Abode has a big sale on for Black Friday, with some bundles at 50% off.
This is a standalone security system with excellent camera integration and its own home automation rules. You will need to pay a monthly subscription of about $20/month if you want professional monitoring (which should qualify for most insurance company discounts) or six dollars a month if you’re going to self monitor.
Some models are compatible with HomeKit and the system itself has a lot of nice features. It also acts as a hub for both Zigbee and zwave, although not all devices are supported so check the list. But like many security systems you can only use their own branded sensors to trigger alarms, the others are just for home automation rules.
And it has excellent camera integration, including allowing the people at the professional monitoring center to see your camera feed if the alarm is triggered.
In the past, a number of community members have used this for their security system and smartthings for the home automation because it has some of the easiest integration if you’re willing to go through Ifttt.
For example, it’s one of the very few security systems which allows you to trigger on either a security system mode change or the security system being triggered, so you could use that as the IF and then smartthings as that to turn on lights or unlock doors or whatever else you have on smartthings.
It’s also one of the very few security systems that allows you to arm or disarm without a pin code, and you can trigger that change off of Geopresence.
It also has a pretty slick app and works well for multiple family members, not just the primary user.
All of which is to say it’s one of the few inexpensive security systems that fits well with a smartthings type home automation paradigm.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s a reasonable candidate if you’re willing to pay a monthly subscription and you’re OK with an IFTTT integration.
This page lets you compare the features of the basic and pro plans:
And here’s their IFTTT service:
the other Switchbot devices don’t have this issue.
