“Want a simple yet effective HA hub? Look no further. Simple, lots of protocols supported and many devices.
Maybe not best if your HA expectations are for a super complex system, but for many of us more than enough.”
“Easy to use and fast strong controller, how ever they overautomated some things such as home/away function and location that automatic change yore frequency.
Overall great product”
“On the surface looks great!
The potential for this platform is massive, once a substantial clean up is done. Unfortunately this will not improve with the new 2023 version until they time to rationalise the user interface.
But has substantial limitations once in use.
Functionality is split between mobile app, web interface and pc access, you can’t do everything on one screen, and often find yourself with multiple interfaces on different devices to get a task done. This is barrier to new users as it quickly gets confusing when faced with very similar interfaces but each one only enabling a subset of functionality.
The Athom Native support for Hue, Greenwave etc ranges from bad to disturbing, the Hue app is known to make the Homey hub unstable and crash, a lot. The official remedy is to restart the Hue app every 6 hours, which fortunately can be programmed to do automatically. But a new user has to learn this a very hard way indeed, experience 20 crashes a day until a support request reveals the issue. The Greenwave App drops all energy monitoring.
Additionally the zwave controller cannot handle secure communications well and contributes to an unstable zwave network.
The graphing called Insights in Homey parlance is great, as long as you only access it using a PC and the web interface, then you get to be able to create a multi device graph.
Not available using mobile devices web access, and not available at all in the mobile app.
The graphs cannot be saved and have to be re-created every time you want one.
For programming there is the awesome Advanced Flows, but again only available using a PC based browser, mobile browsers have a lot of issues and selections flicker and require 20-30 clicks to get it to operate. On the PC web interface it is awesome, but does have some issues, if you click Save it shows it was saved, this may or may not be true. Apparently there is an issue with ALL web browsers that Athom cannot resolve, so a web browser cache wipe is recommended before each Save operation.
There is a tab in the interface, Energy, which would be exceptional in a time when energy prices were soaring, but the App while a good start just fails to deliver its potential and as such remains largely unused replaced by community created Apps like Power by the Hour.
The Homey community is vibrant and a new user can get a lot of support here. They just need to be aware that Athom is Dutch and the Dutch users can be rather blunt, but it is not as offensive as it first appears and once you are used to it, not a problem at all.
Athom has launched two new hubs recently, it would be really nice if they could focus on stabilising and unifying the user interface, making Insights actually useful, fixing built in apps like Hue, which suffers from memory leaks and misses basic functionality. They need to take step back, review everything they have created and draw up a detailed list of missing/ broken functionality and fix it.”
“Homey pro's support for all types of wireless protocol is the most winning edge making this product completely future ready.
Homey Pro has one of the best GUI to enable basic home users to easily configure pro features and make this home automation really SMART.
NO MORE DEPENDANCY ON THE INSTALLERS.
This is why most installer don't recommend Homey because then who will pay them everytime you want to change scenarios as per your growing needs.
Drawbacks are:
It must have upgraded processor, ram and storage.
Hence comparatively it's highly priced bcoz at this cost you get hardware with double capacity.
Wired LAN connectivity could always make communication much better, this is not available.
Master n Slave is needed to expand the reach and control of bigger area”
“I decided to go with Homey after looking at the other controllers out there for quite a few months as I wanted to replace my Vera that I have had since 2013 from my first Vera Lite to my Vera Plus – I think all controllers have good and bad points and there isn’t one out there that wins hands down but Homey does come close for me – I mainly use Z Wave devices and Philips Hue bulbs - The integration of the devices was really smooth and had no issues – The only issue I had was getting it linked with my Wi-Fi which took me about 30 mins for some reason so the initial experience was a bit deflated – A Ethernet port would have been nice on it – The iPhone and iPad app looks fantastic similar to HomeKit – The web site is great but still in Beta – The flows/Scenes are very powerful and can do virtually anything you can think of – I was impressed how you make a flow - lots of different cards you can choose when the app is installed on Homey to help create a flow with the addition of Logic – I have created flows that I couldn’t do with the Vera unless you could code – If you are looking for a new controller I would definitely get this one – it’s opened up a new world for my automation”
“..it is neither. This is a triumph of marketing, claiming to "work with" many different brands of home automation device. The reality is that the vast majority such support is provided by a transient community of enthusiasts, rather than Athom, whose support response times are very slow, and often leave things unresolved or with the suggestion to 'contact the app developer'. For example there is no native heating scheduler, or security alarm, etc. So your and your family's experience is from a hotch-potch of enthusiastic coders.
It is primarily a mobile UI, but there is no way in the Homey App to provide a simple UI for family members to access or control just things of relevance to them (as exists in many competitors).
Lastly the paid backup service is not reliable. Having paid for over a year, when my first Homey died (1 month out of warranty), I fully expected to be able to buy a new Homey and restore from backup. Not so: no backups found. Support said their developers couldn't find what was wrong. So 5 days off work and 2 days of electricians to reinstall and re-setup >100 devices.”
“I've used home automation for many years, in a DIY capacity, but got fed up with things not working 100% of the time or having to fiddle. So I bought a Homey Pro, I've had it about 6 months now and it only works with 40% of my gadgets. It doesn't work with any of the Heltun light switches, the blinds I have require yet another box to control them and the app is a bit slow sometimes. I think it probably works if you only buy supported items, but is a bit restrictive on things you may just have at home. For example I could have bought blinds that only worked with Homey Pro, but then I'd have rubbish blinds.”
“Bought as a replacement for an ageing Zipato device where the cloud services were becoming flakey. Negative: Took about A WEEK for the Z-wave network to get established. Positive: Good User interface, 'flows' much easier to administer than Zipato 'rules' and 'scenes'. I genuinely question whether this is an alternative to more expensive, professionally installed systems. Would be interested how people think this compares to say, Loxone.”
