I want to shortly share my experience here since I’ve had a simliar situation. (HomeKit → openHAB → Home Assistant → openHAB)
When I went into the smart home topic I just had some hue lamps using HomeKit. My preference though was to use something more open, so I stumbled across openHAB and Home Assistant.
Also I was growing my device list which was then consisting of:
- Conbee 2
- Aqara Door Sensors
- Ikea Fyrtur Blinds
- Hue lamps
- Hue dimmer
- RF roller shutters controlled with MQTT
A colleague of mine used openHAB so this is what I started with initially. Since I barely had any idea about all of the smart home concepts and the UI was a bit confusing at first (OH3 was just released then), I gave up on openHAB and moved to Home Assistant. It was very nice to be able to achieve a lot of things quite easily in a short amount of time. After I while I began to notice things I didn’t like:
- HA has to be restarted/reloaded quited often resulting in empty dashboards for some time (HA doesn’t save the last state of entities. This was quite noticeable at the Tesla integration as it only gets the battery when the car is online.)
- the RPI distribution was so locked that you had almost no access to the system
- HA would suddenly stop responding and I had to restart the Pi
- sometimes HA would need several restarts of the Pi to come back again
- logs were only accessible through the UI by default and after a restart you couldn’t see enough of those to actually see what went wrong
- the Ikea blinds never really worked well. I got 3 and 1 would always not respond
- my deconz (zigbee) integration lost some settings, I had to repair devices and things became out of sync with HA
- my SD card broke after 2 months of using HA (this never happened to me before)
- I found no good way of writing automation without using the UI (nodeRED was my choice then)
- configuration as code was important to me but having everything in YAML felt wrong
- updates broke the UI and some integrations, and updates came in quite frequently
The high maintanence time ultimately drove me back to try out openHAB again. I even ran both in parallel during migration which was quite nice. I started to put deconz into a Docker container using Ansible and connected HA to it. Then I added an openHAB container and connected it as well.
After I’ve moved everything over I could just shut down HA.
openHAB has been stable for over a year now, the SD card still works and being able to have the configuration in files is a big plus for me. Also writing rules in code felt more intuitive to me since I’m a software developer myself. There hasn’t been a single crash or slowdown so far and my maintenance time just consists of adaptions to the rules (if my requirements change) and the change of the container version every 6 months. The updates have also been smooth and did not break anything, yet. The only thing that I did not get to work properly is to get the battery usage of the Fyrtur blinds.
A huge plus is that changing the configuration doesn’t require a restart.
Since I have the configuration in files, I can simply fire up a container on my local machine to develop/test changes before syncing them to my Pi.
Disclaimer: My intention is not to bash HA here but to show you reasons why I’ve moved back to openHAB.