Alarmo or Smart Alarm with HA Integration?

Hardware
1

Hi all,
So I am looking to add an alarm to one of my properties.
I only initially need 3 PIR sensors, but could be more in the future.
I don’t want to spend a ton of money on it, looking at amazon I found an Xsense Smart Alarm (around £50)which looks like it does what I want includes the hub, PIRS, door contacts, however, I did want it to integrate with home assistant - which this doesn’t look like it does (only XSense Smoke alarms do by the looks of it).

I then looked into Alarmo, which yes I could buy some motion sensors on Amazon, ideally i’d want them with WiFi rather than requiring a hub as this is another additional cost. Also with a decent battery. Any suggestion’s?
If I did go down the Alarmo route - I would want a physical WiFi keypad to put on the wall (ideally battery operated again). I’ve seen some people using Ring 2 Keypads, but again these are around £70/80 just for a keypad…

Open to suggestions - as I said I don’t want to go over the top with this at the moment.

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There’s a keypad dashboard card in HACS which is designed for Alarmo. People use it on wall tablets - someone a while ago posted a picture of a mobile phone running HA for this sole purpose.

I’ve recently stopped using Alarmo because support seemed a bit flaky. I doubt if it will work with any old keypad, so it’s going to cost.

Edit: What do your insurers think of using a HA system? An intruder only has to pull the plug.

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WiFi & battery don’t really go well together. WiFi consumes too much power & you’ll end up having to replace batteries frequently.

Your best bet is to use zigbee devices or else get a dumb wired alarm & buy a Konnected module for it.

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4

Are you asking Physical Alarm Panel vs Virtual (Alarmo)?

Get Physical if you want it to work when HA is offline, power is cut, wifi is down…

A virtual system is more like an ‘alert’ extension of your home automation… which is fine if you accept the limitations.

I run both… I combined the a wired/wireless Honeywell system with a complete custom House Mode system (automations, helpers, etc). It is a complete state system that will arm/disarm and notify based on who is home (person location, door lock codes used, etc)

I use Alarmo only because I started using it thinking it would do more than it really does. It cannot handle House Modes so I will remove Alarmo when I get around to it. In my diagram you can see it only does sensor checks when arming – so I’ll replace with native automations soon.

Alarmo is good if you want a basic virtual ‘alarm’.

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