Thoughts on Hubitat and HomeAssistant?

Hardware
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#1

I have recently switched from SmartThings to Hubitat as the SmartThings platform has just been so unreliable… I like Hubitat but I keep finding myself trying to leverage Home Assistant and there seems to be more integrations and a better UI/FrontEnd, (I.e Sense Hone energy monitoring, Flume water monitoring and more).

I’m thinking of possibly abandoning Hubitat and just leveraging HomeAssistant. I currently have HA setup on an Intel nuc as a VM on ESXi. Seems to work well. What Zwave and Zigbee usb sticks are most reliable?

Last, would it be better to keep Hubitat for the z wave and zigbee radios and just leverage the Hubitat integration? Move over all automations to HA and use HA for the front end?

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#2

I cannot comment on Hubitat. I did not try them because I did not want to buy hardware just to try them.

3 years ago I left here for openHAB when both pr9ojects were in transition. I just finished moving back. In the intervening time Home Assistant has become more user friendly. The developers here are dedicated and actually respond to user concerns and issues.

#4

I mentioned it in my original post… there a more integrations that home assistant supports natively when Hubitat doesn’t. Also, the frontend/ui dashboards are much better

#5

There are good integrations both way between Hubitat and HA. That is what I do - use both and pick and choose where the devices are hosted.

#7

Originally I set up the SmartThings hub to do hub-stuff, and Home Assistant to handle all but the most basic automation, using the SmartThings integration to HA. Like yourself (and many others, it seems), the reliability and other limitations of the SmartThings caused me to swap it out with a Hubitat.

Now, I use the Hubitat as mostly just a hub, and again integrate that into HA. All my serious automations are done in HA. It all works great. I have Zigbee devices, Z-Wave devices and a handful of “other” (like Kasa WiFi switches), all set as devices in Hubitat, and HA just “sees” them for automation use.

One thing I like is Hubitat has an Amazon Echo skill that works, for free, without all the song’n’dance of HA’s integration. So for the few items I want Alexa control of, it’s done via the Hubitat, and HA sees any state changes.

Bottom line, keep & integrate both. You get the best of both worlds.

Brad.

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#8

I had hubitat for two years. It’s great for beginners but if you have home
Assistant already there is really nothing you need hubitat for.

#9

The point I was trying to make is that HA has more integrations with what I need… i.e Sense and Flume. I have those services and Hubitat doesn’t have the integration.

#10

Bingo! You and I are singing the same song and came to the same conclusion. We have had nearly identical journeys it seems over the years. X10 > Smart Things > Hubitat > Home Assistant.

I installed Hubitat about a year ago. My network also consists of Kasa light switches (55 of them) plus a handful of Z-wave devices (mostly Zooz scene controllers) and several Zigbee devices.

I just got into Home Assistant a few weeks ago (spun it up as a VM) and quickly found the Hubitat Integration for Home Assistant integration and it hit me just like you - use Hubitat for the devices that require radios. In about ten minutes I realized the Alexa integration is a breeze with Hubitat, HA is a mess as well is the HA Z-wave options.

One monkey wrench I think that I am just trying to get my head around. Will buttons / scene controllers work through the bridge? When the Hubitat integration brings Z-wave devices over does it do it in the same way that the official documentation talks about leveraging other home automation hubs to bridge z-wave devices over?

#11

What are you using to get devices from Hubitat into HA?

#12

I’m really glad to find this discussion, I had the same thought about using Hubitat as a hub for the radios with HA for a dashboard. Now I’m thinking of starting with Hubitat which will help with some things for now, but in a year or so I could start on HA since I want its Broadlink integration. The experience of @bpsmicro and @domenicdistefano are encouraging and suggest I can invest in Hubitat and it won’t go to waste.

#13

I use my hubitat hub as a paperweight only. Terrible thing and arrogant developers on their forum. I use HA for all for about three years now and it is rock solid. Hubitat is never been stable. But maybe I was to early for hubitat to be stable. But the developers never ever wanted to know about instability issues. They always blamed other stuff. But they did replace their hub for one with better hardware, and still said it could not be my hub that was the course. So that was bye bye for me to the hubitat.

#14

Just want to leave a reference link here for future users coming to this thread.

There is a (custom) integration to use Hubitat’s Maker API to talk/control devices that are tied to Hubitat - main application is to use Hubatat hub as the radio for zigbee and z-wave.

… other than zigbee and z-wave, you likely could integrate your gadgets directly to HA, and then use HA as frontend & automation engine that ties everything together.

As of today (Aug. 2022), anyways.

#15

Hi, I am in the same shoes, I use HE to take care all Z-wave and Zigbee devices, integrated with HA through maker API. The other way I use HA integration with HE just to be able to access all devices in both hubs. As a non programmer I find HE rule machine easier to handle more than automations in HA, managing global variables integrating them with Sharptools. The main benefit in HA is the ability to control Wifi devices locally like Tuya and Chamberlain.

