Home Automation platform is my current technology focus; therefore, I’d like to investigate as many options as possible before committing to one. After my obsessive online research, I have decided to go with local dedicated home automation platform/hub for their performance, security and versatility. The main contenders for me were Home Assistant, HomeSeer, openHAB and Hubitat. This is my HomeSeer review using 30 days, functionally unlimited trial version.
Background
HomeSeer (HS) was founded in 1999, and has far longer track record than Home Assistant, Hubitat, OpenHab etc. It started to support Z-wave technology as early as in 2003 while even at the phase of the technology being its infancy. (ref). HS charges premium price when compared to the other home automation platforms but some review compared HomeSeer to Crestron and Control 4, which are the real premium price home automation systems and compared to those HomeSeer may seem reasonably priced. Though in my opinion, they are bit different as HomeSeer like more newer local home automation platforms tries to provide platform independency while Crestron and Control 4 are more like Homekit, Alexa and Google Assistant that they are ecosystem itself and must be supported by the each devices. HS was reportedly given TopTenReviews.com gold award with #1 spot in Home Automation Systems in 2014 (ref) and also was listed on Top 18 Home Automation companies who will run your home on Huffpost back in 2016 (ref).
The last year, HomeSeer released a full new version, HS4. The brand new full platform overhaul could be a right timing to joint the bandwagon.
HomeSeer caught my attention because of its price point. This is one of the most expensive option amongst 4 Home Automation options I am considering. It may sound like a cons at first, but I have learned that there is ALMOST always be a reason why company can sustain their business while charging higher prices than competitors. Basically, it won’t certainly be a sole determinant but it is worth investigating trend that the company/product may have something superior going on keep customers choosing their products over the free/cheaper alternatives. Basically, it is far more important for me at this point the value over the simple price point. Here is my review of HomeSeer during my 30 days trial.
You can skip to Review section if you’ve read any of my other Home Automation platform review as below are just introduction about home automation and why I choose local home automation system over cloud based system.
What’s home automation?
Let’s talk about Home Automation itself. Home Automation is an integration of various network connected so called, smart home devices to perform sequences of actions i.e. routine. Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant routines or Homekit’s automation function are the examples of home automation.
For example, rather than voice control to just turn on the kitchen light, you can create automation such as when you say “good morning”, the blinds throughout home opens, multiple lights and TV in the kitchen turns on, coffee maker power turns on and unlock front door while turning off bedroom lights and living room fan.
Platform and cloud independence
If big 3 already supports home automation, why do you want home automation hub/controller unit like home assistant (HA)? There are several reasons but the biggest reason are two forms of independence, platform and cloud.
Platform independence
We live in Apple ecosystem; however, my security camera system is UniFi Protect. Unfortunately, they are not compatible with Homekit. I was able to make UniFi Protect to be Homekit compatible by using a software called, homebridge. This works really well and my Unifi Doorbell can make ring sounds to HomePod minis. If someone is looking for way to make a device Homekit compatible unofficially, my recommendation is try Homebridge first.
However, in my case we have other areas in home with Sonos speakers and not able to hear doorbell ring. So the real automation I like to do is UniFi Protect Doorbell push to announce “someone is at the door” on all my Sonos speakers throughout home. In fact, I want to do this in Japanese.
This is where dedicated home automation hub like HA plays a role. HA acts as home automation controller/brain unit and ties otherwise completely independent products from different venders to integrates together and make an automation.
Cloud independence
Cloud independence means home automation runs independent of internet connection. Both Alexa and Google Assistant always use internet connection as that’s where brain of the automation located. Local operation of home automation provide 3 primary benefits.
- Reliability: Home automation will continue operating even while internet service is down.
- Improved speed/low latency operation.
- Security/Privacy: No information sent across internet; therefore, much reduced risk for privacy breech.
Therefore, I am personally only interested in local home automation systems at this time.
Review
When reviewing local home automation hub/platform/system, I look at following 5 elements:
- Performance
- Integration
- Simplicity
- Support
- Cost
Performance
The performance includes both speed, stability and reliability. This is extremely important for home automation. Imagine the situation where you have a motion sensor to turn on stair light. If this is unreliable or takes several seconds, it is essentially same as doing nothing and you might as well push physical button.
When it comes to speed, the primary question is how fast local execution work. Needless to say, if any original component uses cloud access, even local home automation system won’t make that run in local. Basically, Alexa integration of the local home automation platform won’t make Alexa to run on your local network.
Non-functioning Lutron
Whatever the reason, Lutron integration of the HomeSeer 4 on my QNAP Docker setup was not working. I’ve tried rebooting the system and reinstalling the plugin. The first one or two turn on/off worked but after that it kept losing connection to the Lutron Main Repeater controller.
