Continuing the Home Automation platform as the current technology focus; the last in review is Hubitat Elevation. The specific version of testing is Hubitat Elevation version 2.2.7.126 with hardware version Rev C-5. To me the best word to describe the Hubitat is “simplicity”. The simplicity in the world of Home Automation is a compliment. In a nutshell, this is the most user friendly, intuitive platform I have tested to this date. When Hubitat supports it, they are often the most intuitive and simplest implementation. The limitation; however, is range of integration/product support as well as depth of the implementation itself. If Hubitat meets your need, this is the best solution.

Background

Hubitat Elevation was publicly released in 2018 as a home automation platform that is cloud independent (ref). Amongst the four platforms I have test so far, Home Assistant, HomeSeer and openHAB, Hubitat is the youngest of all. It is gaining a ground fairly quickly with strong fan base. Unlike the other three platforms, Hubitat Elevation comes in a software pre-installed, single hardware option. This means you have to purchase Hubitat Elevation to use it. However, this is inline with a core design theme of Hubitat in my opinion, which is “keep it simple.” In February 2019, Hubitat, Inc. announced the second generation version of Hubitat Elevation that came with built-in Zigbee and Z-wave radios (ref).

The most user friendly local home automation platform

If I describe Hubitat Elevation to others, the key terms are “intuitive”, “simple” and “user friendly”. Hubitat is the platform that understands importance of the user friendliness. This was especially apparent and appreciated as my previous assessment was openHAB3, which was the least user friendly platform.

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 (OpenHAB)? 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.

This is where dedicated home automation hub like Hubitat Elevation plays a role. Hubitat Elevation 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.

1. Reliability: Home automation will continue operating even while internet service is down.
2. Improved speed/low latency operation.
3. 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:

1. Performance
2. Integration
3. Simplicity
4. Support
5. Cost

Performance

The performance includes speed, stability and reliability. This is extremely important for home automation. Imagine the situation where you have a motion sensor to turn on stairmlight. 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.

Gold Standard Matching Latency Performance

Here I have tested both input and output latency using Lutron RadioRA2 switch. Gold standard here is Lutron iOS app as it is the official app from the vender. Basically, Hubitat, Home Assistant and openHAB all had gold standard matching performance here.

Live Stream Testing (not conducted)

At the time of this writing, Hubitat does not support RTSP streaming to be directly displayed. This was actually true for both HomeSeer and openHAB3. RTSP streaming protocol is an only streaming output available from UniFi Protect camera products I use. However, this protocol is not directly compatible to be displayed on the web browsers. So each platforms had their own solutions. For the case of HomeSeer, it used snapshot images with frequent refresh. This gave near real time, but extreme low frame rate, non-audio capable live video stream.

In case of openHAB 3, they had a specific integration, called IPCamera binding that converts RTSP stream to HLS stream format, which is browser compatible. However, for its setup, not only that user had to install the IPCamera binding separately from the UniFi Binding but user also needed to go into the openHAB3 server command line input and manually install FFMPEG. After all these steps, it was still buggy. For the Hubitat solution, it sounds like I needed to go with the route of openHAB3 but more manually. Basically, I need to setup own background RTSP to HLS stream conversion and then access the HLS output file (ref). I simply decided not to spend this extra effort here.

In this regard, Home Assistant simply shines. Home Assistant essentially does the RTSP to HLS conversion using FFMPEG on a background, but this is all part of Home Assistant and all I needed to do was install UniFi Protect integration package.

Doorbell to Sonos TTS latency test | Reliable and fast

The previous tests were a single 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.

This worked well and extremely fast. When Doorbell ring announcement are set on both Home Assistant and Hubitat, two are essentially at the same speed. What I usually hear is Home Assistant starts couple words and Hubitat takes over. So I assume Home Assistant is for maybe 1 second ahead of Hubitat but honestly, it is so close, it could just be from some other confounding factor e.g. if I turn of Home Assistant and turn it back on after Hubitat maybe order changes. Its that subtle of difference.

Stability

Long term stability is something I have not yet tested on Hubitat. However, I have not come across any stability issue for days of testing.

Buggy iOS software

The official version of iOS App at the time of testing was incompatible with my iPhone 12 Pro. I have tried to uninstall and install several times, but after registering Hub to the phone, the app always crushed. So I used beta version of the app on the Testflight. It works great.

Integrations

Analogous to computer, tablet and smart phone application catalogues, home automation platform usability comes down to whether the platform supports smart home devices you own or not. Here the way to connect physical devices to Hubitat Elevation is done via integration.

Hubitat’s core concept/theme of “simplicity” is evident at this stage. In Hubitat, we have a section called “Apps”. This is the page where new and installed integration are managed. However, what’s interesting is Hubitat puts automations, called “Rules” in Hubitat, custom integrations and dashboard app all onto this page. For about couple minutes I was afraid this would make the page too busy/confusing but as it turned out, this makes perfect sense and rather than clicking many pages in attempt to finding something I need, this just works.

When it comes to actual integrations, this is where I felt Hubitat Elevation platform fell short. I have only tested a few of my critical integrations.

