“I have had HC3 for about two years now. I was one of the first to buy it I guess, and I had hoped that Fibaro would work to make the product more mature. I must say that I am disappointed on this point. The Fibaro team gives the impression that development has been deprioritized since they have been acquired by Nice group. I particularly dislike the iPhone app. It is takes ages to open, is messy, and doesn’t allow adding Philips Hue lights as favorites. There is no iPad app. I am also disappointed that there still no support for Zigbee. Device compatibility is worse than my old Vera Edge. On the positive side, the system is fast (even with more than 200 devices) and the Fibaro team has always been fast in providing support.”
“Very good experience migrating HC2 to HC3. No major problems after following instructions from Fibaro. HC3 is very stable so far and over all an improvement on the older Fibaro system.”
“I’ve been using Vera for years and the improvement with this controller is night and day, no more manual polling when devices stop responding and hours of looking through forums for workarounds.
I would agree with other reviews that the Fibaro support is, well, pants ! But for me 99% of devices have just worked and not missed a beat. I hope the bugs and features that are built in but not available yet are soon sorted but I love my new controller.”
“Pros
The new HC3 is a big improvement on my HCLite in terms of speed and what it can do, I cannot comment if it a step up from an HC2.
The new box looks very good.
Cons
The new web interface is good but could be improved, certain tasks need more clicks than the old interface, certainly on a large monitor there is a lot of unused space which could be utilised to allow direct access between say "Devices" list and "Scenes" list. There also seems to be 2 versions of the "Devices "list, I don’t understand why.
The software is riddled with bugs, in my short time I have identified 4 items which don't work correctly e.g. "Date range" which spans over 2 calendar years does not work, RGBW colour selector not working well, filtering by room in "History" not working correctly and initially using "Device Groups" in scenes did not work although this is now fixed with the last software upgrade.
Fibaro support is atrocious, when you submit a support ticket you get an automated reply email stating “Technical support engineer will get in touch with you soon. (Usually within 24 hours)” this is a joke, more like 3-4 weeks and generally they don’t respond at all unless you telephone them. Tickets are closed without being resolved with as message such as “We're aware of this issue and we've already forwarded it to our engineers, who are currently working on resolving it as soon as possible. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience it caused but I have to ask you for a little more patience”
After getting on for a year from launch there is still no time frame for enabling the RF / Zigbee / WiFi
The HC3 is still "work in progress"”
“This hub does what it is meant to do - no messing about. I’ve tried Smartthings and Hubitat and to be honest while the support is much better and the communities are great for those devices, their hubs are somewhat lacking when compared to Fibaro. The Fibaro community isn’t great and some want you to pay them for their help (Yorkshire Automation as an example) but to be honest, you can work all that you need to do for yourself if you put in the effort. It is worth the effort in the end. 5 star product and works as it should. Love it. Love Vesternet service also. Thank you guys. A+++++++++++”
“Brought this because I was fed up with aeotec z stick having problems with both Home assistant and openHab running on a Raspberry Pi 4. Was expecting an easier life, BUT I think HC3 is not ready for the market yet, Lots of functionality missing ref HC2. Real shame IMHO. Some fuctionality is up and running. Good job I have 40 years experience of interfacing hardware and software...”
