Every system has pluses and minuses, it just comes down to your own priorities and needs.
SmartThings is very versatile and flexible, but it has some reliability issues. The company is very aware of that and have said that they are making that their top priority, but they said that six months ago and they aren’t there yet. So right now it’s a pretty high maintenance system, requiring a lot of tinkering to keep it going.
Wink integrates directly with Lutron; SmartThings does not. If you know what a raspberry pi is and you’re comfortable programming one, you can build your own bridge, as was mentioned. But if you’re looking for a “set and forget” system, smartthings isn’t it. Even if you are comfortable programming, it’s still a cloud-based system. Your programs don’t run on the hub that you buy, they run in the SmartThings cloud.
As far as security, many of us, myself included, use a different system for security. SmartThings lacks both reliability at present and some basic features that most purposebuilt security systems have. For example, if the Internet is down, SmartThings can’t send any notifications, not even to your own phone. And there’s no way to arm or disarm it under those conditions. There’s no exit/entrance delay. Yes, you can work around all of that, but you should be aware going in that you would have to work around all of that.
But if you like to tinker, you have a technical background, and you’re OK with a system that requires some fiddly maintenance every week or two, SmartThings can be a great choice. Certainly you can have a lot of fun with all the different devices you can work with even if what you had working great on Monday suddenly stops working on Tuesday when you didn’t make any changes.
If you travel a lot, and your wife Is expecting not to have to do maintenance on the system, then SmartThings probably isn’t for you, at least for anything mission-critical . Lots of threads in the forum from people traveling who got a call from the spouse because the lights were going on and off randomly or a siren was blaring and there was no way to turn it off. I’m not saying it happens to everyone, or that it happens every week, but it happens. It’s definitely a very different experience from Lutron. 