SmartThings vs Hubitat - please share your experience!

Quite a few power users are using both, so hopefully you’ll also hear from some of them.

That said, the following would concern me:

If you’re looking for something plug-and-play, neither system is it. Also, that’s a somewhat unusual selection of devices that you’ve listed unless you are in the UK or Mexico. Most people in the US are not using Aeotec for lighting control.

Both ring and echo will be cloud integrations, which removes a lot of the advantages that Hubitat offers over smartthings. The smartthings integration with echo is much better, just as an example.

Network Planning

Also, Samsung devices are zigbee while Aeotec are Zwave. The iris keypad is also zigbee. I don’t see any zigbee repeaters on your list, which is going to be a problem.

Read post 11 in the following thread, then go up to the top and read the whole thread and you’ll get a better sense of why network protocol helps shape individual device selection. ( The topic title is a clickable link)

Putting everything in Context

Reading both the Hubitat and the smartthings forums is certainly a good idea, but I think we would need to know more about your goals for the project in order to give good advice. To step up a level from device selection first.

So…

What country are you in, how big is the home, is it just you or are there other people as well?

how much time are you willing to Invest in both the initial set up and weekly maintenance?

How tolerant is your household of unexpected downtime or glitches? (While you might think that smartthings would have the advantage here as an older more established system, its cloud dependency and the fact that you can neither delay nor refuse updates adds significant instability.)

you haven’t said anything about security, which is fine, but that’s a whole additional set of use cases so if you were expecting to use this system for security, we would need to know that also. But there are many people, including myself, who use a completely separate system for security.

To summarize

The devices you’ve listed will not work well for you regardless of whether you chose smartthings or Hubitat because of the specific protocols involved.

The fact that you have to know that means that both of these two systems require a fairly significant amount of technical knowledge and neither company is particularly good at explaining that upfront. Hubitat was intended for a professional installers and power users. Samsung just isn’t very good at this kind of pre-purchase counseling for any of their products.

When researching Any smart home device candidates, unless you are an expert user, it’s best to start with the use cases: how you want to use the devices and what you want to accomplish.

Once you have a clear picture of those factors, then you can start selecting individual devices.

And, by the way, I’m not saying that you can’t use all of the devices on your list. I’m just saying that you would need additional devices that you haven’t listed to make everything work.

Devices vs Projects

Because of all of these issues, I’ve moved this thread to projects so we can give you answers customized to your own needs and preferences rather than just a head to head review of the engineering specs on the two hubs. :sunglasses:

If you would prefer just a straight specification and performance comparison of the two hubs, we can go back to the devices category and do that, I’m just concerned that limited to that discussion you’ll end up with a system you don’t like no matter which hub you pick.

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