Hi, I am brand new to SmartThings. I am coming from Insteon and have some questions. I wasn’t too happy with the reliability of the Insteon platform. I am looking for a system where I can set scenes/schedules to make certain lights turn on at certain times. Is that do-able with ST?
Also, I am using my Insteon controller to make a virtual 3-way switch, one that I dont have the appropriate wiring for a traditional 3way switch. Is this possible with ST?
Thank you!
Virtual three ways, yes, SmartThings is very good at that.
Reliability, however, is a different question. Since November 2015 I have yet to go nine days without an impactful failure from SmartThings. Sometimes the failures are small, and just require opening the app and closing it again, or popping the batteries in a device and putting them back in. Sometimes they are pretty major. For example, right now a number of people have reported that sunset-based times have stopped working for them, and the temporary solution was to put in a fixed time of day for the rule. Another group of people had a large number of devices stop communicating after a recent firmware update.
Neither of these are all customers all the time, but many customers run into some problem every few months.
The official status page doesn’t get updated for all problems, even those that affect most customers.
There is an unofficial “first bug reports” Page in the community – created wiki which tends to be more comprehensive:
http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Bug:_First_Reports
I will be surprised if in general smartthings is more reliable than Insteon, just because SmartThings is a cloud-based system, but “all home automation is local” and I would absolutely believe that one individual household would find that smartthings was more reliable.
But at present SmartThings’ primary advantage relative to competitors in the same price range is its versatility. Stability, not so much.
The company is very aware of the issue and has committed to improving stability as their top priority, but as the recent update showed, they are just not there yet.