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ranked #63,414 most helpful out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
The only *real* LOCAL alternative to SmartThings
I am so impressed with my Hubitat. I've been on Samsung's SmartThings platform for three years and they really don't seem like they care all that much about reliability or retaining customers. My SmartThings hub is a V1 hub which means that it cannot do any processing locally. If I have a z-wave light switch set up on a z-wave motion sensor using a "Smart Lighting" rule: The SmartThings hub sends the motion event to Samsung's servers hundreds of miles away. They process the event and send back a message to my local hub telling it to turn on the light. For this to work there cannot be any issues with your local router, your modem, any issues on your ISPs side nor any issues on the SmartThings server side. I did a traceroute and found there are at least 30 network router hops between me and the SmartThings servers. This leads to very large latencies (delays) between your motion sensor picking up motion and the trigger actually firing something like turning on a light. So Samsung tried to address this in their V2 hub... But they left customers on their V1 hubs stranded. Since the z-wave radio in the SmartThings hub is "built in", if you bought a new SmartThings V2 hub the process to migrate over would require literally excluding every single sensor or switch device one by one, and re-pairing it with the new hub. I contacted Samsung several times to see if they were planning on offering anything to help customer migrate from V1 to V2. The answer was always a resounding "No". So especially for me: Moving from a V1 hub to V2 hub would be just as much effort as migrating from ST to another HA platform. To add insult to injury the more I researched the "local processing" capabilities of the V2 hub the more disappointing I became. Only the simplest of "Smart Lighting" automations would be processed locally, and only on a limited number of "supported" devices. So I figured if migrating from V1 to V2 would be a hassle I might as well be open to migrating to a non-ST platform. I tried out Hass.io and OpenHAB and those platforms were both horrible. I gave each platform a weekend and ended up spending an entire weekend on each platform trying to pair just a couple Z-wave devices, and both platforms failed miserably. In two days neither platform could have even the most basic "If motion detected turn on a switch" capability set up. So then I decided to try Hubitat. Within 30 minutes of unboxing Hubitat I had made more progress in pairing devices and setting up automations than I made with either Hass or OpenHAB in the two days I spent on both. What is especially appealing about Hubitat is the automations (Apps) and Drivers (Device Handlers) in Hubitat are both written in Groovy: The exact same language that SmartThings uses. That means that if you have already invested a lot of time and effort building SmartApps or custom device handlers in SmartThings you can just copy paste that Groovy code over to Hubitat and it should work with only very minor tweaks. I did, in fact, have some very complicated SmartApps to port over so I was a bit worried about how difficult that would be. One of my custom apps was an app I had written that controls the recirculating pump for my water heater. It would monitor motion in the bathroom, monitor DS18B20 temperature sensors installed on the water line, compare that temperature to the ambient temperature in the attic (Where the water heater and hot water lines are run) and compare those temperatures to the temperature of the water in my solar water heater tank (We have solar pre-heater to heat the water before it enters the main tank). It would then run the recirc pump for a determined amount of time or until one of the temperatures reached a certain threshold. Fairly complex stuff (300 lines of Groovy code), and this app only took me about 5 minutes to port over! There have also been a couple older Z-wave devices that weren't "natively" supported by one of Hubitat's built in drivers and I was able to copy the "Device Handler" code from SmartThings and these devices immediately started working. Migrating to new Hubitat Hub's will also not be a future problem: Hubitat allows you to back up your entire Hub configuration to your PC, and the Z-wave stick is removable. So if Hubitat releases a new piece of Hub hardware migrating to it will be as easy as taking a backup, removing your Z-wave/Zigbee stick from the only hub, inserting into the new hub and restoring the backup onto the new hub. Since the devices are associated with the Z-wave/Zigbee radio inside the included USB stick on the Hubitat moving between hubs is a breeze. Overall I am blown away by the ease of migrating from SmartThings, the performance, capability and support I've received so far from Hubitat. If you're using ST or thinking of it and think it's silly that every single event or trigger that happens in your home is sent up to Samsung's servers to be processed: Then Hubitat is the perfect solution.
September 2018 · Tools and Home Improvement · verified purchase
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