I guess I have used Home Assistant for 5-6 years. Started with the recommended
rasperry pi, only to be bit by sd card failures. To solve this, I moved it to docker on a Ubuntu machine. That worked for awhile, not sure when it went south, but the built in zwave integration is not what it needs to be. I am all zwave, and saw no easy way to migrate to Zwave JS. Since to get to that point it appeared I need to get on board with the supervisor version which does not run on Ubuntu. And do a migragation. Since I was in for migration and new hardware…
I saw Hubitat for $100. What a breath of fresh air. Yes, if you want to spend time tinkering HA is capable of more and the core program is certainly stable. But in about 2 hours, I had added all my zwwave devices, including Minimotes and Wallmotes that hadn’t worked in over a year. Automations are reliable and easy. Different strokes for different folks.
I came to HA about a year ago but one of the main integrations I needed wasn’t mature enough and it was a dealbreaker. I had an old C5 that I fired up and started using it to get away from the insufferable instability of ST. I eventually went all in and bought a C7 so I could push the limits.
While it was better stability than smartthings, it certainly had it’s drawbacks. I bought a sisyphus table in Novemeber and couldn’t connect it to HA. Of course I found 9 million ways to connect it to HA. Somebody made a HA to HE integration (I still had my old/unfinished HA running) which allowed me to slingshot the sisyphus back to hubitat but I quickly remembered how feature rich HA was and very basic things that hubitat lacked were already built in.
Then I jumped over to see the state of the code of the lights from a year prior and it had been overhauled. With this information alone, I made a snap decision to migrate over 300 devices from HE to HA during the christmas holiday. I shut down both of my HE’s last week.
I was using webcore as my rules engine from ST so no matter what I did, I was still going to have to learn a new rules architecture and I had already tried their rule machine twice.
It’s funny, a year ago when I tried to come to HA, I NOW know that I wasn’t ready. There’s no way I could’ve done what I did in HA in 3 weeks without the knowledge I learned from hubitat. Furthermore, that was my second attempt at HE because I had tried it a year prior with my C5 and was frustrated by just how difficult every integration had to be. It’s wild to see how fast both platforms have matured in a year.
Now, I swap out device handlers and apps like they’re nothing. So, two tries for Hubitat got me into hubitat for 1 year with improved stability, but two tries to HA got me to HA forever (I hope).
I didn’t migrate right away since I wanted to let the dust settle a bit but I did in October and I haven’t had any issues. In the end with some prior planning on my part the final migration was pretty painless.
But then again, I never had any issues with the old Zwave either.
Not true.
I run HA without the supervisor and ZwaveJS works perfectly fine for me.
Of course it does. It’s just not “officially” supported.
But the vast majority of people never get any “official” support anyway. So that point is mostly moot.
Yup.
But you should at least base those decisions on actual data
Tho, I’m not sure what the point of the post is. Or any of the other occasional “I hate HA and I’m leaving. Don’t try to change my mind!” posts.
If you’ve already made up your mind about leaving HA why bother posting about it here?
My main reason going with HA was that I’d read about multiple commercial offerings that didn’t get updated for years and then suddenly the company was gone or where they suddenly pulled key support. I don’t want to build a critical infrastructure (yes, lights not working are a disaster in my household) around something that might go away.
Maybe Habitat will one of the ones that lasts for a really long time. I’d bet on IKEA (massive corporate backer that sees smart home as an add-on, not their core product) but it’s too simple for me. Fibaro scares me since they’re only Zwave expensive and slow to update. SmartThings pulled most flexibility. HomeKit seems limited, although I have all the hardware already.
HA is far from perfect, but there’s a great community and tons of (mostly outdated) online info. Feels safer to me, but who really knows?
I think it all comes down to which system do you invest your energy (money and time) into and how long will that investment be good for. If a system stops being support it will probably keep working for a long time, but at some point it will be missing features or the hardware will break. Now is that a problem? Only if it happens soon enough that your investment isn’t worth it. My hope with HA is that my investment today in scripting and configuration will only have to change about 10% over the next 10 years. If HA dies out, then I’ll have to do a 100% change in 10 years to move to another system. Now maybe this is foolish: is it better to do a 100% change to get a better system? Perhaps!
I’ve looked into Hubitat in the past, but as far as hardware potentially breaking- Home Assistant is much more flexible. While most install Home Assistant on a raspberry PI, it can really run on anything. I’ve run it on old laptops, used PC’s, and even a Mac. Hubitat on the other hand only works on their hardware. If the company goes belly up tomorrow and your hubitat breaks - there will be no way to replace it. Home Assistant is much more flexible since it’s just open source software you can install on anything. Even if Home Assistant stopped being developed, in theory you could fork the project yourself and maintain it on whatever hardware you want if you really want to keep it going.
That’s how I run it- un-supservised in docker on Ubuntu. For Zwave I installed zwavejs2mqtt in docker and zwave works just fine for me. You didn’t need any new hardware, although you still would have had to migrate the zwave integration to zwavejs2mqtt.
I’ve never used Hubitat - its possibly more user friendly, but with any more user friendly system you definitely are more locked into their hardware and ecosystem, and generally can’t customize things as well. Hopefully it works out for you, but also there is nothing wrong with running a dual Hubitat and Home Assistant setup like some on here do as well.
Hello,
Im just trying to confirm that as of today, Hubitat still works wth home assistant. The ONLY ZWAVE device I have is an old Schlage deadbolt. I want to buy one of the C-5s on ebay because theyr’e cheap. Will this work for me for my lock through home assistant?
Beore anyone suggests a USB stick, I have synology which can be picky about sticks and my USB ports are used up anyways.
I can understand not wanting the zwave USB stick on the synology, it seems to cause nothing but problems for others when they try it.
However, I don’t believe the Hubitat C5 included zwave built in, and required a separate zstick from Hubitat. I would verify the specs on that prior to buying anything, and if the zstick is needed, that the seller is including it with the listing. The C7 does have zwave built in.
If you do get the hubitat, as far as I know there are still two ways to use it with Home Assistant- this custom component.
Or MQTT
I’m sure there are others using Hubitat still that can weigh in to confirm. Also, posting on those threads to ask if the method is still working can help confirm or answer specific questions on them.
I was on Hubitat for 2 years, I won’t argue the usability (It’s certainly easier to get started) but it was unreliable for me, constant crashes, restores, etc. Have had none of that on home assistant.
All I can say is hope for the best, but most likely you’ll see
Thanks for the reply. I read that the C7 has the newer Z wave 700 chip and the C-5 has the 500 chip. I’m literally only trying to use this for a Schlage deadbolt that I purchased in 2014 before Zwave plus was even a term lol I just wanted to make sure hubitat integration worked with Home Assistant and it’s looking like it should. Other than that I’m team home assistant for life with everything else. Thanks again
6 months into Hubitat and I’m still a happy camper. Yes, it cost money for the hardware but I was going to have to do some work to get moved from built-in Zwave to Docker Zwave mqtt. I figured I would just use that work instead to move to Hubitat. Mine has been very reliable. Nothing complicated, but I do have my Hyundai car started every morning in cold weather, and the wallmotes and minimotes went in with little trouble and have kept working. And like I said free remote access to devices turn off/on… Granted that can go away, (like my RainMachine access). But I am working on wireguard on my router which should get me access without going through the cloud.
Ok it was probably older Hubitats (C4?) that didn’t include a zwave chip and needed an external USB. Otherwise I would just make sure the used Hubitat is the same region (US or EU) for the proper zwave frequency.
