Quite a while back I upgraded to JS and had to back out because some of my lock status rules no longer worked. I saw a release note for the latest OS today that kind of sounded like that may be fixed now. I had a couple other issues too...but don't even remember what they were anymore.
Anyway, my system ("314 devices") and probably 40 or 50 rules is fairly stable right now.
Why do I want to upgrade...what is the advantage other than eventually maybe JS will be the only option? Faster, More Stable, more options...?
I tried going back to JS on Tuesday night (so at a late point in the Beta) and there had been no improvements yet to any of the device-reporting issues that chased me off JS early last fall.
I am really hoping JS gets some love in the near future.
Maybe faster response times (measured in milliseconds).
Ghost nodes are easier to delete.
Possibly better LR support.
Native supervision support (possibly better reliability for S2 paired devices).
No other advantages that I can think of.
IMO not worth it. Every time I try it just on my dev hub with whatever driver I am working on, I find issues within an hour.
All the events come in correctly 100% of the time on ZIP, and all the drivers I use work correctly on ZIP. Cannot say the same for Zwave-JS.
Unfortunately, it's a "it depends/YMMV" situation. I switched back to JS a few months back and haven't had any issues with it, really happy. Others still run into problems. Really depends on your device brands/types like so much else in home automation. As Jeff notes at this point there isn't a huge list of benefits to using JS at this time, probably the most important in some cases is easier removal of ghosts. If you're running fine on ZipGateway fine to leave it that way.
That makes sense. I'm fairly OK with my setup and performance now. There is a time and a place for "cutting edge" ...I used to love that and didn't mind putting up with some random issues. Right now...since it's involved in home security on several levels...it's just not time to play yet.
I went to JS reluctantly a couple months back as I had some ghost issues I just couldn't solve on ZIP. It was straight forward with JS. Ghost management seems stronger in JS. I meant to roll back to ZIP but never did. Buoyed on that success I rolled my other hub to JS.
I still have issues with one hub and blasts of commands flooding the network (All On and All Off rules) and stalling things. I was hoping JS would help that but it didn't. My other hub has newer devices (mostly 800 chipsets) and works substantially better. I also was hoping ZWave 7.23 might help but it didn't move the dial either.
I've also seen some weird behavior with what I call "tortured routing" where a device will revert to a triple hop routing when a simpler 1 hop or direct to hub routing is available. I'm suspicious of the algorithms for determining multi hop routing.
So I'm still a little unsatisfied with ZWave handling. I came from Vera, which is now probably an antique by any reasonable measure. I would say Vera worked better at ZWave than Hubitat does with Zip or JS. That is really a sad commentary, a 10 year old platform out performs a current vintage one (with modern 800 chipset). My hunch is Vera developers had to crawl into the ZWave stack whereas I think Hubitat treats it as a 3rd party black box and compiles it into the system. That's only speculation on my part.
Vera was likely on the 500 chip, older days but in some way simpler/easier. 700 series when initially released was a bit of a mess that was partially cleaned up over time, but I expect Vera stayed w/500.
ZipGateway was always a "black box" in that it was proprietary and only Silabs could directly touch/modify it. Their way or the highway.
Z-WaveJS is open source, so everyone can look, ID bugs, submit pull requests to the team managing it, etc., and if I understand correctly can also make local changes to help w/stuff specific to HE hubs. Better long term situation by far.
The recent purchase of Silicon Labs by TI, may have some long term repercussions for Zipgateway, but the future for this piece of software is difficult to discern.
Switched z-wave over to Z-wave JS on Home Assistant on one of our buildings, from Hubitat. Incredible range but I do find that Hubitat played better with my Zen 16 devices.
I bit the bullet in December to move the ZWave JS due to ghosts that were showing up after the removal of some older Z-Wave devices I was replacing. Never moved back. Only saw the lock status issue once or twice and it would go away in a few minutes on its own.
I also moved to ZWave JS in December (C8 Pro), went pretty smooth. Easy wake up of a handful of battery devices, rest just transitioned on their own. ~50 devices. I have seen a weird battery charging warnings on zwave motor for smartwings levitate shades, which I think is a JDS issue, but not a big deal. Performance is just as good. I moved over as I had a couple ghost to clean up and its extremely easy on JS. As others noted, YMMV.
