Awesome video, pretty much the same conclusions I've come to: 1. Tasmota is easy and works really well for pre-defined products 2. ESPHome can allow non-programmers to get a "good enough" configuration for their home built projects, but if you already know how to write code in Arduino you are probably still better off writing your own custom firmware. For the OTA tasmota deep sleep on the roof problem: Send an MQTT message with retain, that way when Tasmota wakes up the next time it will grab that message and prevent deep sleep. After you make your update just send a blank retained message to that MQTT topic to clear it out.

I like the way you covered these two very thoroughly. Thanks for this video!

You are drawing me in to creating my own sensors and actuators for my home. The structured way you explain things is very helpful. Many thanks!

I tried both. ESPHome is much more powerfull. You can do data treatment on the device itself before sending it to Home Assistant and avoid ugly data entering Home Assistant.

Nice to see that the weekly publishing is back ... thanks for the video

Very nice, as always, and precisely relevant to my current project. Thanks again.

Thank you Andreas! Again a great video! In the current version of ESPHome (2024.6.6) there are now four different methods availabel to flash the device. 1. via Network 2. plug USB in your PC 3. plug USB in your HomeAssistant-Server eg. Rasperry Pi 4. manual download (as you referred in the video at 10:10)

One can do a request to the tasmota developers to add a sensor it is frequently updated, that's really good!

Thanks for your excellent videos Andreas! Did not know about tasmota-display, but now I know✌

Hi Andreas, thanks for all these videos. I've learned a lot from you. You're a good teacher. 👍👍👍🦾

Andreas, very much appreciate your content. Learned a lot on this one!

I've huge respect for the hours of work that must have gone on in the background, that allows you to display this level of experience! Well done GWTSA :) (Not my best English sentence :) )

Both projects are great IMO!; It gets you balls deep into the software engineering process. Learning the rules / automations really makes a device smart.

Great comparison. Thank you for all your research work and sharing.

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for making this video. I'm running HA in a virtualbox VM at the moment while I await my pi to arrive. You provided some key information that I could not find in other videos regarding getting the first binary into my NodeMCU so that I can continue with OTA uploads. All the other videos had demos of ESPHome Add-on having ESPHome-Flash built in, which mine doesn't. You pointed me in the right direction with the download binary, and I found ESPHome-Flash executable for windows on the web and downloaded it.. All went well after that.. This NOOB thanks you very much for that, as well as the comparison which helped me to know what kind of options I have for working with these devices. I too have been writing code in C++ in the Arduino IDE for my ESP8266s and Arduinos for years doing all sorts of projects, some with web front ends. I'm just now starting to come up to speed in the world of Home Assistant, MQTT, and this way of building applications for integration of many devices not wanting to reinvent the wheel that so many others have worked so hard to build, and nicely.

My google search last night: Tasmota vs ESPHome

You are really a great teacher, sir. I appreciate your efforts.

I'm learning something new every time I watch Andreas!!! Andreas, you put smile in my heart and brain and I learn and learn more and more! Thank you for your hard work. (PS: I was under the Corona with my wife, so it took little time out of learning - that was the hardest part! Now we are like new again!)

Wow! a very comperhensive comparison, thanks Sir!

Thanks for sharing your observations. Well done Sir!

very nice and concise video Andreas..keep at it mate!

Woooow it's really a great work. Thank you so much for this detailed long video.😊❤

Thanks Andreas. Fantastic analysis and presentation as always.

As usual the scientific attitude in measuring based on real facts! Nicely done Andreas! I think an intermediate layer between ARdiuno IDE and tools like EspHome and Tasmota is the microPython. Flexible and simple enough at the same time...

As usual nice video :-) There is another good project especially for esp8266, called ESPeasy. There are a lot of sensors, displays etc. supported

Great side-by-side video. I think you definitely captured the fundamental pros and cons of each. Personally, I think of tasmota as excellent control software (button, switch, relay devices) and ESPHome as very good data collection software (sensor nodes). I still primarily write my own software for many of my devices but have found that if I want to control something or get simple data, I gravitate to one of these two.

