Time to go.. some feedback if you want it

[borat]

After 6 years with Homeseer I am finally making the switch to Home Assistant. I thought it would be worth saying why, in case Homeseer are interested in the feedback.
1) HS4 is a bit of a joke. I thought when it was released it would be a major step change, but its not.. its been buggy and It hasnt really addressed many of the frustrations I had with HS3.. progress is slow on improving it
2) The UI is awful. Again I thought HS4 would address this, but its just not acceptable in today's competitive HA market. The UI for Home Assistant is just a breath of fresh air. Still some things I prefer in Homeseer and learning curve for YAML (if you have to go there) is steep.. but so far I have done everything without needing it, due to the excellent blueprints out there
3) Device support - its now more than 2 years since my Nest integration broke. I paid for it 2 months before the google change broke it and never got a reply on getting my money back. Yes, it was down to me as I accepted the transition from nest account to google, but the new API has been out for more than a year now. To compare, I have been able to move all my supported devices that needed (mostly paid) plugins into Home Assistant (Hue, DSC alarm, Harmony hub) and add some that are not supported by HS4 (Nest, Yale alarm, Adax heaters, LG TV) and find easy built in solutions for other things that needed plugins on HS4 (BLRadar, easytrigger, etc).. all at zero cost
4) My god.. how can we still not have a decent ios app! I've been getting by with 3rd party apps, but the provided one is terrible. Yeah i could spend MORE money on the client and spend many hours trying to get it to look nice.. but I shouldnt need to. Home Assistant app is a dream to use and I can do literally everything I can do in the web UI from the app.
5) Cost - plugins with sometimes questionable support are expensive and add up. More of this needs to be out of the box if you want to remain competitive. Ok so I have to pay a sub for Home assistant cloud, but its not essential and reasonable price if I decide to do so

I'm guessing this may just get deleted and maybe I get banned, but please do believe me when I say that I tried and resisted as long as I could, but the product has just fallen too far behind the times. It took me just a few hrs to move over and that fact alone should worry Homeseer.

Anyway, the forum has been great, so good luck to you all and thanks for all the help over the years.

[Rupp]

Sorry to see you go and yes HS isn't for everyone. Some of us though have HS4 working very well and are happy with the software. All software has it's quirks and missing pieces and parts but at least for me what HS4 offers is exactly what I need. Good luck in your future HA needs.

[ServiceXp]

I too have moved to Home Assistant, and overall it's been a very positive change. I'm loving it.

That said, IMO there is a very important thing to keep in mind. Homeseer is a product, while Home Assistant is a project. That is to say, IMO HA is not nearly as stable and requires much more maintenance and tinkering to keep up and running. Which I'm fine with.. for right now.

While major, monthly updates are great for getting things as good as they are and ever evolving into a great solution, it also seems to create a large amount of breaking changes with it. HA is a major commitment.

[Pete]

Sorry you are leaving @borat.

Using Homeseer 4 here and still getting used to it. It is running OK for me.

I have been running Home Assistant on the same computer. I have yet to have breaking changes with the weekly updates to HA core.

Way back it was mostly YAML editing and today it is not which makes it much easier to work with.

[kenm]

I ran Home Assistant in parallel with HS3, then HS4, for almost 18 months before I gave up on it. For me, it seemed to be breaking every time I turned around. I dreaded clicking the update button for fear of what would break this time. I developed a solid backup strategy which I've since carried back to HS4.

I need my automation system to work for me, not the other way around.

[TC1]

I need my automation system to work for me, not the other way around.

Bingo. My education and early professional experience is electronics and software/hardware engineering, I can build most anything from scratch... when I was younger. I'm a busy tech exec now, Home Assistant is for people who have time/like-to tinker, my time is precious so it's not right for me now. Maybe when I retire something like HA will be more appealing.

[borat]

Perhaps I’ve been lucky but so far I haven’t had an outage with home assistant and it’s been rock solid. I know there were issues with zwave prior to the current integration and latest 700 series firmware but it’s been very reliable with this (and much quicker response than I used to get). This is running on a raspi as well vs a well specced VM. That said I don’t update anything unless it’s needed and have backups if I do. I’ve had a lot more problems with HS4 recently, but mainly down to plugins and the annoyance of having to run on windows (I did look at migrating to Linux but it just seemed like a hack vs a native solution and was easier to just make the switch to something else that’s designed for it).
I would agree the core of homeseer is pretty reliable. I think the biggest challenge and reason for jumping ship is I just can’t do what I need to with homeseer anymore. Nest is one of the most utilised devices you are likely to find and it just seems crazy that it’s still not supported. Plus if you end up with a poor user experience just running things (ie the app) then it reduces the value you get from it. I’m also an ex techie now tech exec. My tinkering time getting home assistant doing everything I need was about 6hrs from start. I would guess I have invested many times that working out how to get homeseer to do the same and with much more limited success. I haven’t had to write any code yet - all done with integrations and blueprints.
Anyway, maybe one day I’ll be back. I moved from Vera due to unreliability so if you are right about home assistant who knows! Perhaps homeseer will get bought by someone who can invest more in it.

cheers

[alphatech]

Not familiar with the other product, can you run both products at the same time?

Sent from my SM-G973U1 using Tapatalk

[wpiman]

Not familiar with the other product, can you run both products at the same time?

Sent from my SM-G973U1 using Tapatalk

It is an open source project. Very popular.

I know some people run both an interoperate with MQTT.

[macromark]

borat Thanks for the feedback. FWIW, the Nest plugin is in beta now and will be released in July. Also, the HS4Touch update is just about done... and a new graphics set will be released with it. If this don't work out with HA, check us out again in the future.

[WJefferson]

4) My god.. how can we still not have a decent ios app!

Well, we're now down to 3 folks now who use Apple products with HS.

[macromark]

Well, we're now down to 3 folks now who use Apple products with HS.

Not by a long shot! However, we are also working on a big update to HomeSeer Mobile that will unify the experience for Android and iOS users. We'll have more info on that this summer.

[wpiman]

Well, we're now down to 3 folks now who use Apple products with HS.

If you use HomeBridge, it works well with Siri and Homekit. Don't even need an app.... Just ask my watch to do things...

[kenm]

+1 for homebridge. I had to upgrade the AppleTV for remote access but it was way past time for that anyway. I also use Jon00's HSTiles on several, small Android tablets around the house. I'm a big fan of structured, pixel-based UIs but I know the trend is towards free-flowing "cards". Looking forward to testing out the new HS4Touch.

[Eman]

The two products work well together with Node-RED playing a big part...

• The plug-ns (UniFi, Monoprice 6 Zone Audio, Ultra-Pioneer...etc and Tasker) in HomeSeer are feature rich especially if you want to do magic in text to speech

Eman.