Viable alternative to ST

Honestly, I have actually been hesitant to initiate either of those as I don’t want to see any effort wiped out in an not fully thought out upgrade. I have had it happen in other platforms. Sometimes what is best for the companies bottom line is sadly not best for the users who have already purchased into the system. You don’t have to read too far back in these forums to find president.

I did transition from ST to HomeSeer and am fairly happy with the change. The biggest issue I had with ST was that it was not available when the network was down. I upgraded to the newest hub on ST when it came out but even that did not do the trick. I have a Zee S2 which is essentially a Raspberry PI device running linux. The Homeseer software is available to run on Windows and as a trial so I would highly recommend getting a zwave usb stick (about $40) and give it a try before committing to HS. I am seriously considering moving it to a PC anyway only because the Zee S2 has a fairly low amount of resources and I have a lot of devices. The amount of devices and granularity of rules were also part of the consideration of moving to HS from ST. As to the Zigbee support, that can be added as an interface on HS.

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I have to wonder if these outages are due to changes they announced at CES and trying to consolidate this with Connect and other things. It might be a lot of prep work.

These outages are a major reason why I am not going to Webcore. I do not want 100% of my functionality going over the Internet to yet another system in the cloud.

This is also why I have very carefully planned what devices I am using in my home. My use of smart bulbs is very limited (hall and 2 sconce lights). Everything is on smart dimmers or switches so if the whole thing comes crashing down, I can get up and flip a switch. That includes the plug-ins. My plug in dimmers come on if I cycle through the on/off on my lamp. I am running the Ecobee and it will work if the cloud is down. I would lose my Ring cameras but the door bell would still work.

Never 100% invest critical systems into a third party without a very good SLA (Service Level Agreement) that has some teeth if it fails. SmartThings is a low cost but very customization solution. I have a friend who does high end installed home automation and audio systems. You are going to fork out lots of money for the stuff he has. I have played with Crestron. It is expensive and they don’t let you get involved in the programming. It is how these companies make lots of money coming back to reprogram things for you. I like to tinker so I do this.

I do what I can. UPSes on critical devices. I am looking at a cellular backup in case my Internet goes down. Not only does Samsung have to worry about its platform but all the other connectors to other platforms out there in the cloud, like Ecobee, Ring, Amazon, Google, Harmony, etc. Their outages affect the perceived up time of SmartThings. And, yes, it runs in Amazon and Amazon will be the first to tell you that you will not have 100% up time. I think they only say 99.99%.

So what if the system goes down a few hours? I have to hit the light switch instead of my motion detector controlling it. I have my code for my door. I carry a key. Tougher prospect for someone who is disabled. I get it. I was unable to walk 6 months of last year. But, for what I paid and what I am asking it to do, it works great. But, the reason is that I am very picky about what I use and ask it to do.

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I would have to say home assistant
But again, for those who are jumping ship its not always greener on the other side

I just recently bought a rpi and the installation of home assistant was extremely frustrating
It might be that i was out of luck but HA was under going a upgrade process and lot of things were being broken in the process, i was locked out for 2 days waiting for them to update HA bug fixes before being able to really able to use it

With all that being said, I do not think i will be jumping ship just yet. But if i had critical automation to manage, i would prolly be putting its on 2 platform just to be safe

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My experience has been OK. Not really bad to be honest.

In general I tend to integrate other systems (wemo, ecobee, nest, HomeLink, August, etc). The advantage this approach is that these systems are popular and typically integrate with other systems (like Google Home, and Alexa) and also generally come with their own apps. Basically I hedge my bets…

So, I am not strictly tied to ST I can always go native if I need to.

I suspect what we are seeing is churn related to Samsung gradually incorporating ST into their ecosystem (or vice-vera). Hopefully it stabilizes.

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Very good example of how different things will work for different people. :sunglasses:

SmartThings will be an excellent product for many people, particularly those who like to tinker, and who place low cost support of complexity above a long MFOP. ( maintenance free operating period). Choice is good.