Prepare for a fast ride today: "Fasten seatbelts!" 😁😮😂

I saw esp home some weeks ago, and had not the time to read deeply into it. Thanks for the overview.

If it weren't for Andreas' videos, I would never have dared to enter the world of ESPs. Now I make my own boards from ESP12F modules, both solar and battery powered. Thank you!

Very good video. Saved me a lot of time researching

Thanks for the great comparision. I use the old fashion method for the most of my ESP-based sensors. But I also tested Tasmota for sonoffs. ESPEasy for a simple S0 counter and ESHome for a CO2 sensor, because only here I could switch off the autocalibration of the CO2 sensor and could easily use an ESP32. All are running stable. BTW, the coolest sensor is the MLX90614ESF Far IR sensor. Using this and ambient temp , I calculate the cloudage. Helpful an unusual.

if I could I'll hit to like your video ten times. Very informative!

Excellent content, thanks for the informative video. Both Tasmota and ESP Home are winners as they help the DIY community have more choices, which help look at the same problem from different perspectives. Maybe in the future we could look at this sensors abstraction from scripting perspective ? Python and Javascript on microcontrollers ?

Thanks Andreas, very clear and understandable video. Your videos are still the best in the business!. My favorite is Tasmota, this is where I learned all about MQTT. Tasmota documentation is also very high quality. I use my Tasmota devices with Hass.io, I really like that, as well as controlling a Tasmota device with a controller (Hass.io) you can make your device work autonomously with rules, so if the device becomes isolated from the controller, it can still be useful with working with its own rules-based "automatons" . P

Excelent work Andreas!

I'm very glad to hear about "the son off switches" again, thanks.

Great video, as usual. If you’re using Home Assistant, to me it seems like the logical choice is ESPHome - purely because of the integration. I really like the YAML approach. I have around 23 devices in ESPHome, however they’re mostly Shelly 1PMs. Using YAML, I’m able to create templates and then include them into the device config using a YAML directive to avoid having to copy and paste the same thing dozens of times. The individual device scripts define variables to hold the unique device parameters (such as names), and these are used as tokens in the template. I also use variables to control the logic of how the particular device behaves e.g. Does it power on after a power failure, stay off or return to its previous state? Does it automatically switch on after being switched off (useful for stuff you might want to remotely switch off, but want to guarantee it switches back on - imagine using this to switch off your modem remotely to force it to power cycle). I feel it’s all very neat, tidy and modular. The YAML also has some pretty powerful directives and logic. For example, I’m able to detect the device temperature or current draw and act on it (e.g. to shut down when the device overheats or draws too much power). I can even write persistent data to the ROM to put the device in a “fail safe” state so that it won’t reenergise the relay until the overheat condition has been cleared manually. I wouldn’t like to put this kind of automation at a higher level. It really needs to be on the device itself in case Home Assistant is unavailable for some reason during an overheat. I like that I have the YAML that defines the full functionality of the device - that’s all I need. If I lose my device, I buy a new one and reflash it with the firmware derived from the YAML, and it behaves exactly as the device it replaced. The integration with the Home Assistant native API is also excellent. No need for MQTT. Add a sensor, and it just magically shows up in Home Assistant. You can even pass data from Home Assistant back into the device (such as acting on a button being pressed on another device).

Thanks for the video. Previously I have used balena os for pi(grafana, mqtt, db and custom application for data processing etc) and mongoose os for esp, found it pretty easy to use. Now want to try ESPhome.

Great Scott released a video on esphome today. What a coincidence.

Excellent video. Please do it again, updated for a current comparison. THANKS!

