I just wanted to share my experience and provide a recommendation to anyone considering moving from either HA on Rasp Pi to a PC and/or moving away from Hubitat.
I recently moved my entire smart home setup from a Hubitat + Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi to everything running on an MSI Mini PC with N100 processor that I got on sale for ~$100 to ~$150.
tl;dr: I highly recommend both.
Hubitat vs. HA
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I found that with Hubitat + HA integration, sometimes when updating either one, it would break the connection between the two. Historically, I was usually able to resolve the issue. But more recently, I was struggling. (This may have partially been a result of my philosophy of being update averse, seldom updating either device).
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There were issues with the Hubitat integration, that may have now been resolved, regarding triggered buttons. I had to create automations to toggle, which added to some complexity. The integration worked very well overall, but had some quirks.
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Hubitat (C-5) always seemed like it had issues with timing/timers, and possibly memory leaks. I ended up having my Hubitat reboot every day at 2 am to try to improve those issues. Even after completely restarting from scratch on one occasion, these issues never seemed to get much better.
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Z-wave and Zigbee diagnostics are night and day better on Home Assistant than Hubitat. Z-Wave JS UI has absolutely excellent diagnostic, logging, and configuration abilities that Hubitat comes nowhere near matching. Including and Excluding devices is faster on HA.
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While I did/do find that HA’s automations, naming, methods are more confusing than Hubitat; to me, it was worth getting better with HA. Trying to create and modify automations in Hubitat was SLOW. HA is lightning fast. If something needs to be edited, it is fast, no waiting! Duplicating actions and dragging and dropping the pieces of automations works excellent. I also found that over time, the amount of automations in Home Assistant was growing, so why not centralize the automations.
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Automations execute more quickly than Hubitat.
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Home Assistant diagnostic data as a whole is much better than Hubitat.
Raspberry Pi vs PC
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HA ran very well on the Raspberry Pi; however, i am able to notice speed improvements with the PC.
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I run AMR2MQTT which is very processor intensive. On my Rasp Pi 4, CPU usage would sit at about 25%. On the N100 PC, it sits at 10%. If I am remembering correctly, navigation is faster on the PC. Backups, restarts, app starts, are all significantly faster on the PC compared to Raspberry Pi.
