I actually started out with Smartthings a few years ago and added Actiontiles at first for tablet Dashboards to my house, but a few weeks ago i took the plunge and installed Home Assistant.
First off, the installation was a breeze and not at all complicated as some older posts might have you believe, integration with Smartthings went smooth as well. 5-10 minutes in i had access to all my Smartthings connect devices and HA discovered several devices and integrations on first install that i wasn’t able to before.
After running HA for a few weeks I have made integrations to my Nest doorbell, Nest minis, Google Text-to-speech, Volumio, kitchen appliances (home connect) Air conditioner, Energy monitoring, fully kiosk, roborock and much, much more.
Even the dashboards allow for much more control, both in terms of devices as well as design. And of course Automations I never thought was possible before, it really is night and day when it comes to how feature-rich the HA experience is and not a single hitch so far.
Now, I don’t want to ditch Smartthings as I will use that as an endpoint to connect all my Zigbee and Z-wave devices (around 80 so far). I´m not really interested in using HA as a Zigbee or Z-wave hub seeing how many seem to have issues with flaky connections and USB dongles etc.
Feel I made a decent choice with this and haven’t had a single glitch although it’s only been running a few weeks now as I mentioned, but offloading or not using HA with the task of connecting Zigbee and Z-wave devices was a no-brainer as Smartthings does this so well.
Funny thing is that the devices seem to respond faster through HA then Smartthings, I suppose that’s down to the cloud API being fast enough while not having the overhead of the Smartthings app. At one point in the transition I couldn’t get Smartthings to respond, but it worked through HA I guess the public API was still working as intended.
Really the only thing I miss at this point is Google Assistant API to allow actionable notifications like Alexa offers. but until then, Android actionable notifications will have to do.
I guess my point in all this is, you don’t have to make a choice of returning to Smartthings, just grab your Smartthings hub and use that as a middle-man for your devices and use HA for automation management.
Personally I couldn’t go back to only using Smartthings, HA simply has too much to offer but Smartthings handles Zigbee and Z-wave device enrollment much better.