Your English is very clear, Hi from Mexico

Hi Andreas, first off, thanks again and again for all the content you are delivering. There's been significant development lately around both Tasmota and ESPHome. I would really love having a follow up video including those feature and your updated ranking. Also I have heard about ESPEasy but did not have time to have a deeper look. Looks like more an easy & straightforward way to integrate ESPxx...but probably not for the advanced users....

HiAndreas. Love your work! I like you and many others use both ESPHome and Tasmota, it depends on the use case. One thing I would point out for ESPHome is that if you are using Wemos D1 Mini, NodeMCU or TTGO ESP32 Cams you can use a standard micro USB to upload your ESPHome config. Just plug the USB into the Home Assistant Host and restart the ESPHome Add-On. Then you will see something like /dev/ttyUSB0 (USB2.0 - Serial) as an option for upload. This helps avoid the need for connecting jumpers to a UART connector. After that it is easy to do OTA updates.

I started using Tasmota after I lost IFTTT support for my lightbulbs and smartplugs. Using Tuya-convert made this possible. I went with Tasmota by default and like it so far, but have not used ESPHome or ESPEasy yet (I was too afraid of bricking my lights/plugs to explore much). As someone who has written code using Arduino/libraries for sensors/automation and then again in micropython, I was hesitant to use a framework, but didn't have a choice on these limited devices. I'll still use my own code for those things that require a more custom approach, but it's nice to let someone else worry about bug fixes for some things! And some things are just not possible with micropython for timing reasons (like IRremote) which I have to say works very well with Tasmota at least. I do as much using micropython as possible. Also use MQTT with HASS in docker. Thanks Andreas for the video and nudge to look at some of the other options!

Thank you very much for video, really appreciate it. One important think: how are both integrate with HA, at this point I will give a point to EspHome as it have direct integration with HA. Tasmota is using a middleman, MQTT, to do this job.

Greart and informative video, as usual!! At 9:42, you describe, that only OTA is available. I found on my RPI4 that when I connect the ESP to the USB connector of the RPI and then restart the ESPHome service in Home Assistant, the board will show up in ESPHome and I can Choose betwenn OTA and USB update. With this method, I can program virgin Boards directly from Home Assistant

Good analysis. Thanks.

EspHome allow direct upload from USB. Espeasy is great that’s true but it is quickly a complex way to do : you have to compile yourself it with some options to have the sensors that you need. The development seems less organized. But I recognize that it is powerful too since a long time.

You never cease to amaze me. Like a heroin addict I am a "knowledge addict". So just like a junkie on the streets of Amsterdam who strolls the streets (That's what they used to do in the 90's. Perhaps Amsterdam has become more genteel these days.) for their next hit, I troll the internet for my drug. Unexpectedly I discover your KZfaq "hit of knowledge" just as a junkie might find a loaded syringe to feed their addiction, your video satisfied my addiction for knowledge just now. This video was very interesting and drove home how difficult it is to keep up with technology. As soon as I begin to believe that I might understand a subject, I come to the realisation how little I really know. Your videos lay the foundation for further research. I often stop your video mid stream because unintentionally you mention one little thing (such as Adafruit's I2C addresses info in this video) and I'm off making "research notes". Keep pushing your "drugs". There's plenty of addicts out there who need them. I'm sure the next "hit" is going to be as good as the last.

You have really fantastic videos.

Thanks for the great video. I have not heard of tasmoadmin before. I use tasmota most often (also because of tuya-convert of several Gosund SP111 power monitor plugs). Also ESPeasy for an S0 counter.

Great Video! Thank You

I like to think we're of the same age and we probably have similar backgrounds in education and profession. I'm sure we share the same interests and hobbies. You always impress me by being so productive and skilled in the field. Today again! Thank you for sharing!

And as it turns out, "it depends"... 🤓 I switched from Tasmota to ESPhome a year ago, as I like to have more control over functions and scripts inside the controller. But then, I am quite well versed in programming. For people getting started in home automation, I still recommend Tasmota.

