5 Best Smart Home Hubs: Comparing Pros and Cons

What’s the best hub for home automation? We compare the 5 best options, including: SmartThings vs Wink vs HomeKit vs Hubitat vs Home Assistant.

Whether you are deciding if you should ditch your current hub, or you’re a beginner trying to pick a hub, the smart home hub comparison will help you figure out the best hub for you.

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MY SET UP & GEAR
See the list of everything I use in my smart home and other favorites:

DISCOVER MORE:

Wink vs SmartThings

5 Harmony Hub Integrations

SmartThings v2 vs v3

15 SmartThings Ideas

See devices that work with...

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Writer/Editor/Director: Reed Kleinman
Producer: Alysa Kleinman

Disclaimer: Smart Home Solver purchased all of the hubs for this video with our own money. As always, our opinions are 100% our own and not influenced.

[SmartHomeSolver]

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last video because I was changing my office set up and upgrading some of my gear. I also got sick, which was not as fun.
We just reached 30k subs! I appreciate all of your support. I’ll be consistently cranking out higher quality smart home videos with my new set up.

[kevinforth]

I use Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ at 2 homes and love it. I use it for monitoring and alerting, controlling outdoor lighting, garage door and smart lock control, thermostat control, etc. It's great if you're comfortable with YAML and configuring your home router network. Certainly not an option for the non-technical folks.

[TechMedDurra]

I have been using Home Assistant for 1, 5 year. I am no programmer and I didn't find it that hard to use. There are great documentation and the community is really helpful.

[LavNglam]

You were so considerate to not trigger peoples' Amazon devices with the word "Alexa." Of course, when you said "echo" my device told me she "...didn't know that one;" a typical response for her...LOL. Thanks so much for the info!

[ShaneCreates]

Another thing to consider mentioning is privacy and how these hubs compare. I'm all in on HomeKit for many reasons, but largely because I appreciate Apple's stance on privacy and their requirements for HomeKit authentication.

[TR-Lynx]

Just gotta say, love your videos. I've been getting more into automation and you have been an amazing resource for understanding whats useful! Keep up the great work!

[GarNelson]

My Smartthings v3 hub arrived in the mail today, so your conclusion makes me happy. :-) Right now I only have multi-purpose sensors on the front and back door, but I'm looking forward to learning and doing a lot more with it in the future. I'll add a second to the 'don't be afraid to be geeky' request.

[TheHookUp]

Really good video... but a few things I would add/change:

1. Home assistant doesn't require the $5/mo subscription to make alexa work. You can use local hue emulation to get alexa up and running pretty easily.
2. Amazon echo and google home are very much "hub" like these days, similar to homekit. Once a device is added to your alexa app you can use your echo or google device as a hub to control them when you are away from home.

Other than that I agree with basically every conclusion you made. Glad you checked out Hubitat, I've been feeling like someone needed to give it a shot.

[krustyrusty]

Hi, i'm just starting out and ready to dive down the smart home rabbit hole :) I've watched a lot of youtube videos and keep coming back to yours. I like your videos, they are informative and simple. Love all the comparisons you do comparing pros and cons, it makes it easier to pick what would work for me. well done mate keep it up.

[abrahamgalloway]

wink 2 now has some local control for when thier services shut down, i am very happy with them and hope they expand more

[hubertsk]

I love how you "beep" the word "Alexa" so it won't trigger my Alexa at home while watching this video!

[curtisbme]

Probably time for you to do a new one of these as things have evolved a lot in the past year and half like Wink being effectively dead, Hubitat Elevation being out for a while, and even things like how Amazon's range of automations are starting to cross over into hub territory.

[leftverture]

I think you pretty much nailed it. I started with Homeseer and X10 a long time ago. At the time, definitely a tinkerer’s toy. More recently I got back into it with a Wink setup. Disappointing - the pace of development and support were poor so I moved to SmartThings. Better, but hardly flawless or dependable. In the last couple of weeks I’ve started experimenting with Home Assistant and OpenHAB but I don’t have the scripting/Linux skills necessary to make those anything more than a curiosity. Apple HomeKit... maybe someday, but I already have a house full of devices and most of them aren’t HomeKit compatible. I guess for me, SmartThings comes as close as anything I’ve tried to being a good fit. I should also mention ActionTiles - it’s a brilliant add-on to ST and extremely flexible.

[diegodln]

I'm using a Vera Plus hub since from 2017 and I am very satisfied of that... It works locally, I can use external GSM connection (if router goes down).
The con is about "limited" compatible Z-Wave and Zigbee devices.

[yuyiboy]

I needed an alarm system and decided on Abode, security and smart hub in one, So far very impressed. 😊👍🏽

[nixellion]

Well, HomeAssistant is really getting there. Their goal is to release 1.0 version this year and the plan is that most things will work with UI, and yaml will only stay for advanced features. So what's already changed about it as of now:

1. Installing it and getting up and running on a Raspberry Pi is a piece of cake (pun intended). You just download HassOS image, flash it on an SD card (Any card reader + Win32DiskImager, 2 click) and you have a running HassOS\Hass.io device.
2. Lovelace UI is now main UI and it can be edited through the UI itself. No need to go into yaml. Yaml is only needed for advanced features.
3. Automations... This could be better, but you can still do pretty much everything through UI, you will still need to edit some JSON data though. However you can use NodeRed instead. Installing NodeRed is one click in Hass.io addons, and then you can have a powerful node-based automation editor which is more powerful than any other automation system out there. It may have a bit of a learning curve of course.
4. A lot of devices can be added and configured through UI now. Minority but quite a lot

And the list of what you can do through UI is growing with each update.

[JasonHolderTX]

Yes, you answered my answered question and started a massive automation addiction! Your videos are great and had me regretting my SmartThings path for a bit with your reviews. Ultimately, ST has been great and easy to work compared to what Home Assistant would have been [for me]. Still plenty of opportunities to tinker with ST, but I am never really in the deep end. Thank you for the video and all your help!

[mattz]

Hubitat can be controlled remotely. It was released just over one year ago. Given this, it's progress is impressive. You can design web based apps. This is nice because you don't have to deal with a bunch of nested menus typical within an app. That said, I hear an app is coming somewhat soon.

[asergioamEDC]

Hello, love your videos and I’m happy you finally talked about the ‘master controler’ home assistant. Being open source and many people contributting to integrations it’s very hard for any other hub to get even close to it’s full potential. It’s a bit hard and time consuming to get the hang of it but oh boy... it’ worth the time and effort. Just one small correction to your video: to integrate with google and alexa you don’t nedd to pay the subscription. You just need to have an ssl connection to your home assistant device. I don’t own any alexa device so I can’t speak for it, never needed to configure it but I did the manual configuration to google and it works flawlessly and for free (more or less, I did get a domain for it). I used to be a main homekit user but ever since home assistant I just send my devices from homeassistant to homekit and google and only because of voice control.

[matthew]

I’ll just stick with the clapper to turn my lights on and off. Much cheaper.