5 Reasons Not to Build a Smart Home on home Assistant

in this video i'm going to give you five reasons why home assistant might not be the platform for you so stick around because i'm going to try to help you avoid some boring stuff [Music] what's up everyone my name is jeff and this is slacker labs where we look for ways to automate the boring stuff using home assistant and smart home tech and yeah this video is all about why you wouldn't want to use home assistant on a channel dedicated to using home assistant yeah i know stick with me i think it'll make sense in the end and the truth is i really do want you to succeed in your smart home journey and sometimes that means choosing a different path from mine so let's talk about the five reasons why you might not want to use home assistant as your smart home platform reason one home assistant is a choose your own adventure we all remember those books from our school days you know those books that instead of having a single path to the end allow you to make choices as you read through the book that change how the story unfolds home assistant is a lot like that which sounds really great since the smart home space feels a bit like a michael bay movie lots of cool stuff happening but the story tying it all together is a bit confusing and with home assistant there are currently over 1700 integrations built into home assistant core to help shape your smart home journey and even more if you throw in the home assistant community store i don't know another smart home platform that gives you that many choices but like peter parker's uncle said with lots of choices comes decision paralysis okay he didn't say that but the struggle is real at least with a platform like smartthings or amazon echo you're limited in which devices you can integrate with those platforms leaving you more time to automate the boring stuff and less time deciding what smart home protocol you're going to invest in which brings us to reason 2 there is no easy mode in home assistant ok that is a bit of a lie there are some things in home assistant that are quite easy but the point here is there are parts that are not going to feel easy if you're just starting out on a smart home journey or you've come in from another platform like the amazon echo where you can just add devices and automate them in a matter of minutes as much as the home assistant user experience has improved over the last three years there are still parts of it that are going to require you to get under the hood and edit freeform configuration files especially in the beginning when you're adding devices of course that experience is largely going to be based on what kind of devices you're adding to home assistant but with a platform like smartthings you don't have to know if a device is zigbee z-wave or even wi-fi you just have to know that it's compatible with smart things and adding it is as easy as hitting the button that says add device with home assistant if you want to add a zigbee device you're going to have to go out and buy a zigbee radio and get it integrated with home assistant and then you can start adding your zigbee devices and the pattern's the same for z-wave and if you want to get into advanced automations you're probably going to be dealing with yaml jinja and some basic python reason 3 home assistant is open source i suspect out of all of these this one might be the most controversial after all being open source is one of the things that makes home assistant awesome but i can also see how someone might not want to base their smart home system on an open source platform open source means that home assistant is developed and maintained by a collaborative group of smart home enthusiasts this means that changes are driven by the community not by a corporation solely focused on profit and the result is changes can happen quicker than they do for their corporation-backed counterparts from a feature and security standpoint that's a good thing but it also means that as a user of home assistant you're going to have to stay more up to date with the changes happening to the platform which brings us to reason four home assistant still encounters breaking changes and out of all of these this one might be the most negative breaking changes are simply changes to home assistant that may require you to modify your configuration or may break some functionality in your smart home in one of the updates especially if you haven't been paying attention to the changes that are being made i've been using home assistant since 2015 and it has gotten a thousand times better but while the frequency of breaking changes has lessened they still do occur that means that the wi-fi plug that you bought and integrated all over your house and home assistant no longer works because of a change made by the vendor or it could be that apple bought the weather api that you were using in your automations and shut the api down meaning that you have to go out and look for a new weather api the bottom line here is that even though you've chosen a path for your adventure there could be times in which you're forced to change that path based on forces or situations outside of your control and while breaking changes occur in other platforms as well i think they do occur in home assistant a little more than they do in some of the other platforms simply based on the nature of what home assistant is trying to do which is to bring all of your disparate smart home technology together under one platform which brings us to reason five home assistant is addictive this reason of course is based on how much you like to tinker but if you don't like to tinker that might be another reason to avoid home assistant because home assistant was built for tinkers tinkerers tinkers i have always been prone to tinker and with home assistant it got so crazy that i actually gave up on home assistant back in 2017 and moved all of my devices back into smart things but not even a week later i was moving all of my devices back into home assistant because i had seen the promised land outside of the walled garden if you're looking for a platform to automate some lights maybe set some scenes and do some basic automations and get a full eight hours of sleep every night then then home assistant might not be the platform for you and there it is five reasons why home assistant might not be for you okay those might actually be five reasons why home assistant is the platform for you but as much as i love home assistant and i think it's the best smart home platform out there these days i do understand that it's not for everyone home assistant does require more effort to get started and to keep running then say smartthings or the amazon echo and before you jump all in on home assistant you should know what you're getting into so if you've been considering whether home assistant was the right platform for you i hope those five reasons help you in that process whatever direction you end up going in if you found this video useful hit that like button and consider subscribing to my channel for more home automation and home assistant content like this and as always thanks for taking time out of your home automation projects to watch mine until next time go automate the boring [Music] stuff

Channel: SlackerLabs

Views: 59,978

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, home automation, raspberry pi, lovelace, hassio, yaml, mqtt, scripts, home assistant automation examples, home assistant basics, home assistant for beginners, home assistant guide, home automation ideas, home assistant tutorial, home assistant beginner's guide, smart home ideas, beginner's guide, home assistant scripts, Home Assistant Tips, home assistant overview, build a smart home, smart home tips, how to succeed with home assistant

Id: g48pwCIAQEk

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021