Conflicting rules when automating lights and other questions

[JDRoberts]

The short answer is that core will be able to do everything you want.

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

There are a lot of different pieces to different longer answers, so we can go into those if you want.

The main difference between routines and other smart apps is that a routine can be used as an official widget and they have their own section in the smart things mobile app, so that makes it a bit quicker to find. They do not run locally. (Neither does core.)

The only smart app that can run locally is the official smart lighting feature, so you will see community members choose smart lighting for specific use cases for that reason.

But otherwise, the answer to pretty much any complex set up these days will be core.