Needed to get this one off my chest! I'm probably going to anger a few Home Assistant users, but hoping we can laugh at our falls together. Let me know what you think! 😅

So you wrote your last automation in HA, when? Seems as though you are talking about HA from a few years back. And you seem to think in depth documentation is a bad thing. That Zigbee document includes config info plus in-depth content new users will not likely need. Seriously, spending a day with HA puts you in no place to review the current state vs something 4 years ago. Grow your channel with positive content. There are legitimate challenges with HA and the first 6 minutes of the video found none of them.

7 yrs with ST and I quit because it was becoming an increasingly walled garden. I quit 2 or 3 years ago so just before ST became a bit more "local". It was slow, frustratingly cloud dependent, and extremely limited in what it could do without external tools such as Actiontiles and Webcore (both cloud based). HA is indeed harder to learn but what you portray as drawbacks is actually what I love most of HA! I can build my home automation as I want it and not have to bend to Samsung's design / will. As for automations, I use Node Red within HA and the possibilities are endless and super powerful. I have more than 300 "things" (zwave, zigbee, wifi, esphome, Unifi gear, voice assistants, applications, etc) integrated which was, and maybe still is, unthinkable with ST (not much for the quantity but the variety of "things"). ST was primarily designed for small ecosystems, at the time they said their average user had 15 devices, and their application was definitely geared towards low numbers of devices. In HA I have about 50 dashboards and I don't need the cloud for them to work which I don't believe is the case with Actiontiles. I am not saying ST is bad... it is surely an easier solution for those who are not technically inclined or don't want to invest time in their system to get exactly what they want (again... not what ST wants or allows...). Last... I love that I can run HA on whatever hardware I want, and that I can replace the radios (zigbee, zwave, thread, etc) as new technologies emerge. Try that with ST... you are stuck to their glacial hardware and software development pace. HA might break every so often (there is room for improvement) but development is lightning fast. Love it! Your video hit on a number of good points but it is also skewed significantly from your perspective (sounds like you want an easier, lower maintenance, more basic option) so I would not call it "The TRUTH".

As someone who used home assistant, then stopped because it was too hard and it would break all the time, I can say this is not what is happening anymore, it does take a bit of time to learn but it's getting easier every with update. I have a few non-basic automations and didn't use yaml on any of them, they were all created through the UI. The only cases you have to use YAML or Jinja is for things that no other platform are able to do, so I believe it is reasonable that it's a bit harder to set up. That being said, Home Assistant is a project still being developed, breaking changes are part of it, and recently they've changed their rules for deprecating things so when they do release breaking changes you have a long time to change before they actually break

As a HA user, it's great to see a channel showing capabilities of other systems, and these are fair criticisms of HA. I originally tried SmartThings many years ago because I wanted something that "just works", but switched to HA b/c what I wanted to work it couldn't do. I expect ST has improved vastly since I tried it. I know HA has and I almost never touch yaml now. I still prefer to not invest time in home control and want it to "just work", which is why I also do not sink time in my dashboard. I do have a slight sense of fomo when viewing those others, but I never access my dash anyway because I subscribe to the theory "if you need a dashboard to use your smart home, it's not smart, you just moved the on/off button." gl with the channel!

I moved from ST after 5 years of use to HA several months ago. If I had to compare the experience between the two, I would say this. I never got to a point of feeling like I had a stable configuration with Smartthings. I felt I was constantly chasing after problems because of cloud issues, ST upgrades and work around’s to get what I was going after which was a stable environment that also passed the wife factor. Setting up HA was certainly more difficult and I was constantly accessing HA user sites and KZfaq for help. Thankfully the answers were there and I quickly created the stable environment I was chasing with ST. Now the only reason I play with my HA environment is to look on creating improvements or adding additional devices. More importantly, it just plain works which checks off the wife factor In the end, I find HA to be a much better environment than ST and worth the initial time investment. I’m running an RP 4 with external SSD and have not experienced any lag whatsoever. It’s actually quicker in response compared to cloud based ST. ST may be the best choice for you but I feel HA is nowhere near the bad choice as you describe.

