Hubitat Elevation C-7 Home Automation Hub (US Model) Expired

You're right, there's an optional monthly fee. However connecting it to Google Home or Amazon Alexa bypasses the need for this. I use my Google Home app to easily control my devices remotely. Alternatively yes, VPN will work as well.



I've had both, SmartThings UI is certainly prettier looking and rules and automation are a little bit simpler to setup. The best thing in my opinion is that Hubitat works perfectly well using a web browser. SmartThings doesn't work on a computer. Hubitat commands are faster and will still work even if I have an internet outage.

Dammit. Just bought a used one for $95. Didn't think they'd go this low even with BF. 🤦

FWIW, I switched from SmartThings to Hubitat last year around this time and have been REALLY happy with the decision. Works great with a wide range of Z-Wave and Zigbee equipment and integrates seamlessly with our Google and Alexa devices. Picked up the second one I mentioned to extend automation to my shop. It'll be great to monitor and control things out there without having to actually go out there. Highly recommended!

I'd been using SmartThings since late 2015 and switched over to Hubitat back in February, because I finally had had enough of their cloud outages and laggy response times. The UI for SmartThings is more polished, but the performance and stability of Hubitat is rock solid. I'll take the latter over the former any day of the week, especially when it comes to home automation. Besides, we have Alexa integration with Hubitat, so we hardly use the mobile app (i.e., dashboards).

And if our Internet connection goes down, it's nice that we can still control our home automation locally via the mobile app. The iOS and Android Hubitat mobile apps really just encapsulate the web UI for your Hubitat hub (such as the custom dashboards you create to control and monitor your devices), although they recently added a "Devices" tab, which allows you to view/control the state of all your devices. The mobile app also adds geolocation functionality, although I've never been able to get it to reliably track my location. What has been 100% reliable is the Life360 Connector app (built-in app). My family already uses Life360, so it just made sense to connect this to Hubitat.

I actually bought a second Hubitat hub (on sale) just to segregate my many smart bulbs (mostly Sylvania/Lightify) on their own ZigBee network. Many smart bulbs try to act as ZigBee repeaters, but they usually only repeat bulb commands and drop everything else, so they make lousy repeaters for other ZigBee devices and can create network performance issues. So, it's best to keep them on their own mesh. One notable exception are the Seng-led ZigBee bulbs, which apparently do not serve as ZigBee repeaters, they only pass commands to other Seng-led bulbs, thus it should be fine to have them in a mixed ZigBee mesh. If you do have two Hubitat hubs, be sure to use different channels for their ZigBee and Z-Wave radios, to help avoid interference. I logically connected the "bulb hub" to my "master hub" via the built-in apps called 'Hub Link' and 'Link to Hub', respectively. This allows me to control the smart bulbs from the "master" hub, even though they were added to the "bulb" hub.

I also use the built-in app called Rule Machine to set up my automations. Yes, it's not as straightforward or intuitive as creating automatons in SmartThings, but the learning curve is relatively small. I spent about 30-60 minutes reading and comprehending the official documentation (Hubitat has excellent online documentation) on Rule Machine before writing my own rules. Hubitat gives you more latitude in creating rules than does SmartThings, which has a rather simplistic rule set.

I also like how I can create local backups of my Hubitat hubs' configurations. Although SmartThings saves your settings in their Cloud (in theory), on more than one occasion I've had all of my SmartThings settings lost due to a forced firmware update or Cloud migration (e.g., moving "Classic" accounts to Samsung). Again, with Hubitat, everything is controlled locally.

Having said that, even though Hubitat is locally controlled and commands are processed 100% locally on the hub, they still offer an optional cloud service, if you'd like to access your dashboards while away from the house. The mobile app will seamlessly switch between cloud and local dashboards, depending if you're on your home WiFi or not. You also have the option of not making your dashboards accessible via their cloud, and just using your home VPN instead. Again, the decision is up to you, not some provider (e.g., Samsung).

Overall, I'm very pleased with Hubitat. I don't see myself ever going back to SmartThings. Sure, there's more of a learning curve, but it's well worth it in my opinion to gain local control and added functionality.