Thinking of Moving from HS3 to HS4

[Techvet]

What you are presenting is an apples to oranges comparison. Quicken is a larger company and larger team (long time user here) compared to HST. In order to maintain two different interfaces, one needs an extra set of resources. The economics of doing this simply doesn't make sense for HST.

And being resource limited, HST had the foresight to make HS4 extensible, in both the interface and plugins. There are various substitute front-ends that folks have written.

You're probably right about the resources bit. I guess since they made the new software backward compatible with the HS3 plug-ins I would have thought they could have done the same with the interface. Like I said, I'll probably revisit it one day to give it another go - when I have more time.

[januszczyk]

About 9 months ago I made the attempt to migrate from HS3 to HS4. At that time I also decided I would migrate HS3 from Windows to Linux (all virtualized) first and then upgrade.

This did not go well and I ended up rolling everything back to Windows HS3 and sitting tight.

What were the issues?

1. Unfortunately Mono on Linux does not do ASP well and switching to ASPX resulted in huge performance issues (clicking a window would take 30-60 seconds to update). These were not HS pages, but other pages like Jon00 HTML. No attempt at pre-compiling, etc. really fixed the issue. Near as I can tell this is a known Mono issue.
2. I'm heavily using Jon00 "plugins" and some of these are subtly broken (such as Jon00 Network). Other plugins like Arduino had their serial port support (RS232) broken. I tried workarounds and different software but in the end things were not working and events depending upon them no longer reliable. I did verify before I did the upgrade that the plugins I use where good for Linux.
3. Coming from the information dense HS3 UI, HS4 is a struggle - feel like I have to scroll and click through everything to "see" what was a glance in HS3. God help you if you decide to filter on a bunch of things - a huge chunk of UI to show what filters are active blocks you from seeing much of the actual data requiring more scrolling.
4. My HS4 Z-wave migration was a disaster, all HS devices got disconnected from their Z-wave nodes and even with a backup I had to laboriously reconnect everything - that was not fun.

This past Monday (11/14) I (oddly) spontaneously decided to give it another try and upgrade my Windows HS3 to Windows HS4 (not going the Linux route anymore). Unlike the prior upgrade, this upgrade was pleasantly uneventful and everything more or less just worked. All of the plugins survived fully working and by and large I did not see anything broken other than a number of images are disconnected (links to the PNG files). I was able to upgrade most of the plugins that had HS4 versions relatively easily.

I have spent the past few days trying to work around the UI - it is much better than 9 months ago but honestly the menu bar is super clunky (Devices, Events, Cameras, etc). I have installed Jon00 Links to try and work around things adding custom widgets pointing to custom HTML pages and that certainly helps me get to where I want to go faster. After spending a few days with this it's my feeling that the internal event/state machine handling is super solid but the UI is a work in progress which unfortunately still has a ways to go before it gets to the maturity of HS3 UI.

1. I am more heavily leaning on Jon00 HTML to construct an information dense UI - the biggest issue is no dynamic updates to the data like in the main UI. I also leverage Jon00 Links to make the HS3 pages available.
2. Odd UI things like a left over for example: Plugins->Legacy Z-Wave that points to a ton of 404 links. Not sure if that is some Jon00 mistake (not trying to cast blame) or it was from the legacy Z-Wave prior to upgrade. Not sure if I should hunt it down in the html pages or if there if I should be uninstalling something.
3. The missing HS UI pieces are annoying - trying to fix the broken images require you to edit the device status/graphic ranges. Unfortunately directory selection is no longer supported so yet another Jon00 plugin to the rescue.
4. Unfortunately all of this work around does not integrate with the menu bar particularly well - I wish I could customize that menubar to better align to how I use HS.

I had been looking at HomeAssistant and Homeseer to determine which path to take. But after kicking tires I decided that, while the UI is not as good, HS is more integrated in the backend and requires far less command line work. While I have no difficulty working in JS, YML, etc. the fact is my home control system is something I put time to get working and then it just needs to work. After 12+ months I come back to it and having everything in YML to figure out again is a pain - a GUI does have value. :-) Plus I'm starting to lean more and more on MQTT and node-red so not all of the logic needs to be in the main system. This allows far easier integration with things that don't have native plugins.

If you are waiting on HS4 my experience is the backend part of Homeseer is very robust at this point. The UI is ok and, for me, I can make it work with enough 3rd party tools.

-Jeff