Hi all!
I use homeassistant since 2019. I feel quite good to use it but I want to try something of new and also if is possible avoid to use the home assistant cloud that is not free !
In my system I have:
most of my devices wit zigbee network and raspbee card,
some with MQTT 3)
some that I see there is no integration in openhub - like EFERGY to measure power consumption.
A things that I see that is look like less user use openhab and the community is smaller.
Any opinion from expert or beginner use or advice about pro and cons of the two different hub?
That’s a loaded question, because you’re asking in an openHAB forum. Most of us fall into one of the following categories:
Haven’t used Home Assistant
Left Home Assistant for openHAB and haven’t used a recent version
Go back and forth between Home Assistant and openHAB, or perhaps run them at the same time
I’m in the “haven’t used Home Assistant” camp, and don’t pay much attention to its development. All I know is that many people use it happily, which means it must have some good features and qualities. The same goes for openHAB. This being the case, my opinion is that both Home Assistant and openHAB are capable systems. That’s great, because we’re not competing with each other.
I encourage you to try openHAB for yourself, so that you can compare the experiences side by side and ask us questions as you learn about it (please read the documentation first). You’re almost certainly going to find that some things are better in HA and some are better in openHAB. Neither is perfect, so all that matters is which one serves you best.
A quick search for “EFERGY” suggests that some folks have gotten this to work using the HTTP binding to request data from the Energyhive cloud server. This is one of the things you’d want to see for yourself, because it’s unlikely that anyone here can tell you how the experiences compare.
This is often presented as a negative of Home Assistant. Personally, I believe that if you benefit from something, you should be willing to pay for it. I’d hate for someone to avoid Home Assistant primarily to avoid a monthly fee of US$6.50. Just order one less coffee every month and it’s pretty much covered.
Some of us donate that much and more to the openHAB foundation to support its operations (which include the myopenHAB cloud server). The only difference is that we see it as a goodwill donation instead of a fee for services.
So like I said, try openHAB out. You’ll either feel like it makes sense for you and want to do more with it, or find that it doesn’t suit you as well as Home Assistant. You might even find that you want to use both. There’s really no wrong answer.
I go between them both and get totally annoyed by the ever changing UI in HA. Supervisor and the shutdown server controls moved and confused me just recently as guides and videos do not match what the UI looks like today… If your wanting a project that has less breaking changes as changes are discussed and reviewed in more depth before being made then openHAB may be for you. I also do not like that you have to use json in the configuration.yaml for some and can use the UI for other intergrations. openHAB generally supports both methods in 99% of cases so it is more consistent once your over the learning curve.
To be fair you can create and host your own cloud instead of paying for theirs (openHAB allows this as well), but then you need to pay for certificates and create accounts to allow you to use google/alexa and other services. Its a lot easier to use openHABs cloud and someone else pays and keeps the certificates up to date. You can also use VPN connections to just show up inside your network when your not at home.
The good news is that both projects are opensource and you only loose some time by giving both a try. Welcome and would love to know your thoughts, just please be polite as the coding is done by voltunteers in their spare time and it is a labor of love for them and rude comments can get taken badly Things change and improve with each release.
Yes I am pretty sure as it is opensource software written by volunteers, the users and contributors would get very angry if someone did that and rightly so. However I do not know the full details and could be wrong… Whilst both HA and openHAB both allow you to host your own cloud, it takes time to setup and time to keep it running and if you forget to renew a cert will stop working until you resolve that… If you don’t want to be registering and updating certificates and applying security patches to the server, then the openHAB cloud is free, easy to setup and works well without needing to take care of the extra stuff. But as mentioned above please consider donating to the foundation which buys the hardware to host the cloud and pay for running costs and more.
!