After years of Openhab - I installed Home Assistant side by side…sorry Openhab - HomeAssistant wins hands down. Now if I was like the core maintainers a professional programmer…of course Openhab is more powerful but misses the point and why HomeAssistant seems to pulling ahead - the end user experience is primary - Openhab now feels more like the increasingly corner case catering to its power users/developers (which is absolutely a legit goal)
The inflection point for me was in the MQTT binding transition. With the rewrite David chose to not add documentation for direct file based configuration. You had to hunt to find it in the source instead of in the documentation link. Why? Because no one should be using file based configuration. The majority of the other bindings documented what was needed for file based configurations in the documentation page- just an arbitrary decision at the caprice of the developer.
Ironically I had been considering being a sustaining member at that point (nothing good is really free) but decided against it as my gut told me things would work towards another solution taking the lead.
HomeAssistant as little as two years ago wouldnt have been viable but now its not only viable but in many ways more powerful (in terms of skillset to value of time spent configuring)
For the time being I will keep both running at the same time. The Wife Approval Factor won out on Home Assistant. She said the default Openhab app style looked like 1995 and the HomeAssistant app looked very modern (and i could change it from my phone while she showed me what she wanted changed)
@rlkoshak and others are just fantastic folks and I only wish them well and thank them for the information and the great fun I have had over the years with Openhab.