I’m a big fan of the fact that ESPHome uses the native API. It eliminates the need for the MQTT server and then defining sensors. They just automagically show up in HA when you add the integration for that device. esphome-configs.io/ has some definitions similar to blackadder but still very early days

Very well done overview! I've tried Tasmota a little bit, but found it harder to understand, and ESPhome covers my needs so far. But it's good to know how the two differ. Maybe I'll need Tasmota for something in the future. Thanks! Protip: ESPhome (in Docker) can upload over usb, but you need to first connect your ESP device to the computer running ESPhome, and then restart the ESPhome container. Then you should be able to select something like /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of OTA. (On Linux, I don't know about Windows.) And you can run the ESPhome dashboard without HA, if you install ESPhome manually with the "getting started through command line" guide. So it's not as straight forward, but possible.

Excellent video!

I like both of them very much.My house is a mix of both devices.

i love Tasmota.. thx for great info sir

Thanks! very informative

You really should have a look at ESPEasy!

thanks for the video!

Thank you very much for your videos. For battery operated sensors I would like to mention mySensors with a mqttEthernetGateway.

And once again, I go looking and you have the answer. It’s been a year since this was made but here’s a couple things I’ve found in the past few days. I have HA on a Pi 3 and under the current version you can install ESPHome firmware OTA, directly or via a serial connection (if so connected, ttyUSB, etc). It lists 4 ways to install it, can’t remember all 4 off the top of my head. I started with Tasmota on a Sonoff and a NodeMCU and discovered you can use Tasmotizer to flash the ESPHome firmware as well. I run a Pi 4 as my lab “workstation” and found that to be more reliable than every other method I tried. The ESPHome flasher won’t run on armhf/arm64/Linux, Tasmotizer does. My current complaint on ESPHome, which I do seem to prefer, is the lack of syslog support that Tasmota has. I want to centralize logging for debugging and security monitoring (using Splunk) and syslog is almost universally the glue we use to hold that all together. For the deep sleep can you force it to sleep when the work is done using the deep_sleep.enter action?

The TSL2591 can be used on the precompiled Tasmota sensors binary by deactivating the TSL2561 driver: I2CDriver16 0

I like your IKEA box 👌

I only use tasmota and few self made projects, thanks to your platformio-video!

A lot has changed since you made this video. A new comparison may be in order as both tools have evolved significantly.

8:15 they want python3, you can see that at the command below ("pip3", which indicates pip from python3)

Perfect, thanks

You are so amazing teacher

Man , you are the best!

Great analyses, thank you. Maybe when you low on ideas for new video you can setup small system, I am guy that learn best when you show me from ground up :) I know you have done it in 5-6 separate videos, each step, but mini series or one long video will push more ppl to try it and then you can identify problems for us simple comoners :) Thank you for sharing, big fun :)

Good video, I use Tasmota with iobroker over MQTT this work pretty well. In Tasmota firmware i use normal sleep - for deep sleep i need to google more, to find the best practice. FOR power a normal 10 watt solar panel and a small akkupack.

Greetings Andreas, There's a lot of hardware and software solutions for the maker to tinker with these days. I thank you for creating these in depth reviews and tutorials on what there is and how to go about it. i currently have a bme280 connected to an ESP32 which is sat outside on my windowsill upstairs. It is nice being able to see the weather outside from my browser on my pc or my smartphone. I must get act together and arrange for it to talk to Profilab, as that does data capture well and can do the controlling of actuators if need be. We had snow in the western Cape on Friday and it's interesting to see that the air pressure drops by 10 hectopascals in Johannesburg at the same time, that's 1400 km away. It takes 2 days for the cold air to reach us here afterwards. Very interesting. I also had fun doing data capture by loading a 0.5 Watt pv array with a resistor, connecting it to an esp32 analogue input and graphing the solar radiation using Profilab. Very interesting how the solar intensity varies with changing weather conditions. Anyhow, taking up your valuable time by making you read a long text. Thanks for the video, it's approved. Kind regards, Duncan