So, I get the point, but here's a thought: I just went to HA in March after a decade on Vera. Vera was bought by Ezlo, which abandoned my hardware and froze my software. At the same time, my Radio Thermostat was abandoned on the cloud and I was forced to replace it. In the past I had used DarkSky as a weather API, but then Apple bought it and killed the API. In considering Hubitat, Home Assistant, and SmartThings, my chief factor was, will the platform be sold or abandoned and will I have to move again? Can I run it on anything I want? Only HA gave me the feeling that it would be around forever and I could run it on anything I wanted. I know this is arguable, but that is where I got to. Was it tough to get going? Well, 10 minutes to get a VM up and running (on an existing Windows NUC that has a bunch of other stuff already on it). If it was longer than that then Hubitat was plan B, and then SmartThings was plan C. A steep learning curve to get Z-Wave (30 existing devices) working that was really unrelated to HA itself. That part was indeed hard. What I LOVE about HA is that you can start with zero code (you really can), and gradually learn templates and that will solve 95% of everything by itself. Putting templates in automations keeps most of the (and/or/if/not/else) in a nice UI, and then just the templates could be considered "code like." My configuration.yaml is quite short, and I can't see how you can corrupt it if you simply check validity in Developers Tools before restarting. I think I have one If/else in "code" that I could eliminate now that I know more. It kind of feels like you went back to HA with the same approaches you used years ago when it was primitive. Coming to the current version from Vera was a breath of fresh air and a whole lotta fun. Except for Z-Wave. But by the way, I loved your approach in this video - fun and funny and it even incorporated your family. Original. Great job.

I been using HA for a few years now started on an rpi3->odroid->vm. For me the best part is to be able to integrate a lot of devices by making my own(esphome). Also integrated my solar system(solark) to my pool(pump, lights, waterfalls). I have been able to make devices for my garage opener, fridge, pool, led strips, washer, drier, hyperion, etc. I also run frigate with AI monitoring for 9 cameras. With the vm running on a Proxmox server with full daily backups. For me the best automations are being able to do climate control depending on my solar system battery status, even turning everything off if the power goes out depending on the SOC.

Definitely love hate relationship with HA, but I couldn't go back to anything else. I code for my day job and having full control of my home is just amazing! That said yaml sucks and I hate working with it. I really want a node based ui/automation editor (and yes I use node red, but node red is more of a node event system then node coding system.) like unreal for home automation. Still I took a few days and programed a custom integration for my vacuum that works with its map and man is it amazing to have! I do have to agree through unless you want to take the deep dive stick with something that will look good out of the box.

Is there a list of which devices work locally with something like smartthings? I'm currently using google home, and thinking about moving to homekit or something else for more local options

Thanks for the video. What hardware do you use for your ductwork automation?

Thanks for this. I lost my voice-box to a rare cancer a couple years ago so I also am more interested in dashboards rather than voice assistants (obviously.) Is there anything that you would recommend in particular? Computing power isn't an issue as I have 4 HP DL360 G9s, Unifi Dream Machine SE, a few Unifi cameras, some Govee lighting that I just bought but haven't installed. I also have Proxmox installed on a local server, as well as a remote server. Unraid is installed on one of the other servers, Proxmox Backup Server on one, and then Windows Server 2022 Data Center Edition on the other. It's the one that I use the least... not really at all. Is the Govee lighting good for these? I got the H601A 6-Inch Recessed RGBWW Lights on Black Friday. I got 12 of them. But if there is another brand that is more compatible and similarly priced, then I would like to return them so I'm not starting off my Smart Home with incompatible stuff. BTW I believe your channel is going to grow very fast because you are informative and funny 😂

I've been a HA user for over 5 years now and what you say is true. HA is being actively developed and you have to stay on-board and update every month or things will stop working and when you do update I find that things stop working. The more you go into the rabbit hole the deeper it gets. I really enjoy by HA hobby but sometimes it is very frustrating, if it was not for the fact I'm retired and can largely choose what I spend my time on, I don't think I would have enough time to feed my addiction.

Oh thank you I just got lost in the deepest of rabbit holes where everyone and their mom praises home assistant. I have no idea what "code" even is but you saved me

Fascinating stuff!! Love the content, 11:18 had me rolling 😂 Can’t wait for some wrx vids!

Great video. My ST v2 (2015) lost a lot of functionality over the last year, so I finally decided to replace it. While looking at the options, I came to three same conclusion about HA. I could do it, might even find the challenge fun, but based on everything I've seen it would be a huge time sink, and required fixes during updates. I decided to try HE, and boy Ami glad I did. The C8 has fantastic upgraded radios and external antennas, so connectivity is extremely reliable. Even to a battery operated Z-Wave motion sensor in a metal mailbox out at the street. An easy "Created Virtual Device" button on the Add Device page. The simple rules engine and Rules Machine can run all of my automations, especially when integrated with Alexa (to integrate with Ring). I automate everything so I don't use a dashboard. HE does have dashboards, but not as 'pretty' as you can get with a lot of time and yaml code in HA, or using other options. If that's what you want, the best recommendation I've seen is to use HE for connectivity with its superior radios and for the easier Rule Machine, then use the built-in HA integration to build the dashboards.

Is it possible to set up a calendar with chore lists on them for different users of the home?

You worked your butt off for this video - thank you! I’m officially sticking with ST for now. Appreciate you

I use HA and you're honestly not wrong. I use Samsung devices but have barely ever used Smartthings. If it can be done locally it honestly removes my need for HA.

I changed from FHEM to Homeassistant. I started not with the manual mode, where i have to configure everything with the configuration.yml. I do this the easy way in the Web-UI. I dont share your opinion. Yes, there is some that needs improvement, but thats the same at all products this area.

Good video. I just setup HA on a NUC last weekend and am slowly in the process of converting over from SmartThings. Smartthings was nice, and is what got me into home automation, but with 200+ devices and 200+ automations, I've simply outgrown it. Simple automations I could churn out and test in a few minutes on ST have me scouring the internet for answers. What's even more frustrating, is finding a post/video, only to see it's 2.5 years old and irrelevant because the integration/addon is deprecated. That being said, I have done some stuff that works natively in HA that would require me to use janky virtual switches with Alexa in ST. You made some controversial statements that will piss some people off, so now I'll have a go. Dashboards are stupid. The whole point of "home automation" is just that. Automation. If you're doing it right you don't need a dashboard to monitor and manually turn shit on and off because it all does it on its own. I don't need to know the temperature of 19 different spots of my house or the current status of the 79 Hue bulbs I have. I don't want to have to push a button to start a bedtime routine when I can automate that with a pressure sensor in my bed. I think most people that obsess over dashboards do it to show it off to others more than for an actual practical purpose. That being said, monitoring cameras in a dashboard is useful, so there's that.

Thanks for the video. IMHO, what you note as downsides with HA are some of its major benefits. Can you spend way too much time on these things? Absolutely. That said, I've created a platform that works great for my needs, and have spent _maybe_ 25% of what I would've spent on a "vertical" platform like ST. The heterogeneity of HA is, in my experience, one of its greatest strengths.

Interesting. I expect you are quite accurate. And here I am, just ordered a Home Assistant Yellow and a long time user of SmartThings. While I admit, I might just be in a year, where you are now, my situation is a bit different. I'm retired and looking for something to keep my mind active.

As a certified Old Person, I chuckled at the phrase Smart Home "NEEDS". Cue the "Back in my day" speech LOL.

Thanks for the video about HA. I am in the "other" camp - I switched from SmartThings to Home Assistant because of the unreliability (for me) of SmartThings. It was literally down more than up, and I had (at the time) maybe 10 devices. I agree that editing yaml sucks - but recent builds are moving more and more into the UI. I've built two other HA setups (for friends) and honestly the only problems I've had were devices that quit responding - a power cycle has fixed all those (so far, knock on wood, saving me a trip over to try to repair). I haven't looked back. I have a gen 1 Smart Things hub in a box somewhere and am happy with my zigbee & zwave combo USB stick with HA (it just worked). With any system, some things work better than others, but I'm sticking with what works for me. And it looks like you're sticking with what works for you too. Cheers!

