What’s the best smart home hub for 2021? And what’s going on lately with SmartThings anyways?! I’ve tested many of the best smart home hubs, and will …

source

42 thoughts on “Ultimate Smart Home Hub Comparison for 2021”

  1. @Smart Home Solver – Can I recommend the Argon One enclosure with the m.2 SSD "slice" as being a great little enclosure for Home Assistant?

    There's even a Home Assistant "ad-on" that handles the fan control on the Argon One AND reports the fan status and speed into Home Assistant

  2. I'm new to smart home. I only have an Ikea hub, but I need a temperature sensor for electric shutters. Which way to go? Xiaomi smart home is cheap, but will it work with Ikea smart blinds? I am most attracted to Smartthings for its simplicity, but now I don't know.

  3. Which hubs do support zigbee inbound group messaging like the Tradfri remotes?
    I know my 4th generation Echo doesn't.
    Looks like Home Assistant apparently does, but I'm not ready for that yet 🙃
    I connected the Tradfri remote to one of our bedroom lights. If I use it to turn the light off, Alexa has a meltdown and loses track of the bulb.

  4. How about node-red? Where does it come into play these days? I'm not a programmer, but have done a bunch with graphical languages like LabVIEW. What do you think of a rasberry pi loaded with the graphical language node-red…? Working with Alexa. I'm hoping that my plc brain can work through automating things around the place in this no code environment…thank you very much for a great review. It is helping me make decisions.

  5. Hi Reed!
    Why are you saying Nest Hub Max isn't a hub? If everyone is calling it a hub including Google describe it as a hub. Is Google advertising products that isn't what it initial is?

  6. WebCore and the old SmartThings IDE was difficult enough to get traction with, though I eventually did. The new one looks a lot prettier but it is an undocumented fuster cluck. Just before the ST community pretty much stepped through Death's door, I got some official looking responses to my cries for help with this new IDE asking for me post my code… and then crickets. If you didn't like editing a YAML file for Home Assistant, try to write a device handler in the ST IDE. For the moment, I'm sticking with ST because that's where my money is invested and it still have some life in it — though I may dabble in Home Assistant. I'm sure, now that I am no longer on the community mailing lists, etc., true to their usual dismal track record in communicating, Samsung will completely nix without warning the old cloud engines that run our Groovy ST code. Btw – your finale to this video, with the tear swiping was perfect — not just funny, but a spot on interpretation of the whole situation.

  7. Switched to Vera from Wink when Wink blindsided us with the new mandatory subscription nonsense. Wink had frustrated me with slow response times and semi frequent non responsiveness. Plus I seriously wanted to get rid of any unnecessary cloud connections.
    I was immediately surprised by the almost instant response times the Vera Plus had. Before I would trigger a momentary switch (gate or garage opener), wait with no response, hit the button again, and then they would start to open and then sometimes the 2nd button press would kick in and stop the opening/closing. With Vera there an instant response so I was instantly happier. Vera does have a cloud membership but it is much cheaper and with the improved usability it is worth it.

    There is a downside to the Vera. There have been a few short could outages which effect disable the ability to access gate control to access the property (but not a huge deal but irritating). The Vera app has a very fixed interface that wastes a bunch of space and when the Android device is rotated landscape it only shows 2 full buttons and 2 half buttons (very user-vicious).
    More complicated button actions are called "Scenes" and if you create scenes in the Android mobile app you cannot see them in the web interface. Vera says they know this but the response has been more of a "That's the way it is" instead of "That's a program error". After an update to the mobile app it now regularly shows a big red banner saying "No Internet" when both the phone and the house clearly have rock solid internet. When this happens control using mobile data can be a little hit-n-miss but I have a VPN from my phone to my house so I can control devices even when the mobile app is proclaiming "No Internet".
    If you want to do more complex automations you have to program them in a language called LUA which has no usable tutorials and which makes it so you are not really supported.

    End result is I'm going to be looking at switching to Home Assistant on an Intel NUC. It will remove 100% of cloud connections and I can make it 100% future proof by making it so no one can force an update that breaks the system.

  8. Home Assistant! Finally! I've tried a bunch of hubs and Hassio is, hands down, the best one. It can be frustrating and annoying at times but once you figure out what you're doing wrong it works perfect. I keep coming up with new ideas for automations and I have yet to find something I can't do with it.

  9. Are these necessary if you have an Echo Spot? I'm in a small studio apartment with only a few smart things: Hue lights, motion sensor, TV, etc. Or would having a smart hub with the Spot be more efficient?

  10. I think in the past 3 months I've seen 90% of all your videos. My new home is going to mimic your home set up very closely. One of the best channels I've subscribed to.

  11. I finally moved from smartthings to hubitat, and OMG it's sooo much better! The "ease of use" score given here is highly misleading in my opinion… Smartthings is actually not easier to use than hubitat… The UI looks better on the surface, but it's not usable at all.

    Adding "smart apps" was always a major pain in smartthings, plus it had some major design flaws (like the auto-door-lock smart app: if it thinks the door is open, then it automatically unlocks it! a huge security issue).

    I regret not moving to hubitat sooner, what a waste of time on smartthings

    Great video, I would simply correct the "ease of use" score of smartthings -> it's nowhere near the full green bar given. It's basically as hard as hubitat (if not more so, because slower, and requires phone app all the time) + it's quite nasty to deal with.

  12. Hi! Great comparison! Congratz! I have a question: What's the difference (advantages) of using a raspberry pi home assistant instead of a smart hub (zigbee + tuya) from aliexpress?

  13. Great video! By the way, why not include Domoticz? I know you pointed out, that you cannot review them all, but perhaps there is another reason not to include Domoticz.
    If I had the time, I would try them all 🙂

  14. I need help! If someone can explain. Let me explain my problem
    I have all smart in my house (thermostat, locks, 7 light switches, 4 smart outlets, 2 surround sound systems,5 alexa devices, 1 range 1 oven and probably more things. The problem is everything is connected directly to the Comcast router that should be at 600 megabytes per seconds, but it's running extremely slow. I'm guessing all the devices together connected to one wifi is the reason. How can I fix this?

  15. Hi, I have been using vera for about 8 years and it works great, In Mexico luxury houses are big and made of concrete and bricks, so sometimes I have to add 3 or four hubs, but Vera allows you to put salve hubs and wit that solution you can cover big areas. The UI is not that great, but you can use Roomie remote or Alexa and it works so good. Vera is compatible with 95% of the products on the market, at least with all that I have tested. There is a lot of information out there in case you need support. Customer Support is not that great, it takes days before they can solve a problem, but with the information that you can find on internet you can resolve almost all the issues.

  16. What about zemismart? They have a zigbee hub and pretty much every single thing you could need in a smart home. I want to purchase it but I don't know if tuya is safe? How do I know they won't collect personal data or something like that.

  17. Thanks for the great video. Have you tried any LoRa smart home systems like YoLink? I just set it up at my business and it's been super reliable, even with the hub 7 poured concrete floors below the furthest device.

Leave a Reply to Petter Ekhem Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *