I’ve waited to setup my smart stuff until I received my blue series switches. I bought a SmartThings hub when aeotec released their hub. I’ve installed blue switches in about half my house so far. It seems like SmartThings has lost a lot of functionality in the last few months. I can’t do more advanced things that it seems like others are doing. I can’t program switches to do certain things per amount of on’s or off’s. I’ve read that you can set lights up to flash certain color for tornado warnings, I can’t seem to do it without advanced functionality. Looked like SmartThings had plugins for myQ, Hue’s, Nest, which all aren’t functional now.
What hub has a lot of flexibility and do any other hubs have matter support in progress?
Components I have in the house right now is blue series switches, nest thermostat, nest door lock, Logitech circle doorbell, and hue bulbs. I have apple HomeKit hub and Philips hue hub.
Hubitat is a popular option for ppl migrating from ST. The platform offers some similarities (groovy) and has a generally friendly community and helpful support staff. The platform was at the heart of my house for a couple of years. So long as you keep things simple, it can be reliable. I found it to be plagued by nagging performance slowdowns that had no discernable cause, but it works well for many.
I switched to a beta unit from Oh-La Labs, the Collective Core, about 3 months ago, and am ecstatic. It’s basically a highly optimized linux distro running on much better hardware. Services are open-source, with each sandboxed using podman containers. Z2m, zwave JS, node-red, and even HA are all given their own containers, tied together with a mosquitto MQTT broker. All local processing, unbelievably reliable (1 reboot due to a power outage in the past 3 months, NO slowdowns/reboots otherwise), and easy to use… containers are enabled / disabled with scripts provided by Oh-La, taking away almost all the config headaches. No UI yet (still a beta), so I use HA as a dashboard server. All my automations and control are in NR, which I found was far easier to learn than I’d feared.
HA yellow looks like it’s similar- curated hardware and software that make your experience easier. Oh-La just arrived at my door sooner, so that’s where I’m at.
I started on Hubitat, liked the platform and what you can do with it, but I didn’t like the very limited dashboard options and ended up wanting to do ‘more’ that wasn’t supported. That lead me in turn to Home Assistant which I’ve been very happy with. It’s come a long way even in the last year from a cli heavy approach to moving more and more configuration to the GUI. There are still some limited pieces that require changing the config files, but it’s more the occasional one-off at this point. I also wanted something local (both of those), without a mandatory subscription that I also wasn’t at risk of losing if the company went under, etc (more HA). HA is open source software you also can’t beat the breadth of integrations and support that’s generated by its community along with the amount of info out there for it. There is a regular monthly update schedule with a lot happening and a ton of added support or feature enhancements, etc.
The flipside of that is that there’s a lot happening and that’s not for everyone. UI changes have happened a few times since I’ve been using it, I’ve had a couple upgrades that had ‘breaking changes’ that affected me where config parameters changed up some and I had to update to match the new way of doing things and then it was good again. It’s somewhat what you make of it as you likely won’t need or want to upgrade every month, but if you wait for too long you also increase the odds of more attention being needed because something may very well have changed.
I’ve been using Hubitat for several years now and love it. I highly recommend that platform. I have hundreds of devices and hundreds of automations and everything works quickly. One nice thing with Hubitat is that if you find that one hub is not enough for your needs, you can add others and link them together. I use 3 hubs linked together myself to help share the extreme load I put on my home automation.
All roads eventually end up at Home Assistant, because it scales with your home needs to add power and utility. You can start on a $50 device and upgrade to a full blown server VM with multiple cores and SSD/NVME drive (like me :)).
There is a learning curve for sure, but it is becoming more and more accessible day by day.
Also, you can bring in your ST “things” into HA to try it out, then slowly move over to the platform as you get more familiar with it!