Thank you, you just saved me a 500+ hour rabbit hole.

Haha great video, the vignettes at the start and your close lines were very funny and well done. You earned this subscriber, +1

Can smartthings run local devices like Zigbee devices or a other hub like Hubitat Thanks please let me know

I can't read the HA guides while you are scrolling so fast. /s

As a developer and enthusiast i dont mind these points, but have to agree when it comes to normal users

Love Smartthings but the thing that drives me nuts is the broken geolocation tracking from the ST app, I've had support looking into it for ages but they still haven't fixed it... That's the main reason I've been looking into HA

Problem is smartthings for me do not have several features due to region block.... It has less things for Brazil than for USA. It also does not detect all tuya devices I have, wyze cameras and broadlink ir blasters.

Enjoy this video, thank you. I’m fairly new to the HA platform and have certainly noticed it getting complicated quite quickly 😊

I'm a former Hubitat user myself and I switched to home assistant 2 years ago. I would have done the same if I were on smartthings. You're not wrong, it takes a while longer to get into the .yaml vibe opposed to the out of the box gui modes of the other systems. Although HA is catching up. For me the reason to change is hardware reliability. For smartthings and hubitat I'd have to have a spare hub lying around the house in case of a HW failure, or face a lot of downtime due to unavailability or delivery or... In case of home assistant, I can be up and running on a VM in an hour or 2 while I wait for my new dedicated hardware to arrive. For me that is the most important thing.

I use ha for integration I use node red for 100% of my automation and dashboarding Also I use a mini pc as opposed to a pi I just do patches now my setup just works But to do my thing it helps to understand the tech involved (python, yaml, docker, Linux, node, react, html, CSS, JavaScript, various network protocols). Then it's straightforward, but these areas of knowledge represent some sweat equity, I was lucky enough to have worked in IT using most of that stuff and reading tech manuals is a familiar process. For an absolute beginner it's like a college course but with no tutors. However if you do have that comfort level HA is great! If you grock dynamic DNS you don't have to pay Nabu Casa but I do anyway because I can

Holy hell I just went through this again!!! Yes again. I lost my holiday weekend. I had it working, with snmp wan monitors and everything. Then something went wrong. Three days lost! I just can’t anymore. This is my third shot. They are out!

like the video. I did start with SmartThings but 3 months in i got board and wnet to HA. Node Red for the win. Click drag drop.

See you back in HA when your devices become paper weights or your automation requirements outgrow your current platform. You should also check out templates cos you don't know what you don't know, and templates make it so you don't need to know.

Home automations are suppose to simplify your life period. I got your point and you're right. Thanks for sharing you got a new follower.

I couldn't agree more that HA is a slippery slope. I've spent far more time working on the smart home than I've received back. At this point I will never recover my sunk time. Luckily I thoroughly enjoy the challenge. I do need to find a way to be more disciplined with how I spend my time as we can't make more of it. I don't want to ever feel like I didn't do much of what I wanted to do in life but had an awesome smart home.

As a licensed electrician as well as Network+ professional who tries to upcycle waste-stream electronics utilizing open source solutions with clients, I gotta say that this is definitely true in a lot of cases. However, the tech is always improving and having a professional to install and support these sorts of things as the market asks for them is really the focus of why HA is so important. I can't install ring devices, SPAN panels, Caseta switches/bridges, and a whole host of other solutions without the help of HA.... or at all in some cases. We NEED community driven projects with easy access to feature requests and/or the ability to create a fix OURSELVES.

Love the video. This was months ago we need new videos from you

I want to thank you for your advice on actiontiles I hope you would do more on actiontiles and update not like for 5year ago thanks so much

Potential idea! ActionTiles vs SharpTools! Which is the most POWERFUL dashboard!

