Trying to like Smartthings, Wink keeps winning. Help!

Hello!

I am trying out Smart Things and Wink. I really like ST, but Winks Interface is so much easier to use. I am hoping there are some tweaks that can be suggested for ST.

I really like ST for these reasons:
1.) Solid Community Support
2.) ZWave, ZigBee, IP Support is great. Really responsive when turning devices on and off.
3.) SmartApps
4.) Alerts/Actions

What I do not like, and I am hoping there are some workarounds:

The screens/tiles are not intuitive

  1. Is there a way to make the shortcuts/screens more intuitive?
  2. Why can’t the icons be named? If you have many devices it’s hard to find them. It would be nice to go into SmartThings and see easily by room or type a list of controllable items.
  3. Also dimming. With Wink you can just slide across an icon to dim, With ST you have to go into settings of each device.

Any help would be nice. I am really trying to stay with SmartThings.

2 Likes

You need a dashboard. Check out these 2:

1 Like

Are these 3rd party developed apps?

Does Smartthings have a support Dashboard?

I am hesitant to use a 3rd Party dashboard for my mothers house :slight_smile: It just needs to work!

This is very helpful.

these were made by members of the community. They both require some initial configuring to work with the equipment you have. for example, if you dont have a motion detector, you wouldnt want that widget showing. Once you have either one of them working, its easy and very intuitive to use.

with these dashboards you arent tied to the smartthings app to use the system. You can use it from any web browser, including PC, Mac, a tablet, or a phone.

You need one of the dashboard for your mother/wife for sure. My wife was giving up on ST until the dashboard. Hopefully Smartthings will have something out soon maybe at CES. I saw at Homedepot buy 2 link bulbs and get a wink hub for $20. Now that’s a deal.

Hi @m_a, we’ve been asking for this for quite some time. Maybe we’ll see this capability added soon, but for now here’s a work around:

Thanks for the responses. Unfortunately that puts Smart Things out of the running for me. I’ll be returning it. Hopefully they will create a great dashboard at somepoint!

-M

I’d be curious to hear about your experience with Wink. I’ve just given one to my brother as kind of an experiment. I don’t think his family would have found SmartThings very usable.

@scottinpollock I have been using it for a few days and I have to say the setup and usability is very easy. For a novice to open up the app and find a light they want to turn on and off is breathtakingly simple.

As far as usability Wink is far ahead of Smart Things.

I am having trouble figuring out why I would want to deploy Smart Things. Smart Things seems perfect for someone who is technical and wants to tinker. ( someone like me ) But ultimately something like this just needs to work.

Yeah… this led my decision to gift my brother a Wink instead of SmartThings. I really do appreciate SmartThings’ granularity, but have recently run out of enthusiasm due to everything being so obscenely slow.

So, have you built many robots yet? I am curious what the capabilities are there.

I have both Wink and ST in my home, I use the Wink for my Pivot Power, and my GE Link bulbs. And ST for the rest of stuff, Wink has gotten a lot better, and simple robots are very easy to set up.

A lot of my more complex uses for ST revolve around motion, so I haven’t really test out Wink. I don’t know if it even supports any of the z-wave motion detectors.

Also, I haven’t joined my monoprice door sensors to wink, so I don’t know of those work yet. I’m keeping Wink as a back up currently, they just seem to have so much more energy moving forward currently than ST right now.