I've never made the Tasmota firmware work reliably on any of the multiple hardware platforms I have. They hang. However, most of the more recent (a year or more) Arduino ESP8266 WiFi Server examples seem to be very reliable. I've had one that controls a single relay work perfectly for about 6 months straight. Same hardware I tried with Tasmona. But I must say I had two extended power outages (two hours and ten hours), and after power was restored, it came back up without any intervention. Also, I have another ESP8266 WiFi Server that controls 20 GE Low Voltage relays, and it's worked perfectly for about 3 months so far.

Thank You

Great video. All your videos are great. I did want to add to this one though: you gave a point to Tasmota in the section that discussed the OTA as the only option for ESPHome on initial flash and as a work around had to download the binary and use the flasher. Actually that is how I do it too but only because the computer running ESPHome is upstairs for me. If on the same computer running Docker, simply map the usb port to the docker container (or run in privileged mode). Then the USB device will be in the dropdown as well. Believe you also said that Tasmota has a nice one place to see all Tasmota devices but ESPhome does not, yet you show the page where the OTA drop down is which shows all the devices. It is for this reason I use a custom panel to being ESPHome in home assistant so I can see all esp devices in one place. So, anyway, just those 2 minor things I wanted to comment on. Going either route (Tastmota vs ESPhome) is 50/50 in most cases and probably will remain that way. I like ESPHome, especially being able to use any arduino library to make a custom component or even write my own.

great stuff!

Thanks Andreas, I want to play with some of this automation stuff one day soon. This upload should help. For Linux try Fedora. Lenovo is shipping with Fedora for a reason. -Jake

good information!

Nice job selecting those AMS sensors. 😉. FYI that TSL2561 was the sensor used in the first iPhone. DE N5BOC

I flasged 3 Sonoff Basic with Apple Homekit and I’m using them right from the iPhone. Also I built a neopixel strip connected to a ESP node and flashed with Apple Homekit too.

Hi Andreas, the TASMOTA deepsleep is optimized for minimum uptime and/or long deepsleep. You have to change the teleperiod to 10 seconds to get the immediate execution of your sensors. In this case, the complete uptime of an ESP8266 is less than 14 seconds as long as the sensors do not need to much time for the LUX calculation. This also works on the ESP32. Regarding your problem to keep the device awake after restart: There are two options. Option one is defining a deepsleep SWITCH. If this is "ON" the device stay awake even if deepsleep defined. The other option is to push "deepsleep 0" as a retain MQTT message. After start, the device will read the message and disable deepsleep. Let me know if you miss more functionality. I have many devices with deepsleep and battery only powered running. works like a charm. The NTP function is to calibrate the deepsleep. As you might have seen a 3600 second deepsleep has a quite big shift. With the function, you can assure that your devices e.g. wake up properly exact at the beginning of the hour. Also very convenient, because predictable if the device runs for months.

Many things changed with Tasmota 9.4 I have successfully flashed ESP32 with the latest tasmota and I see that it has support for mqtt, knx and many sensors. Already tested with RF and IR, works perfect, using mqtt and knx to control them

One important bonus of ESPhome is its direct integration in HA. You don't even need to pass data via MQTT. After, it's also possible to use any sensor with ESPhome as soon as there is an existing arduino lib. You need to build "custom sensor" with ESPhome.