So basically HA is like a PC whilst SmartThings is like a console, not as good and has limits but more convenient and user friendly. Don't use either myself currently though.

It's really simple for me i started out with X10 devices (look it up if you haven't heard of them) then a Wink hub, then a smartthings hub, then a hubitat hub, then finally switched to home assistant 3 years ago and never looked back, why, because each one of those previous hubs died within 2 years of getting it. I will never get another proprietary hub, it's that simple. I started with HA running on a raspberry pi 4, then a old laptop i had lying around, and now its on a home lab server running in a VM, have never lost any of the configs as i have HA back itself up to the cloud every couple of days. It does have something of a learning curve but i'd never use anything else.

I have had a smartthings hub for 4 years and Home assistant for almost 3. I like the HA setup "Because" it is a challenge. For me, its the trip, not the destination. They are both frustrating in their own ways.

I went from ST to Homey some years back, was the best experience ever. Now? Just going for running HA side by side with Homey and hope I will get the best of both worlds. But have to say, HA is powerful but even more frustrating and hard to even learn the most basic stuff. Things that took 10 minutes in ST takes 2 in Homey and 30 minutes in HA at this point 😂

This hits the nail on the head for me. Started with HA but now im moving to ST for the ease of use and it just working when I want it to!

Can’t find the local device video mentioned at 6:32

Well, being that Home Assistant is as vast as it is people tend to focus on what they are good at when starting in home assistant. Coders will tend to focus on coding. For others the dashboard must be pretty and flashy. System guys will absolutely make sure the hardware is just perfect and so on. When I started out, I decided to keep it simple and not integrate something I absolutely do not need. In fact, I even try and keep to one brand on the devices, not entirely possible but still I do not go bonkers here either. Where possible I only use home assistants’ automations. An absolute must be backups. Before each major update I do a VM export and the rest of the time I do backups to Google drive. If you make it complex it will be complex and spending five hours figuring something out, document it because if six months later you need to redo it, it will probably be 5 hours again. Above all enjoy.

I will take local control every time. I'm a happy Home Assistant user of many years. Samsung's "Smart Things" will never have a place in my home, just as google and amazon will not.

I'm way down that rabbit hole....I run Smartthings V3 hub with a Home assistant Raspberry pi and a Habitat hub ...then I have my Lutron hub and yolink hub and...dear god I haven't seen the sun in years.

For me the key issue is this: do you buy in to cloud management or not? If you want local management and independence from vendor lock-in; then Home Assistant or Hubitat are arguably the only real options (I run both).

Great video. You actually show animated examples of your opinions. You never said not to try HA or HUB, just advised of a few hurdles. I wanted to try HA and HUB, but held off for the exact reasons you mention. The deep hole, and deciding if its worth it in the end for the individual user. I found your information on STs future interesting. Luckily started with ST and Zwave devices to test out my entry into the smarthome devices. Added Alexa, which has come a long way with ST updates. Love your family included in the monologue. I thought she said COKE...👀 🤣

Honestly, the trouble you appeared to have with HA just makes me think that you may just be shit at it. I'm hopeless at coding but I find yaml easy enough to figure out and I don't even bother with HA automations - Node Red is too easy. HA has been rock solid for me, to the point where I use it to monitor and manage my off-grid power system. I think that I would find the mundanity of ST excruciating. The day I stop wanting to know what's going on under the hood and opt for "plug and play, no thinking required" is the day you can plonk me in a hole and cover me with 6' of dirt.

I keep trying to use home assistant. I’m a software developer with decades of experience and yet this just keeps defeating me.

Cmon home assistant is great

I personally enjoy integrating several devices from various eco systems onto one platform. I also enjoy solving problems, saving time, money etc. through creative and complex automations that only HAS can afford. The feeling when you finally conquer an automation that had you perplexed previously is amazing! I migrated from ST 2 years ago. the learning curve initially is steep but well worth it IMO. Occasionally stuff breaks and you want to pull your hair out or pound a hole in the wall, still worth it though...

