Hubitat C8 Pro vs local Zooz Stick?

Configuration Z-Wave
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Have a house where Lutron 430MHz stuff just isn’t cutting it - the solid concrete with tons of rebar and other metal construction are killing things and Caseta doesn’t allow more than one repeater. So I’m going back to Zwave and doing all 800 stuff.

In my move in a year ago I had flirted with the idea of Zwave by buying a Hubitat C8 Pro. Haven’t really used it yet and just set it up today; not the most easy setup but whatever. I also run HA on a mini PC dedicated (no VM).

My basic question is should I join the Zwave mesh to the Hubitat and integrate with HA over the wired LAN, or use a Zooz 800 stick directly on HA? Is there any advantage to running directly on HA, any speed improvements (looking to do around 75 devices to start, perhaps grow to around 90-100)? I like how Hubitat draws the network map of your mesh so you can see when hops are needed, but the “using yet another box” thing has me thinking that just doing it locally to the HA mini pc might be better.

Any recommendations?

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Z-wave-JS UI also has a network map, but I’m not convinced poking at the mesh improves it. Always fun to look at.

Going through Hubitat adds “another box” as you mentioned, which means more maintenance, more opportunities for failure, more bugs to fight, etc. Not sure I see the value. Another thing to consider is you’ll likely have to haunt two forums as the majority of Home Assistant users won’t be using Hubitat with Z-wave.

I find the Home Assistant integration and Add-on options to work just fine. Others have horror stories, but I haven’t experienced it personally.

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