As an alternative test, I have used my Sonos Move as output. It has cached TTS audio file from Home Assistant. So clicking on play sound from HomeSeer to Sonos Move making sound are all local. This was indeed instant speed.
Another latency test is comparing how long the video stream latency is when the home automation hub is used. HomeSeer appears to be the king with 1 sec latency here at the quick glance; however, there is a reason behind this. HomeSeer UniFi plugin do not support video streaming but rather uses serial snapshots to give the ultra-low frame rate live stream video-like view. There are two primary pros for this approach. It actually starts near instant speed and actual snapshot stream is the true real time. Whereas, video stream is often buffered so there is a few seconds of delay not only for the start of the video stream but also actual live view once started also may have a few seconds of time lag. The major cons of the snapshot stream are ultra low frame rate and also lack of audio.
*In fact, I was able to do snapshot stream mode on the Home Assistant using Unifi Doorbell. It was indeed matching to HomeSeer in speed.
The previous tests were one step and not a true reflection of home automation. So this time, I used simple but multi-step home automation. The input/trigger action in this case is UniFi Protect Doorbell push. The output is target device doorbell ring event notification. For this test, I used Sonos Move (wirelessly connected) speaker to say “Someone is at the door” in Japanese but text to speech setup on HomeSeer was quite a bit of pain. Although I got Sonos Text to Speech (TTS) to work at one point, it no longer is for whatever the reason.
So here I used stored audio file for Sonos playing audio. This is functionally identical to Home Assistant as they cache the TTS audio after the first query to cloud.
The result indeed was identical to the Home Assistant with instant response. However, I have again encounter inconsistency issue here. The first ring worked but not the second and after.
Reliable stability
It may be due to my Docker setup, but HomeSeer failed miserably for reliability test here. Both Unifi Doorbell and Lutron only worked for the first input and rest failed to respond.
Integrations/plugins
Analogous to computer, tablet and smart phone application catalogue, home automation platform usability comes down to whether it supports smart home devices you own or not. Here the way to connect devices to HomeSeer is called plugins, which was called integrations in Home Assistant. Given the recent release of HomeSeer 4, the developers are still under the process of migrating to fully support HS4 version. Therefore, the versions based on HS3 is called legacy plugins. In my case, Lutron RadioRA 2 and Sonos are still in the legacy plugin status.
Below are summary of compatibility spreadsheet I created for my personal smart home devices.
Simplicity
The purpose of home automation is to simplify our life. While achieving this goal, many of us are willing to spend time and effort. However, the question is how much of the effort and time? It comes down to ease of setup and use of Home Automation system. My impression about HomeSeer 4 here is mixed.
Ease of Setup
HomeSeer have software license options for Rasberry Pi version and Linux/Windows version. The overall installation process are not much different from the others. There is also option to purchase pre-build hardware with HomeSeer 4 installed.
Having said this, I could not make Rasberry Pi version of HomeSeer 4 instant work on my Rasberry Pi 3b. I got to the configuration menu but the actual HomeSeer 4 instant never started no matter how many times I reinstalled/tried to update. So I had to give up on this route. I had wished installer would show some sort of overt error message there so I could know what to do/what I am doing wrong there.
UI centric Plugin Installations
Once the system is up and running on the docker, the plugin installs are more inline with what I would expect in 2021 or perhaps in 2000. Plugins are search on the plugin part of menu.
more intuitive than that of Home Assistant so long as it is HS4 compatible plugins.
After installation, we will go through configuration step to activate the plugins.
This takes us to step by step UI guide.
There is no magic to this, but this is what I expect from any program that can utilize user interface (UI).
Support
The world of smart home platform is rapidly evolving. What is standard today does not mean it remains as such next year, especially given the relative lack of gold standard here. What this means to Home Automation users is that good system requires an active and fast development to keep up with new integration as they come out. So support here refers to how is the Home automation platform development pace and quality. Will it be able to keep up with rapid pace of smart home catalogue explosion? Sadly, few plugins I have tested I must say I am disappointed with HomeSeer.
Lagging Plugin Implementation
Here are couple plugins I have notices absolute inferiority to the corresponding integrations in Home Assistant platform.
UniFi Protect Plugin
Simple comparison table what I had to do to get UniFi Protect Camera streaming working between HomeSeer 4 and Home Assistant. This plugin is HS4 upgraded version.
On HomeSeer 4, UniFi Protect Plugin required me to log into individual cameras and turn on anonymous snapshot access and enter the IP addressed based image file location to the camera configuration page of the HS4. This was counterintuitive at first.
