Difference between openHAB and Eclipse smarthome?

[danny]

I’m just getting started with home automation and am wondering what the difference is between openHAB and Eclipse smarthome. I understand they are related in some way or one is based on the other?
Under what circumstances would I use one over the other? My use case is to automate my own home to some extent.

[sihui]

Most of your questions are answered on the first page of the introduction docs:

http://docs.openhab.org/introduction.html

You may read some more explanation here:

So which OpenHAB version should I use?

ESH is a framework. It is actually derived from openHAB1, but moved under the Eclipse Foundation. It provides the core framework for a smarthome system, and is therefore core of OH2. Most of the core functionality of OH2 is actually part of ESH (rules, sitemaps, items, REST interface…). OH2 is then an implementation of ESH. It selects specific services, and customises the framework as OH2. It adds a LOT more bindings which can not be part of ESH due to ESH licensing constraints.

@danny

Under what circumstances would I use one over the other?

openHAB is the frontend which you want to use …