So far all is working as it is supposed to

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#16

I have a HA running on a Synology Dock and want to have one master hub that can manage both Z-Wave and Zigbee devices - As my NAS is in the basement then the HE connected via Ethernet should be able to link to HA on my NAS through my LAN, is that correct?

Have you found any compatibility problems with devices and HE?

thanks

#17

Can’t comment on the NAS part, but the principle of having HE on your LAN and your HA instance picking it up is correct, I have been doing this for a while now (and am just in the middle of ditching it in favour of a Skyconnect, i no longer need ZWave).

Be aware that it’s not exactly as it sounds. HA is not using HE as ‘the radio’ as such. You pair all the devices with HE and it can then either pass state info to HA or receive instruction from HA for each device. The devices though are still connected to and managed by HE. Not necessarily a bad thing but I am just looking to manage everything in one place, ie in HA.

#18

I moved from HE to HA 6months ago. This was my initial setup, to ude HE for zw and zb devices. But I discovered that HA is better in terms of device managemnt then HE. It doesnt have for e.g. so frequent aquara sensors drop issue, zwave device parameter configuraton is more user friendly and list of supported devices is much wider (e.g. I had a lot of problems with older Fibaro ZW devices in HE). Not mentioning the response times, which are faster with HA compared to HE, possibility to do zigbee groups, etc.

#19

Very glad to have found this thread. I had been pretty happy with SmartThings with several custom groovy apps (MyQ, home bridge, flume lock user managements, Konnected alarm, etc…). However for everyone using the groovy or custom DTHs Samsung just flipped us the bird as they broke their groovy integration as of January 2023. I preemptively purchased Habitat this past Dec. thinking that would be my next move.

Then out of pure chance I happened to install HA on a friends machine to record some cameras using MotionEye. I hadn’t touched HA in about 3 years and to be honest that experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found HA really overly complex and unstable at the time (was using HASSIO on a Pi). However my recent experience was quiet the opposite. So much so that now that I’m about to get started moving all my ~90 devices from STH to HE I paused and wondered if I should be giving HA another shot (using it as the main integration hub via usb ZB & ZW radios).

Reading some of these posts is inspiring me to use HE as just a hub for those zigbee & wave radio devices (bulk of my home) since I already bought it. I did already have a ZW USB z-stick s2 laying around so I got it setup with HA last night but was a little sad to see I couldn’t start pairing mode in HA. I had to unplug the stick and press the button on it near the switch. Was hoping for a friendly web UI for adding/removing ZW devices. There was an ok Web UI for adding / removing devices (although removing was not working)… YMMV. So reading about using the HE hub with the API integration sounds like a great compromise. I just hope that HE takes full advantage of all the features of all my Zigbee & ZWave devices.

One thing that I have to say worked really well in STH was their “Smart Home Monitor” which was basically three sections to monitor alarm hardware, leak detector hardware, smoke & co2 detector hardware. It was super easy to setup though lacked customizability. I believe I can get that going again with HE (if I understood that correctly) since they’re both written with groovy.

Few questions for you guys if anyone has experience with any of the following anything you could answer would be greatly appreciated.

  • Have you had any stability issues with HE?
    • If so was it the latest hardware/sw?
  • Has anyone had any reason to use zwave, zigbee devices directly with HA for any reason (like missing device features or functions)?
  • I mainly intend to interact with my home using Apples Home app. I’ll also likely eventually get around to creating some custom dashboard for some fire tablets I have wall mounted. Any recs on clean HA dashboard themes?
  • Is there any problems hooking HomeBridge up with HE?
  • Does HE have a HomeKit integration directly?
  • I understand HA has a way of sharing out devices directly via HomeKit, would that be better for any reason?
  • Is HA or HE better at integrating with ZW locks?

Again :pray: thank you guys for all the great info on here already. Cheers from San Diego!

#20

I can only answer a couple of those - HE was pretty much rock solid for me for the 1-2 years i used it on its own. When I first switched to HA i left the devices on HE and used the integration to bring them in to HA - sometimes this was a bit flaky and i couldnt always control devices from HA, but mostly it was ok.

In the end i recently got a skyconnect and changed to using ZHA and pairing direct to HA (i only had a couple of ZWave devices which i switched out for zigbee). I did this because i just wanted less devices to manage, still monitoring it see how it goes for reliability.

#21

I did the same moving from HE zigbee to sky connect, I can say that HE is much more stable when it comes to zigbee. Anyone found the same ?

#22

I moved from HE to HA 3 years ago. Have deconz conbee stick for zigbee. This has been much more stable then HE ever was.