“Leading up to last year around May I was very in to home automation, but automations dependant on the cloud. It was good, it was impressive but then one night when the weather was extremely warm my internet went off. I discovered the hard way that I couldn't turn my lights / fans / TV off in the 'new' usual way and had to go round pressing bloody switches :( After a bit of searching on the internet I was torn between Home Assistant, Samsung smartthings and the (now considered beautiful) Hubitat..... Anyways, after a tinkerer's dream and moving on 12 months or so I decided it was time for my 78yo dad to have his home automated, and he loves it. Hubitat is by far one of the best on the market, some would say it's marmite - love it or hate it. I'm in the love camp, it's a very very powerful piece of kit and has one of the best communities backing it up. The range of compatible devices is quite extent and theres getting more on every update. There's many community drivers too and it all works locally without cloud integration / internet (cloud integration is available too - but needs internet to work!). Vesternet were brilliant getting my order sent to me and it was here in a couple of days. 5 stars”
“Brilliant piece of kit although not for the faint hearted. This is extremely flexible and well thought out.
Sadly, it has not got the best user interface prefering to run absolutely everything via drop down lists that only engage when you move away from them - this is frustrating and when there is only one item of input, where do you move to? Large areas are missing back/cancel buttons meaning you can get stuck in loops too - it is not enough to use the browser back button as it remembers context dropping you right back in the middle of any loop. One of the big selling points is customizability but it is let down by a lack of documentation which is incomplete and has very few examples. The fanboys will rant at you telling you there are plenty of example in the forums but good luck finding them and it is poorly managed and poorly laid out - the excuse is that SmartThings is no better - as if two wrongs make a right.
Despite this, and to move away from the very minor bad points, it is absolutely amazing. Extremely fast and effecient and there is little you cannot do with it. If you are a programmer like me you will probably be at home almost instantly - I have already written two drivers for things that have not got any yet and intend to publish them. There are plenty of drivers that users have made and they are largely good. I do worry about malicious code and so find myself combing through work before I use any 3rd party stuff.
For anyone just starting out, the first user app to search for and install is "Hubitat Package Manager" - again it has the silly drop down nonsense but it will really help you get all those missing drivers and apps users have developed - much better than trawling the horrible forums.
Would highly recommend and despite the negative points, it was definately a worthwhile purchase for me!”
“Great product, make sure to research before purchase; it doesn’t lead you, you lead it. It’s fairly straightforward once you’ve researched and the impact it has on your ease of life is disproportionate”
“Excellent service from Vesternet as always. The Hubitat was bought to replace my existing Smarthings hub as I finally got fed up of constant changes breaking all the automation inmy house.
If you are a total novice to home automation and want a pure end user experience this may not be the hub you are looking for. If you are technically minded and already famiar with IOT then Hubitat provide excellent features for more complex setups that YOU have full control over. Interface with it in almost anyway you wish and stop large corporations messing up those complex integrations and automations you spend hours perfecting.
It's not perfect but it's the most perfect solution I've found so far.”
“Quick delivery and service by vesternet as always.
I think the hub is aimed at a tinkerer or enthusiast rather than an average consumer, most things work out of the box but it really comes into it's own if you're willing to go deeper into it. You can do everything from just installing the standard integrations to using community written ones to writing your own.
I was looking at moving everything off my Home Assistant set up and working wifi devices via IFTTT but discovered a community app to connect HA directly into HE, it's great. My favourite automation so far is with a sonoff zigbee button that lets me turn on and off all the lights I use if I go downstairs at night to let the dog out and that's a combination of Hue and WIFI lights. It not only works in it's own way but pulls together all my Hue and HA stuff together under one rule making engine, I'm loving it.”
“The hub itself appears ok but I have had issues with ghost nodes and zwave radio corruption. That wouldn’t be too bad if Hubitat customer support replied with a decent level of support but unfortunately you get half hearted responses days apart which don’t even answer the question you posed
Apparently a new firmware will correct the current bug but they don’t know when it will be released”
“I’m not quite ready to make the full jump away from smartthings, so the addition of the C7 meant I could share the two platforms and introduce things like Google voice notifications.
I’ve installed a Fiat few additional codes and the process is much better than on the ST IDE.
So far very happy.”
