My fairly experience with OH is that developers rush to get features / changes integrated just befor e release of a Milestone or “stable” version without proper testing in a previous snapshot release. Many times this results in breakage in OH releases. With HA, you are free to keep running a stable system. You can wait until others have found issues and patches before upgrading.
I suspect that is a tradeoff between new user friendliness / simplicity vs robustness for large installations.
Actually it’s more complicated and less achievable, because - what I already mentioned - all changes are bundled and released with core at the same time. Thus new version might possibly fix the issue your installation encounter, but possibly it will break something else.
Releasing half-baked/untested features happens to HA too (who knows, maybe OH is even worse in that). Just look at most recent release with new incomplete Tuya integration, removing previous working integration at the same time. Not speaking about Shelly integration and several others.
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HS usually tries to document them and quickly releases patches. The OH lead developer told me I had to wait over 3 months to use my newer z-Wave devices that were in the binding database just because they broke backward compatibility, unannounced during a minor version development cycle.
My HA has been stable for pretty much 2 years. There have been 2 exceptions.
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Last night’s clock change, which didn’t take down the system as such, but it did affect the reliability of the system. I was lucky that because it is running on a Virtual Server, with plenty of RAM and CPU - it was able to stay up during all the IO thrashing of trying to run multiple automations 20 times ever second for an hour. But in Home Assistant’s defence - Whether it is Sky, Google, Apple, Bank ATM machines - EVERY year some computer somewhere is affected by the clocks changing. And this has been the first time Home Assistant has been affected.
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Several releases ago, there was a major Database upgrade upon install of a new version of Home Assistant and bizarrely the developers opted to do the database upgrade FIRST before letting the rest of Home Assistant load, rather than doing the upgrade in the background. This led to many of us being unable to access Home Assistant for anything from 20 minutes for the luck ones, to >18 hours for the unlucky ones. I was around 5 and a half hours. Some complaints, and suggestions of - maybe do the upgrade in the background, and we just accept that no data is stored for the duration of the upgrade was a better option - and that seems to have been accepted, because now database upgrades are done in the background.
Other than those 2 issues - I’ve pretty much had 100% uptime.
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Very true. But most of the problem can be mitigated by simply not recording every single event and state change by default, and instead allowing/encouraging the user to specify which data to keep. It’s a baby step, but I suspect it is more likely to happen than a (long overdue) total recorder re-write.
I put in a feature request for this some time ago, and it got a bit of interest, but no movement yet. Your vote might help 
If that is the case, the database architecture seems to have been designed to be the worst choice for both scenarios.
If that was the default, then it would be somewhat of a workaround. As well as aggressive database maintenance by default. But then it would be so easy to, for example, set the option for an entity to “record all states”. With the user unknowing that each state change writes about 1K to the database.
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Thank you all for the comments!
I did not expected so much answers with lots of both - positive and negative answers.
For me it looks nothing big has been changed since my investigation 1 year ago. I am running OpenHAB on my RPi 4. HA is running on Synology, but only collecting data, not automatizing anything.
In my opinion, automation should be about security and saving time. If I should read the breaking notes every month because of updates (I like to update a lot 
), I’ll rather spend my time another way.
I will give it a try someday, but due to lack of time, I will stick with the competitor…
No. Most of the breaking stuff has been in the move from YAML to GUI. I have rarely had to do anything because of a breaking change. Some integrations introduce breaking changes, but mostly because of a change on whatever 3rd party the integration is providing access to, rather than anything on the Home Assistant side of things.
My condolences.
I ran OH for 2 years and was heavily involved supporting the Z-Wave binding there. Development there is an absolute trainwreck unless you are part of the “chosen few”. Features are rushed into milestones and releases without previous snapshot testing causing high potential for instability.
A competitor who expects the users to write core documentation instead of the expert developers doing that.
Good luck!
Not that different here, obviously.
And again: Not that different here, sadly.
But there comes this idiom into my mind: “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!” 
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Developers here value & actually act on user input. See the latest Release Notes for some work put in (Tuya) due to user input! I had the OH lead basically tell me I needed to wait 3 months to get any support for the new version of my devices because the Devs broke backward compatibility (unannounced to other devs) during a minor release schedule. They know Z-Wave depended on that compatibility.
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This thread clearly shows that people have different conceptions of stability. I mean some people were happy with windows 95 while the internet was being run by the fantastically stable and secure openbsd.
Instability caused by an update is one thing, but on any particular release I see stability, in that if you leave it alone HA never needs restarting. Other than that it chugs along turning on and off my lights and HVAC, measuring my power usage, telling me when the tide will be high, when to put the bins out and what the weather will be and has been, showing me my cameras and when my packages will be here, turns my speakers off so I don’t wake people up and turns them on when they need to wake up. That is stable IMHO.
Spoke too soon hahahahah the latest release is breaking my system…that is why backup + backup + backup is important.
Nothing broken that I have seen yet.
I got problem in multimedia issue. Some of my lovelace is now gone.
What is broken? I feel like people always exaggerate that the system is broken, but then it’s just an integration or some small thing not working. For me a broken system doesn’t run anymore or a large and vital part of it doesn’t work as expected.
Mostly it is caused by custom cards. Like Atomic Calendar. There are updates available in HACS.
In my case some of my lovelace is gone or blank. Trying to insert it manually did not help. At the moment I just restore my proxmox to the previous version.
First tab
2nd and 3rd tabs is now just blank
2nd tab looks on previous version
Oh the new TUYA working on my system, so that did not give me problem
I dont think so.