When I saw windows and VM I thought oh no.... :D Had nothing but bad luck with that. Edit to add: Yaml? That's so rarely used now, don't think I've really touched it in 2 years (other than to remove things that got integrated into the UI). I know this vid is 7 months old, but...

what you can do with the automation interface in HA (pure gui no script) is WAY more powerful, easy and clear than any samsung or google or apple interface... try again home assistant, it never failed me

Z-wave was really easy to install and integrate

Mostly good video but I think it's kind of crazy to fearmonger over learning a markdown language. Neopets was for kids and it had them using html and css. Computers have existed for the past 3 generations or so. I think learning markdown (any markdown) should be viewed as a fundamental of tech literacy, and that we should not push people away from that based on some perceived level of technicality. I have one entry in my configuration.yaml that is longer than 4 lines long, and it was a copy/paste. "traversing nabu casa....." it's a toggle switch.

HA is so much more approachable today than say 4 years ago. Its hardly the same experience.

Thank you for your honesty. I was strongly considering home assistant but, as I researched how to do simple tasks, I opted out as it looked like a second job.

Thank you so much for providing such a thoughtful review of Home Assistant! Your honesty and transparency earned you another subscriber!!! Kudos!

I love Home Assistant's mission. And I think I'll be sticking with it. But they'd do well to take onboard this criticism. When you're a developer who's built an entire operating system, It's easy to lose sight of what constitutes "simple". The `configuration.yaml` thing seems to be a sticking point. I think Home Assistant really needs a cleaner way to break up configuration into smaller modular files, which can be reloaded without restarting the entire system. I coded my own Home Assistant integration last week. Getting it working was surprisingly simple. But enabling it to update without a full restart was like trying to head-butt my way through a brick wall.

You lost me, don't believe yours to be a fair judgment. By the way, I use and love my HA, 165 + devices, not a gig but all the documentations provided make life much easier, in saying that Community also its a plus to me, plenty help out there.

As a maniac Samsung eco system user I would say this is valid criticism, however I absolutely did not see a fair view over HA because all that was said here I did using ONLY A SINGLE ANDROID PHONE that I got 7 years ago and Im running Ubuntu in less than 5 hours setup including linuxes upgrades and so far 0 touch to yaml automations. I even added a nice good night and welcome home messages via alexa. Regardless of all that, I would like to see a in depth Smartthings vs HA fair comparison, including the best of what both can do and the cons of each. Samsung ST was my previous usage and veeeeeeeeery limited to me. Btw, I'm running my HA in my loved Note 5 xD Samsung user in all my electronics since longer than I should.

HA can absolutely be a rabbit hole if you don't set any boundaries but that's not a very good reason to choose anything lesser. It would be like choosing to use Windows. It's crap but it's standardized crap so I don't need to make any decisions.

Minty video 🤌the humor was on point!

I'm not interested in any inevitable rugpulls from proprietary commercial systems.

Damn, wish I had found this video before wasting money in HA! Lol thanks

I think I can say the same about HomeKit vs homeassistant.

The home assistant chat in the beginning was hilarious. But the scrolling long documentation is not representing HA properly. I have HA with z-wave and zigbee devices. Never once did I read a page of documentation nor yaml file to set them up. What script(s) were so hard in HA? Did you even try the UI for your desired automation? Without examples, it feels like you didnt really try. Just found truthful but not giving full context to the HA gripes from yesteryears.

If you consider constant tweaking in smart home as something bad, then why do you have YT channel about this topic? There is some true about the things you said, but the short answer is that HA is for power users, and SmartThings, Google Home, Alexa, Homekit etc. is for basic users. You can do much more with HA, but of course it will require more effort. What I don't agree is that you need to do all the things in yaml. Yeah, it was like that, about 5 years ago ;) Now you can configure helpers, groups, automations all with the UI.