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I agree with you on not having 100% of your Automations defined in webCoRE (Pistons).

When it comes to lighting and taking advantage of one of only a couple ways that allow local processing, I encourage everyone to setup some or all (where they can) of these rules in Smart Lighting so they have some sort of control when the cloud begins raining cats and dogs.

As for the rest of your Automations, there isn’t any difference between Routines and Pistons as they all run in the cloud.

I totally get what you are saying about not having/wanting an additional layer (another cloud based system) alongside ST also being cloud based, which would be a great question for the webCore team as to how their environment is setup for redundancy / load balancing / automatic fail over and how often they experience downtime on their own.

@anon36505037 @ady624 - Any details / insight around this?

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If there was local processing that would solve 90% of my issues with platform outages. Thankfully I was still able to use the Aeon Minimotes with this most recent outage, so was able to change from armed to disarmed and not trigger the alarm even though the ST app was not loading. This was not the case in some previous outages.

As others have said, would pay for an add-on (USB ports available on V2!) or a new hub with local processing if it could work through most of these outages.

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The local processing was what I liked most about Vera, Indigo and Homeseer. What you give up in local control though is the maintained compatibility with other devices that require their own ecosystem.

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Yep. This is why I have made ST “one component of many” rather than putting all my eggs in the one basket. Ecobee, Hue, Alexa, Tasker, tp-link and now smartlife etc. all function on their own as well as with each other. So if ST drops off my nice rules die out a bit, but the functions remain intact.

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and my chickens from the eggs:

Nest, Hue, Alexa, LIFX, Yale, Wemo, Flashlight, Candles, Lighter, Propane Heater, and Glow sticks

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Perfect! Thanks Robin.

I have seen it all before in my installed SmartApps, just didn’t put 2 and 2 together :slight_smile:

That explanation I think will assist a lot of users who previously didn’t want to use it based on thinking that Pistons were executing elsewhere .

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Wow $200 for the intro device and then they nickel and dime you for any software add-ons such as Zwave and Zigbee integration. I am looking at HASS.io to run HA with a gui. ST is way too unstable to trust.

It does introduce that much more cloud dependency and uptime of the ST servers unfortunately.

HA is nice, but it still has it’s limitations. It does have an easy TTS integration but currently doesn’t support a lot of secure Z-wave devices like those using Barrier Class ie Garage Doors.

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That should not be possible. The only two ways to use a minimote to arm/disarm smart home monitor are either with a routine or with webcore, and neither of those run locally. Multiple community members have reported that they were not able to disarm during the most recent outage, which is the expected behavior.

Are you on one of the betas? Because I would think if they had made a change of that magnitude they would have announced it.

One of the selling points of the new ADT/smartthings security panel is that it can be armed or disarmed locally.

@jody.albritton

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I don’t expect perfection. Everyone has their own standard, but mine is a maintenance free operating period (MFOP) of at least six months, and preferably 12.

I get that from quite a few low-cost home automation systems of the simpler type: HomeKit, Philips Hue Bridge, Logitech Harmony, even Wink.

My best MFOP from SmartThings since November 2015 has been nine days. :disappointed_relieved:

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The reason I asked the question around webCoRE was that @kahilzinger doesn’t want to run WebCoRE because of additional cloud based servers being introduced into the equation. And with the explanation that @anon36505037 gave is that once you have saved your Pistons, they are saved and executed from within the same exact ST cloud as how a Routine is executed from within ST and each Piston stored as a child app in ST. The only dependency then is if the webCoRE servers themselves go down, you wouldn’t be able to modify or create a new Piston.

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The only functionality that I lost was mobile app, IDE, and cloud to cloud (Google Home was what caused me to even notice the outage). All my routines executed as expected which shocked me. I have Osram button switches that still worked even though most of the lights I use them for are not local (Ikea + Trendsetter)

It is like the hub was communicating with the server, but nothing else that required a log in could.

Im working on an app :wink:

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