I’m a blank slate here, looking for advice on smart switches that will play nice with Home Assistant. I’m new to HA but not coding. We’re building a new home, we’re going to be pulling wire soon, and I thought picking some smart light switches would be easy, but I not only want to make the right choice and not invest in a particular hub or platform that’s on it’s way out or will confine me if I later want to expand it, for example into direct HVAC control, or in my case I have a real interest in color-tunable (specifically tunable white LED lights, be it 120V or 12/24VDC (not to get off on a tangent but for a while I was thinking about Shelly RGB2s and, and frankly what was going to probably require modified lighting fixtures, ripping out the supplied driver/power supply and wiring direct to the LEDs, I was looking at CTT panels and recessed downlights… but I am going to have enough projects when we move in. I’m back to an off-the-shelf solution).
I’m for something with an ecosystem, or at least one that’s growing. I hear a lot of good things about Wemo switches, but then I see they don’t even have a built-in smart receptacle. I don’t want wall warts in my brand new house.
So I am drawn towards some of the more established lighting brands, like the big three L’s Leviton, Lutron and Legrand. It seems that Legrand really has it going on with color-tunable LED lights capabilities:
Lutron Caseta Wireless seems to be popular in here. Lutron definitely has some ecosystems, like the RadioRA 2 and HomeWorks (which sounds super-high-end and I figure the infrastructure just to put in a couple lightswitches to start is cost-prohibitive). Caseta is described as a “single-room” system but supports 75 devices. Here is a comparison between those lines: http://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/3682773_RA2_HWQS_comparison.pdf
and I’m just not sure about their CTT capabilities. Some of that is Greek to me. It looks like HomeWorks has more options, including DMX integration.
Also, Lutron bought Ketra, I am assuming because of what they have been doing with their CTT lights, and now they are in the family, I see they’re integrated with HomeWorks (might have to look a little harder at that!) LED Lighting Products | Ketra by Lutron
Leviton has a very deep commercial and residential product line, but I can’t find anything on color tuning switches.
At some point, researching all this, I am ready to give up. If I had to pick, I’d probably say Lutron, but is the Caseta line my best bet? I don’t know if there are cheaper sources for HomeWorks, but that looks immensely expensive.