I use hubitat for more robust rules and configuration. But it doesn't always support everything. "aqara". It works, then it doesn't. Aqara now supports matter and so does hubitat. But of course aqaras matter doesn't work. Just shows the hub. No child devices. Hubitat says they are working on adding matter bridge support, but when? I know I could stick with what I know works. But where is the fun with that? So now I use Alexa routines for my aqara devices for now. My wife always wonders where I'm disappearing too.

ive made the same expirience....

8:50 the stock video of sand blowing over money is using Israeli Shekels. Seeing how I'm in Tel Aviv, I was surprised to catch that. Wondering where this stock video came from. Also, this entire video was useful as a cautionary tale as I start my smart-home journey.

There's a certain type of community that uses Home Assistant. It's similar to the Apple community. Never. I enjoy live.

I find HA a bit fragile and not user friendly. They need to bake in some basic setup and allow techies ability to change things. I don't want to waste my time trying to set up a darn home or constantly have to manage it. Just bad approach and not sustainable.

It's funny because I left Smartthings because it's ceiling was SO low as to be almost unusable for a large number of products out there. It was also far more complicated, requiring the use of either the IDE or WebCore just to get simple nested conditionals to trigger reliably. Did I misunderstand, or did you basically say that you preferred Smartthings because you were limited in what you can do, in comparison to HA? I can't even remember the last time I needed to touch yaml. I do remember the headaches of the "new" IDE...

Respectfully disagree on the automations point. Complex automations can be done in node Red with a drag and drop interface. Actually, a lot of things have been moved out of the scary yaml. I agree that there’s a learning curve to Home Assistant, but it’s not for the casual user, Apple, Google, and Amazon have the casual user automation market handled. Also, I completely disagree that cloud is paramount to automation. I implemented Home Assistant so I could avoid the cloud and keep my devices in a walled garden of safety. Lastly, I’m in IT infrastructure and can tell you open source community code is not a negative, but closed source closed code requires a lot of trust, in this case a lot of trust in Samsung. With that, if you don’t have the time or desire, and have the supported devices then yes, SmartThings would possibly be a good fit, but like everything, there’s use cases for everything. Personally, I hardly spend any time on configuring Home Assistant and it’s rock solid running on an old laptop or on a VM, not a Raspberry Pi.

Samsung … no thank you

I think over-complicating automations is one of the worst things people do. It makes them more prone to failure, and most of that complication is not even needed. Home Assistant Yellow supports Thread and Zigbee (and in turn Matter) out of the box, so just be aware of that. I know Z-Wave needs to be added, but it really is not hard. In fact, it is as simple as plug in the z-wave dongle and Home Assistant just detects the stick. You don't need to do the over complicated stuff now. Smartthings is good. If you want an out of the box all in one and no fiddling, Smartthings is the way to go. IF you have a little time to tinker, Home Assistant is worth going. I don't really agree with needing to edit YAML. I use Home Assistant and the GUI does support a lot of if then else. There are trigger identities, and al ot of other features that are all accessible via GUI. The bad thing about Home Assistant is finding the information to use these features. You can do a lot of complex stuff from the GUI, if you know how to use trigger ID's, if then else in the GUI and a lot of other things. Now I have waffled all above and it is too long for anyone to read it, I would 100% recommend Smartthings for most people that only want to close a curtain or turn on a light with a motion sensor.

I made the switch from ST to HA over about a year period running both in parallel. The whole Edge Driver program was the final straw. It was so mismanaged, with very limited information about how to actually upgrade them. Also, shutting down the IDE (or threatening to, I see you have it in this video so maybe that never happened). I never liked the "new app" vs. the old app. In the new app, you could go to a device and there would be no list of what automations were using this device, crazy! The one thing that really bugged me about Smartthings was the lack of configuration via browser/PC. After a while all of the automations got too cumbersome to try and manage via a phone or tablet app. With HA, the ability to see automations and other things on a big screen (or two big screens at the same time) has allowed me to get more detailed and better manage automations. ST did come out with a Windows app but it was very limited compared to the mobile app. Overall ST was great. It got me in to all of this and I ran my 2015 hub for 6 years. Eventually I unpaired all of my Zwave switches and paired them directly to HA which has been more reliable. Running HA on Raspberry Pi with SSD. Thanks for the video, looking forward to more videos from you!