Thanks for an interesting video, Andreas. I can only really comment for Tasmota. It find it fine for simple easy jobs, and I like that they have added syslogd telemetry (syslog to UDP port 514), which is lighter weight than MQTT for interval based telemetry. But when it comes to automation on the sensor itself (not centralized via say Node-Red), I feel I want a little more flexibility. The Rules of Tasmota are a pain to edit, and they are sometimes a little cryptic. For example, if you want rules to only trigger once on change, you have to enter this command Rule 5. Doh? It's cool in ESPHome that you effectively write the C++ and upload, but that's still a pain to debug. What I actually want is an easy to use interpreter with web-based debugging/breakpoints so that I can mess with it in its installed location until I'm happy. Almost like MicroPython, but that is way too sparse to really use. The closest I have found is this Annex RDS platform (sites.google.com/site/annexwifi/home) - it's BASIC (yes really, welcome to the 1980's :-), but with a file manager, breakpoint and single-step debugging, and really cool webserver integration if you know a little about web programming. I am not involved in that project, so this is not an advertisement :-) I just find it a quite useful alternative.

Hello Andreas, you are always a step beyond 😊, Thank you. You did not spoke about Espurna, any reason for that?

Configuring deep-sleep on esphome, you could instead of the timeout, create an automation on the device (although i have not tested this): sensor: - platform: dallas on_value: then: - deep_sleep.enter: deep_sleep_1

The answer to this kind of question is always the same: "it depends" :) The most engineering answer there can be.

FWIW, if you connect a USB-serial to your Home Assistant machine, ESPHome will discover it and let you flash firmware. This works even with a dockerized install of HA running on a virtual machine hosted on my home NAS. (The only funky step there was remembering to assign the USB port on the NAS to the virtual machine). The port can be found as an alternate selection to OTA in the selection list. As far as startup time for the deep sleep problem, if you assign the address yourself (or make a DHCP reservation for the node once one has been assigned, and configure it as static in the node configuration), startup time is much better. And if the OTA update is problematic with sleeping systems, they can always be taken back to the development environment and programmed with the USB connection.

That's a very good summary. I also like your comparison between efficiency and flexibility, I think many people don't really realize this. For me personally, when I can, I like to use ready-made software like tasmota. But many times such software or even some libraries don't offer exactly the functionality that I want. So I end up having to write my own program. I have even written some assembly programs. But very rarely, since apart from memory and speed efficiency, assembly doesn't have many advantages compared to C. You can do almost anything you can do with assembly also with C. But assembly takes so much longer to write that for complex projects it's really not worth the time. At least not for me.

Hey we have the same last name and all of my family from my dads side is in Switzerland 🇨🇭 nice video!

Esphome ftw

IoT devices with built-in ESP8266, like Sonoff, Gosund, Blitzwolf, ... --> ESPurna or Tasmota But you have to keep in mind all the MQTT traffic is unencrypted. Because of performance and memory, no TLS secured communication to MQTT server with ESP8266 chips by default. But as always a good content here.

Edit: Name corrected - sorry. I'd like to see you compare espruino and mongoose OS. Both use JavaScript interpreters with on board hardware management dashboards and web based IDEs. Please Andreas, please compare those two was I'm really struggling to decide between them. There's nowhere that compares the two. You'd be helping a lot of people out.

You have the Developer tools in Home Assistant for seeing the sensors and everything else :D it is awesome check it out.

Programming via USB is enabled on HASS/ESPHome addon when a supported device is detected, ie serial port. The device will show an item in that drop down that always says `OTA Over the air`. To see this plug a device into the hardware that runs HASS and check the drop down list.

I guess I'm not complete beginner but I would disagree to the "both have steep learning curve". I was shocked at the simplicity of ESPHome when I started using it. To get started all I had to do was install ESPHome, create the config, define the pins and flash it. It felt really intuitive and somewhat like a magic. And their documentation is excellent. Later on I also realized that you can use custom components for things that are not supported out of the box. And you can use existing Arduino libraries for that job. Check out their "Custom Sensor Component" guide in documentation. Oh, and I use Home Assistant, so auto discovery and fully automatic integration for ESPHome devices helps as well.

Hi Andreas, one small point, for most ARM MCUs, there's no real advantage between C/C++ and assembler. This made me sit up and think and I've noticed that modern compilers can make very efficient code without having to use (very hard) C shortcuts. It makes for much more portable and readable code without sacrificing speed!