Hi all,
I’m using openhab for many years now. But I really think to move to Home Assistant, because of the bigger Community and more ‘easy to use’ addons and more bindings.
From my Point of View, openhab ist much better in configuration of UIs. If you Invest enough time you can get really beautiful visualization.
What other advantages so you see for openhab?
It depends on what you want to achieve. as usual 
I tried to achieve the same I was doing on openHAB on Home Assistant - and I crashed. Home Assistant is indeed more “easy to use” for standard scenarios. But in my opinion, if you like to do a load of logic this is way easier with openHAB - as openHAB doesn’t have that kind of abstraction like home assistant has for the end user.
That could be pro or con: you have to do more for yourself in OH as in HA, but you’ve got more ways to interact with the system in OH as in HA.
For me it’s the scripting power in rules and even in the Things, that does the trick. And in the end the way rules work in OH are more to my thinking than they do in HA.
HA of course has all the plugins as OH has extensions, perhaps some more, but in the end I as an experienced user have more freedom to adjust the system to my needs as I had with HA.
But as I said: that is heavily depending on the way you use your smarthome.
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What was exactly the Point that you could not solve with HA?
first off, the logic of HA is bound to “events” and there’s no such thing as a cron-based logic firing up.
That is kind of a hassle to overcome, if you like to have a rule around something that can be changed without you knowing.
e.g. there’s a ready made ruleset available in OH marketplace, which calculates the phases your dish washer or washing machine is in. even if they’re “off”, they tend to use a wee bit of energy, let’s say 1W or so. In OH you can set a cron-based rule every x min to check if the average consumption is above 1W or not. In HA you fire up the automation everytime the consumption is triggered for 1W and then I was fed up with trying to find out a way to achieve “averageSince” in HA, which is readily available in every rule of OH.
and there’s some more of those, mostly logic related things tiny and bigger, which led me to stay with openHAB.
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For me at least I could not overcome these items.
HA = recurring monthly charge of $$$
HA = constant internet connection required.
OpenHab != recurring monthly charge of $$$
Openhab != constant internet connection required.
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I am migrating to home assistant. I think openhab is great and so is it’s community, but most of my devices are zigbee (most of them don’t have direct zigbee support on openhab neither in home assistant) and I am using zigbee2mqtt to interact with them, which has great support with home assistant, but not so good with openhab (I know I could add them manually, I was assisted on how to do so and I am thankful for that; I also checked if homie could be added to zigbee2mqtt, but typescript is above my skills).
By the way, having both of them running right now managing different parts of my house, I think Openhab rules are impressive, I use both DSL and blocky (with my kids 
); I haven’t written any rule in home assistant (yaml? really?).
Home assistant market seems bigger, but it depends if you need it.
I’m always wondering, if I hear “Homeassistant is more easy to use”…
I tried multiple times in the past to get something running with HA…
But without Supervisor stuff or whatever it’s called (that’s the first confusion), I’m not able to run anything.
Far away from my -even- minimalistic OH config what I have right now.
Even also the change of the single .yaml … Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the file config from OH (even when the core dev’s dislike it in the meantime).
In general, for myself OH is way more straight forward then HA.
But of cause, that’s the same discussion like iOS or Android, Linux or Windows etc. etc. 
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it took me like 3 days to learn the difference between Home Assistant OS and “Home Assistant”
and I think that’s an appropriate comparison! 
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I have no experience with HA and my general opinion is everyone should use what ever system works best for them. But I do read most of the posts on this forum and what I’ve seen reported from those who migrate from HA to openHAB include:
- OH has a friendlier forum
- HA is prone to allowing massive breaking changes at any time, OH is more “stable”
- No free remote access
- HA didn’t support device XYZ and OH does
- creating automations is awkward
I know there are some who run both HA and openHAB to get better coverage for their devices and take advantage of each’s strengths.
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I use zigbee2mqtt too. I wrote a things/items file generator to deal with this. It makes adding/modifying a lot of similar devices much easier.
I recently converted to using Zwave-js-ui (basically Zwave2Mqtt) with OH. Created all the generic Mqtt things (did not use HA configs-problematic). Is your things/items generator code sharable? Could be helpful to others.
I saw your script, I couldn’t make it work, but the idea looked great, so I start making a python script to try get mqtt message from home assistant, and generate items automatically.
But parsing json start failing. I think topic may be longer than 1024 (which I believe it is mqtt limit), but by some strange reason home assistant wasn’t affected by it.
My intention was parse “home assistant” topic from mqtt, and generate a text which could be imported in “add items from textual definition”; it says it can be used to add/update items, so there shouldn’t be data loss if some items were already in and modified.
Maybe I should have tried using api/rest to add things with proper channels… I may give it a try.
Search for items generator on this forum
What was the problem?
I used to use it for years. Recently I stopped using it in favour of generating the things and items directly in code using JRuby.
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The community of openhab is great. Openhab is completely community driven which feels much better for me. I can easily accept small missing features or even contribute by myself if I like to fix or add something.
The payed subscription of Home Assistant that you need in common use cases (connect Google assistant, Alexa…) for me is a big disadvantage.
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Once understood how work OH is easyer if you have to write code.
I like That OH when you use TTS on alexa doesn’t stream audio. So if you’re listening music music will stop alexa will speak then music will continue. With OH music will stop and will not continue.
The problems are binding related.
No binding for Roborock on OH but there is on HA
No binding for Bticino LIVING now on OH and works fine as homekit on HA
Sonoff on OH is supported only changing the firmware, somebody wrote a binding that works with original firmware but is not official, so on every major update we have to wait several months to have it working…
MyBMW bindind doesn’t work with my 2016 car, works fine on HA
Comfee Water heater has no binding on OH but there is for HA
Broadlink RM mini has no binding for OH but HA detected it automatically.
The first 4 are very popular things here in Italy… maybe a fund raising for binding developing can help…
Did you use the community search ?
There are a couple of post for Roborock support
Not completely correct. There was a openHAB 3 version supporting it and I am going to move this to openHAB 4. The search function should have given you according posts.
Don‘t know how HA discovers the RM Mini, but from my experiencene, it does not announce itself in the network, so autodiscovery will not be possible.
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For me HA has to many inconsistencies and is lacking some fundamental things.
E.g. there is (or was when I tried it the last time) no differentiation beween a command and a state update.
If you have a battery powered device and send a command the value in HA will always be that of the command and not the actual state.
Also scripting even with AppDaemon is super awkward and not very comfortable.
Part of that is due to the internal structure and how values and metadata are coupled together.
I like writing rules in python and obviously I prefer HABApp to do so.
It’s much easier and much more flexible.
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I moved to Home Assistant over a year back, because there is NO real innovation in openHAB.
I would encourage everyone to do this step. It is not complicated. Z-Wave moved with no effort. deCONZ too.
Configuration is much easier
UI Configuration is much easier and more flexible
Stability is much better. Especially when you use HomeKit
Many more useful integrations
Much better Z-Wave support
Innovation rate is much higher
And the yearly charge for Home Assistant Cloud is worth it.