You prob did yourself a favor. 2023.6 broke my ambient weather and avid integrations. community support bit was on point forums either echo or cry chamber

I quit using Smartthings when google bought Smartthings out. I also stopped using Nest because Google was watching everything and kept sending me messages.

What peasantry is this? The time Bullcrap. Don’t use HA nor ST and flick the lights manually. This will save you time.

Great vídeo. I'm an Electronic Engineer and professionally I work as IoT Engineer. For smart home I have designed my own system. So, my own server, backend, services, frontend, security.

Great video, subscribed for more.

In my experience, if you want just the basic ST can do, HA will do it without any Yaml. If you don't mind Samsung stricking it to you, and telling you what you can do, by all means, ST is best served with lub 🤣.

8:48 for me it literally cost 0€ to build my Smart Home with HomeAssistant. I only used IOT devices, that were already there like some old WIFI-plug, the solar inverter, the WIFI-router, the wallbox and I'm able to use all of their capabilities, like charging the car, when the sun is shining, doing parental control in the WIFI, checking if somebody is home (via the wifi router integration) and switching lights depending on that info. Also I can work with stuff like Wake-on-lan and webhooks. In addition to that I'm not tied to one of communicationinterfaces like Z-Wave, Zigbee or Thread. I can also use existing Devices, that were installed via KNX years ago.

This guy gets it.

As a HA I can confirm the constant automation fomo. The UI has gotten so much better in the past year. I think part of what is shocking for new users is how much it can expose to you from your smart home. Many devices have features that are obscured by other apps or not as useful by themselves. I have some pretty complex automations that I use and haven't touched yaml. Nabu Casa is working hard to minimize the need for YAML, you can see it in the better UI. Also I like it because the open source community brings a ton of value to the platform. I was able to get consistent controls for RGB lightbulbs from different brands in HA which is great for in home user experience. Your criticisms are valid of HA. I can't readily recommend it to everyone as a home automation platform. I look forward to seeing what walls you hit with ST, see if HA has an answer to it. Also if it's a meaningful limitation.

You can create automation without using yaml

YAML? I have not written YAML code in the last two years. You have little understanding how to create, edit, install etc...

I have been using Home Assistant for a few years, I have never had the issues that you point out. I use Proxmox and Alexa, I use Zwave and Kasa lights and switches. 3 weeks ago I build Frigate now I have 7 cameras in HA. I noticed that you were showing a video from 2001, maybe that is the issue with this video.

Wow this is a spectacular level of BS nonsense. First of not all smart things devices run locally and those that do require the use of Samsung proprietary drivers, meaning if they stop supporting it , change it or block certain functions your out of luck. This whole ceiling excuse is just that a excuse for not admitting the truth which is the problem is you and not some piece of software. Its just software and it doesn't make you doing anything so the reason for obsessive behavior is a obsessive person, not some some code. Making automation, ZigBee and zee wave have been simple and easy for ages now in home assistant and though you can config in yaml its not done often now unless you adding something with very little support outside its developer. The bug that allowed potential opening of doors did exist in home assistant there no denying that but he aparently didn't bother looking at smart things. In 2018 alone smart things had 20 such vulnerabilities and the list for them even now is frightingly long. If smart things works for you that great but stop trying to make excuses for yourself and blame some software instead. If you can't walk away from tweaking with something to be with family or you cant set realistic goals unless your artificially limited that a fault in you not some ones and zeros 🙄. Home assistant not for everyone, nor is smart things, Hubitat or any of the other alternatives but you need to look in the mirror. If this was fact based comparing advantages, features, flaws and disadvantages it would have been taken seriously but thats not what you did. Maybe next time compare actually facts rather then blame a software for your own issues as it looks more professional and a lot less cringe.

Disappointing bias review. Self-described script kiddie host lacks skill then blames the systems.