Almond+ gets very good reviews as a WiFi router, not so much as a home automation hub.
you can have a great home automation system now – – at a cost of $5000 a room
At the present time there are a couple of well established, very expensive Systems that do everything that everybody wants, including incorporating security, visual, and home automation in a reliable system. But they cost around $5000 a room Plus significant annual fees… Multi millionaires use them, but not really anybody else. Control 4 and Crestron are both in this group. If I could afford a control 4 system, I’d absolutely get one. But it’s way outside of my budget.
If all you need is lights on a schedule and some voice control, you can have a very reliable system for around $300 a room
If you’re looking at the low-end, say $200-$500 per room, you can get very reliable control for lighting and window coverings on a timed schedule by going just with Lutron Caseta. You can also get voice control through HomeKit and add a lock to the system. If you only need lights, you can do the same thing for even less money with just echo and the Phillips hue bridge. You can stay in the same budget and add a HomeKit lock.
The problem comes when you want conditional logic and sensors and your budget is $500 a room or less
Inexpensive Systems that do just lights on a schedule have been around for a long time. What the advertising for SmartThings and its competitors promise is something much more like a control 4 system: a truly smart home, that uses sensors of various types, combined with conditional logic, to change what devices do, and when.
This technology exists: it’s the basis of the very expensive systems. But when you look at the home automation hubs that are available in the lower price range, you find that they all have pluses and minuses, and they all get rated at around 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 stars on Amazon. Some people love their set ups. Some people can’t get them to work at all. Most people find that they just aren’t very reliable, or they have significant missing features, or they work great for a few months, some new feature gets pushed out, and a lot of existing stuff breaks. This is true for all of these hubs. Sometimes the hub seem to be pretty good, but the business model is sketchy, and there’s an ongoing danger of the company going out of business.
There’s no one market leader, and there are customers jumping in all directions between them.
If reliability is your top concern, Staples Connect (whose primary market is small businesses) has made that their top priority from the beginning. But they got that stability by significantly limiting the features that they offer and the devices that their system works with. There’s no Geopresence, no voice control, no IFTTT channel, and a choice of only a couple of sensors of each type. If you look at their forums, the main complaints are that there are so few choices and so few updates.
Insteon gets dinged for having old technology, although they are significantly investing in upgrades, including their new homekit and AllJoyn hubs. But the new stuff doesn’t have enough device choices yet, and doesn’t play with all of the old stuff. Because they’re in the middle of such a significant transition, it’s really hard to judge where they will be in a year.
Wink is literally in bankruptcy. It may survive, it may not. Amazon stopped stocking the hub about a month ago, never a good sign. Again, a year from now we should know a lot more about their trajectory.
Works with Nest and HomeKit both seem to be reliable but neither has sensors or trigger logic yet. Both are adding new devices all the time. My expectation is we’ll be able to look at them as potential candidates by the summer of 2016. But for now there just isn’t enough there yet.
So that brings us back to the existing cheap hubs: SmartThings, Vera, Zipato, Homeseer, Lowe’s Iris, PEQ, Abode, Securifi Almond+, Fibaro, a couple more.
Some have Geopresence, some don’t. Some have voice control, some don’t. Some have text notifications, some don’t. Some can run locally, some require the Internet for almost everything. Some have better rules engines than others. Some push out changes without allowing them to be delayed, others don’t. Some have good camera integration, some don’t. They offer different mixes of technologies. Some have a monthly fee, some don’t. Some allow custom programming, some don’t .
No matter which one you get, there will be features from one of the other ones that you’ll wish you had.
The future is coming, but it’s not here yet
Everyone is waiting to see what a full-featured HomeKit system, and a full-featured weave/thread system, and a full-featured “works with nest” system, will have to offer. but we’re just not there yet. My own guess is summer 2016 for the Homekit and maybe as much as another year for the weave/thread. Even if the candidates in this group are $1000 more than the current cheap hubs, they will put a lot of design pressure on those.
So as always, different things are going to work for different people. If all you need right now is some light control based on timed schedules or voice control, either the Hue bridge or the Lutron Caseta system can solve that problem now.
If you want more complex conditional scheduling based on sensors, and you’re in the low-end price group, the odds are you’re going to end up with the same 3 star rating no matter which hub you pick, although you may have different reasons for each rating.
So it’s up to you how much you want to invest now, or if you want to wait and see if the market brings us better options next summer.
I chose to go ahead and do a phase 1 now, knowing that I may well want to replace everything I have in the Fall of 2016. But I don’t think there’s any inexpensive system available now that can really break into that four-star category, let alone 4 1/2, unless you’re going to limit it to just what the Hue bridge can do.
That’s why my own suggestion is to pick specific use cases that you want to solve right now and evaluate each potential candidate against those specific use cases. Don’t worry about potential or long-term promises. All of that’s going to change by next summer anyway. Don’t worry about features that you think you might use some day. Just look at what would give you the right return on investment right now, including issues like reliability. And know that once HomeKit and weave/thread are serious competitors, the whole set of offerings will probably change.
FWIW.