one point it would take minutes to run a simple automation and even after a reboot it still wasn't as fast or snappy as I wanted.
Instead of putting a 2nd HE hub, which in my opinion was underpowered, I loaded up Home Assistant on a NUC I had that wasn't in use. I left all my devices on Hubitat and moved all of my automations to Home Assistant and Node Red using the Hubitat custom integration. Things have never been faster and more stable.
With Smartthings, you're at the mercy of the cloud. But the benefit of the cloud is essentially unlimited processing power. On a local device, that's not the case. You're limited by the power of the hub. In theory, the hub should be more than powerful enough to cover most people's needs. In practice, once you get beyond what would be considered "basic" and into more of a power user status, the hub becomes your bottleneck and that's where people start adding multiple hubs or exploring different avenues.
Yes ... the bottleneck of the cloud with SmartThings is the thing that I disliked ... however as I grow with HE I am worried that I will exceed the power of the machine! I have th HE C7 and withthe number of devices it is currently fast ... fingers crossed it doesn't get bogged down too much as I get more creative with my automations ...
Partly the reason I moved 99% of my automation to Node-Red. NR is also easier for me to "see" the 'flow' of my automation and that helps me make more complex automations than I could with RM. That is my personal limitation not a fault of RM.
I also forgot my third reason for buying a new hub (C-7 still in the box nagging me to upgrade)....
Supporting a small business during Covid-19. Something I try to do as much as I can.