Based on the screen shot above, I had originally assumed stream is where video streaming protocol e.g. RTSP address comes in. Then snapshot is just static image used on the tile. But it turned out Snapshot is what HS4 creates snapshot based live stream. The stream is what it uses when you try recording the video in HS4.
In contrast Home Assistant as well as Homebridge, all one has to do is supply UniFi Protect controller IP address and user credential to access the controller. Once the controller is connected to those platforms, individual cameras were recognized and true video stream were accessible. No further configuration of the individual camera is required. So here I think development of this plugin is lagging behind the competitors.
Sonos Text to Speech
Sonos plugin is still a legacy version. This by itself makes me quite a bit concerned. The HS4 upgrade were middle of the last year and I surmise developers must have had a beta access well before that. Sonos are relatively popular platform. So there is no HS4 version of the plugin makes me believe development pace of HomeSeer community is a bit slow paced.
Obviously if nothing was broken and functioning, then that could be a reason; however, Text to Speech through Sonos on HomeSeer 4 is unnecessary cumbersome and complicated.
Above is a screenshot of an action part of the Home Seer automation/routine, here they call events. Given HS4 has built in Action name Speak Something, I initially got quite a bit excited how easy HS4 can be. Because I had thought it would be as simple as selecting this option, then a text, and lastly select output speaker sourcei.e. in my case Sonos speakers. Unfortunately, it is far from it. There was no dropdown box to select client from. I kept searching what is host:instance format that represent my Sonos speaker. I thought it is a simple learning curve that every device in the system has standard naming convention e.g. device name:entity etc.
The part of complexity comes from the fact Sonos plugin remains at Legacy HS3 version, which made original Sonos plugin documentation no longer accessible directly from UI. One has to manually type in URL to the document. However, once you start reading the document, it is still confusing.
Basically, what it turned out is that I needed to create “intercept speaker device” by assigning a manual name. Then type in the exact manual name as target for TTS. From an beginner user perspective without understanding how HomeSeer 4 platform works, there are many areas this process could be simplified.
- Automatic creation of intercept speaker devices upon Sonos plugin installation
- Upon making Linkgroup, have a little checkbox for intercept speaker devices creation, which in turn makes proper name based on LinkGroup Name
- On the Action page, dropdown box to let user select Intercept Speaker device as target. *Currently, you have to manually type in the Intercept Speaker Devices Name as it won’t show up in selection list.
Relatively small community
The secondary objective measure that can potentially answer the question of support is to look at the developer community size because this is community developer driven platform. I don’t have direct developer numbers so let’s take a look at the community size. Below is a Reddit Community user numbers. Experienced users on the official forum and forum like reddit can provide far better technical support than most companies tech supports.
As you can see, HomoSeer community size is the lowest.
As for my personal experience, I posted a comment on one of HomeSeer official community site for question. The actual developers of the plugins responded fairly quickly.
Cost: $$$
As I started this review, I really care about the value of the product. I do not mind paying money if what I get is worth the price. HomeSeer is the most expensive platform amongst the four I am investigating. For my personal case below is what would cost me with comparison to the Home Assistant.
HomeSeer does not have a free software license. I could either buy pre-installed hardware (Windows or Rasberry Pi) but hardware value from HomeSeer is not great. I’d rather purchase my own, more powerful hardware. So in my case, I got Intel NUC10i7 myself.
MyHS Plans
HomeSeer has subscription service but it is primary for cloud video storage. The reason why I chose UniFi Protect for my surveillance camera system is to avoid the cloud storage. In fact, local home automation search is extension of that. So I won’t need cloud subscription from HomeSeer personally. On the other hand, Home Assistant cloud service provides me easy Alexa setup, natural voice Google TTS, and hands free remote access option. Although all these I could setup my own for free, I thought its worth giving the money to the developer and save my own time at least for now.
Fortunately or unfortunately, amongst the list of my personal need plugins, only two are the ones require me to purchase but those two are important ones for me that I MUST use. Basically, it is quite a bit more expensive product. The worst part though is UniFi plugin and Lutron plugin are not fully functional and inferior to Home Assistant integrations that are free. So value is quite a poor here.
Conclusion
As of April 2021, my personal recommendation for HomeSeer4 is avoid it. There are better system with more reliability at cheaper cost and more user friendly. The weakest link is rather smaller size of developer community. This may become vicious cycle. Even though this is the oldest amongst the four systems I was interested in, what I experience is a fallen empire.
HomeSeer 4
$$$
Pros
- Primary UI driven System
Cons
- Lacks reliability
- Slow developer community
- Low value