• Lutron RadioRA2 light switch/sensor
• Sonos S2 speakers
• MyQ Garage Door opener/sensor
• UniFi Protect Camera/doorbell
• Alexa Integration

Lutron and Sonos are official integration/apps and they both work reliable and fast. Honeywell Lyric T6 Pro and August Lock on Hubitat are Z-wave based connection. Since my Honeywell thermostat is not Z-wave compatible, 　it is essentially incompatible for me. August Lock version I have is Z-wave compatible but I believe mine kept connecting back to Connect bridge. So I couldn’t really test the August Lock Pro that I own with Hubitat.

MyQ Garage

This is a custom integration. Per the design decision by community developer of this integration, MyQ’s official door sensor are not supported. What this means is, I can close and open the door from Hubitat; however, I would not know the status of the garage door whether it is currently open or closed. This means if I open garage door via regular garage opener, Homekit, MyQ app etc., Hubitat won’t know door’s open/close status. Since typical home automation of garage door is like “If garage door is left open for 1 hour, warn me” type things, I felt this is a limitation essentially making this integration not practically usable. If one really wants this to work, one can install/purchase separate sensor (not MyQ version, while still using MyQ garage opener) and use the sensor to report the status of the door instead. However, this seems to be quite a workaround that seemed to lost its original intent of making our life simpler. In fact, Home Assistant and openHAB3 were able to read the status of MyQ door. So when the other platforms are capable, it is sad to see Hubitat community developer made such decision.

UniFi Protect Camera/Doorbell

This is also custom integration. For this to work, one needs a separate hardware that’s constantly running Python script. I have created virtual machine on my Intel NUC where Debian Linux VM is running. Relying outside of Hub is not unique to Hubitat, but UniFi Protect system has its own controller unit, UniFi Dream Machine Pro in my case. Then Hubital Hub and now third component felt a bit too much and there is always a risk for system failure when there are more components involved and making troubleshooting harder. To make it worse, as mentioned above, similar to the openHAB3, this integration itself does not support video streaming viewing. I will need FFMPEG conversion setup on my own and that will be outside of Hubitat Hub.

Here I really hope Hubitat will add Pro version of Hub that has FFMPEG, Python etc. pre-installed. Alternatively, release an official add-on unit for these special background add-ons.

For the simple functionality of door bell push and motion detection, Hubitat works well and reliable on my short tests.

Alexa Integration

Despite this being one of the official integration, here my use case is a bit special. Despite I live in United States, I use Japanese Alexa, mainly for Amazon Music HD service. Unfortunately, I kept getting error linking Amazon Alexa Hubitat Skill and was not able to test this.

Overall, Hubitat integration supports are limited than Home Assistant. Some integration are completely out of option for Hubitat, the others are function limited.

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. This is where Hubitat Elevation shines. Undoubtedly, they are the best in this category amongst the platforms I have tested so far including Home Assistant, HomeSeer 4, and openHAB 3.

System Setup

Hubitat Elevation only comes with pre-installed hardware form. The benefit here is you just plugin power and ethernet cable and follow easy step by step instruction.

What I liked here is it gave so called quick tutorial during the part of setup. Home Automation platform can be fairly confusing to new users or even those who are familiar with the other platforms, due to the difference in design of each platform. Even though this is only a handful screen shots with 1 paragraph each, I think this is exactly what the other platforms should do.

It got even better here. Hubitat provides built-in, introduction Apps, called “Let’s Get Started!”. This creates virtual setup to allow users to learn via actual hands on experience. Many of us knows hands on guide are multiple factors more effective than just reading manuals.

From the start of booting up Hubitat, you are welcomed by the developers who understands the importance of proper tutorial.

Integration Setups

Automation Setup

Automation, called Rules in Hubitat, is very intuitive. Honestly, I can’t think any more simpler method than what Hubitat does without losing functionality. Amongst all the parts of home automation platform, this is indeed the core piece where some platform do not realize it.

As you can see on the above example, it showed one step at a time, so no confusion here. Text to speech setup was also simple. In fact, I could switch to mp3 file play in very similar effort.

Setting up Unifi Doorbell ring to Sonos TTS announcement was really easy once I got UniFi Protect integration installed.

Even though this may seem minor, this is actually the first time I am seeing text to speech can select multiple targets.

I have personally found, a Reddit Community typically have more new user friendly people. Hubitat community size is relatively similar to openHAB but much newer.

As for my personal experience, I was able to find most of my question fairly easily on google search with most pointed to the official forum; where, I see each users helping each other.

Cost: $130

Hubitat is hardware product. You cannot buy just its software but rather you must buy the official Hub, which costs $130. The benefit here is hardware/software optimized like Apple ecosystem approach. The downside is there is nothing you can do to improve hardware horsepower.

As far as the actual value goes, the other platforms often use Rasberry Pi as standard hardware setup. Currently, Rasberry Pi 4 kit with case and additional required parts can cost $120~$140. So if one did not have actual hardware to run home automation software like Home Assistant or openHAB 3, you may still end up paying similar price.

Conclusion

As of June 2021, I would recommend potential users to research each integration/components you like to integrates with Hubitat. If it is compatible with it and full functionality (of your need) is supported, this is the local home automation platform to go with. It is the most intuitive platform with high performance. This certainly gives power beyond Apple Homekit/Homebridge; however, integration support is still limited when compared to competition especially Home Assistant. Even though the limitation may not only apply to devices you currently have, but you need to make sure it is also future proof. If you plan to continue expanding smart home devices in you home, Hubitat compatibility may limit your future selection.