Home Assistant vs OpenHAB - Which one is better?

choosing a home automation platform is an important decision and one that you will need to make right at the start of your journey into the home automation world it's where all your smart devices will come together in a single unified experience and it will truly level up your smart home game and unlock features that you never thought possible before home assistant openhab domitics habitat and homeseer are just such a few platforms out there so which one should we pick today we're pitching openhab head to head against home assistant to find out which one comes out on top let's take a look these two platforms show much similarities both are open source both can run on pretty much any hardware and run locally both aim to unify all your devices under one roof and amazingly both are free of course you can support both these projects in various ways and i do encourage you to do so openhab or open home automation bus was founded in 2010 is currently on release 2.5.7 and runs on java meaning it can pretty much run anywhere the jvm cam home assistant was founded in 2013 is currently on release 0.114 and runs on python meaning again in theory it can run anywhere that python can in order to put these two platforms head to head i'm going to break this out into six categories installation ease of use supported devices mobile apps automations and the community slash update stability i do want to mention that i am a long-term home assistant user myself but i will do my best to keep my bias out of this and be completely as fair as possible i also want to mention that i'm comparing these two systems from the point of view of a new user coming into the home automation world let's jump into the first part of any home automation the installation both openhab and home assistant offer customized raspberry pi os's as well as docker images making them immediately available on a wide variety of platforms openhab also has install options for all the major linux distributions through their package managers as well as pre-compiled installs for mac os and windows home assistant offers virtual machine images through vhd's vmdks vdis and ovas as well as some other customized images for other boards like odroid and intel knox overall both openhab and home assistant are available on pretty much any platform out there in one way or another as far as the actual installations go both are incredibly easy and can be done without much trouble at all in just a couple of minutes once the install's done both platforms will land you at their respective uis in order to complete the setup home assistant will get you to create a user set time and location and things like that whereas openhab will ask you which ui you want to install as well as other packages which as you'll see later i find a little frustrating however both setup and installation on both are incredibly easy so no issues here i'll give openhab the slight edge for installation i like the fact that they provide pre-compiled installs for windows mac and linux as well as all the other options but as i say neither will cause you any issue on the installation in terms of ease of use i feel home assistant by far has the edge here in terms of being a new user and the learning curve openhab has quite a few key concepts that require the user to get familiar with like the difference between items channels bindings and things to name a few i feel it's unnecessarily overly complicated for example to add a single device in openhab you have to go to the add-ons menu and install the add-on which you want which is quick and easy however after that things start to feel a little clunky to me you then have to go and add a thing which is like an entity in home assistant then add a channel to the thing then finally link your channel to your item before you can even have it appear on the dashboard now there is an option in the configuration to have it do that as a last step and automatically link the channel to the item but that option is off by default if you choose the recommended option so i do think it's really overly complicated for a new user home assistant isn't without its complications for new users here either in previous versions you had to manually edit the yaml config files in order to add automations or devices to home assistant much of this has now been added to the lovelace interface which is excellent but some devices can still only be added through the config files this should get better as time goes on but as it stands it's still a little confusing for new users just take a look at this of how many steps it took to add a device to openhab compared to home assistant openhab also ships with four user interfaces out of the box which i find to be pretty confusing one of them have panel is pretty self-explanatory in that it's made for wall panels or tablets however the other three give you more or less functionality depending on which one you choose you can add or remove user interfaces as you see fit however the whole concept of having different uis for different functions i find to be pretty frustrating and probably the weakest point of openhab for me for example if you choose paper ui which is the recommended ui on setup there is no way to do automations out of the box however if you choose admin you will have access to automations immediately but how is the user meant to know this at startup you can install the rule engine add-on into paper ui which will give you access to do automations but still i find the whole thing particularly frustrating to me the term ui or user interface should mean a different look and feel to displaying the same information with all the same settings accessible regardless of the ui chosen having different settings and controls only be available in different user interfaces is an odd choice to me i totally get that paper ui is meant to be simple and functional to the user without being confusing however i think a better way of doing this would be to add a toggle switch that would show or hide information depending on if the user is advanced or basic that way you have consistent functional experience across all the different ui's with the only thing changing is the look and feel i do however appreciate the ability to be able to install and customize uis according to your taste and i do appreciate paper ui simplicity which is intended to be a simple place to control all of your devices having a ui that's optimized for a wall panel is also a nice touch home assistant by contrast only has a single user interface called lovelace however just because there's only one interface doesn't mean it's not customizable lovelace is incredibly customizable with themes that allow you to change the way it looks and feels a wide range of cards that allow you to change the way that your devices are displayed and it will play nice with virtually any display you can put it on both openhab and home assistant have discovery options which will automatically attempt to discover and add your devices to their respective platforms this can be super useful when adding loads of devices at once i wasn't able to test openhab's implementation of this because nothing showed up but this could be because of the way my network is structured or because i didn't have any compatible devices but the documentation certainly indicates it should work one small feature i did appreciate in openhab was the ability to click on any of the add-ons and it take you to the openhab description page where you can find all the options a nice touch i definitely have to give the ease of use section to home assistant i think in openhab's attempt to create basic or advanced uis has actually made things more difficult instead of simpler even adding devices in openhab is more difficult than it needs to be having a nice looking and easy to use home automation platform is all well and good however if it doesn't support any popular devices what good is it fortunately openhab and home assistant both have large amounts of supported devices with all the big names included home assistant calls these devices integrations and lists the number of them right on their website and even breaks them down into individual categories for us at the time of filming home assistant currently supports 1632 official integrations i say official because there are community add-ons that you can install that probably takes this number up to about two thousand remember add-ons and home assistant are not classed the same as add-ons in openhab openhab's numbers are a little harder to work out however according to their website there is currently 2004 bindings with all the major platforms supported all in all it's great to see both platforms support such huge number of devices because everyone benefits from this i'm going to give this one a tie both platforms support everything you could ever want and are constantly adding more and more all the time next up let's talk mobile apps mobile apps are a huge part of the home automation world and both openhab and home assistant have android and ios apps i'd like to preface this by saying that i am talking about the native or official mobile apps offered by both home assistant and openhab some of the things i'm going to talk about are available through third-party apps but i'd like to focus on the official experience this time both platforms will allow you to view connect and control all of your devices locally and remotely as well as send notifications and use voice control after that they start to differ a little bit let's start by discussing a few of the additional features that home assistant offers that openhab currently doesn't the first one being location tracking location tracking allows your device to periodically send its gps location to home assistant which is incredibly useful for using within automations openhab does support gps locations except it's only through third-party apps as far as i can tell like own tracks home assistant also supports actionable notifications which allows the user to make a choice directly from the notification which the home assistant server will then act upon again this is incredibly useful when coupled with automations you can add or delete devices configure automations and scripts and change your edit dashboards all from the mobile app which i found really useful for when you're on the go as far as i could tell and please do correct me if i'm wrong you cannot do this from the openhab app the only other additional feature i find that openhab has that home assistant doesn't is the use of nfc tags using nfc tags within openhab allows you to assign certain functions to tags like control devices simply tap and hold the device you want to control a menu will pop up and you simply scan the nfc tag after that you can scan and tag to control any device a really excellent addition to the app i definitely have to give the win to home assistant here the additional functionality it commands and the far superior customizability pushes it far ahead in this aspect automations are becoming more and more important with these home automation platforms and it's easy to see why why do something yourself when you can have it happen automatically taking a look at the way openhab does automations you have a couple of options in paper ui you can install the rules engine add-on to give finally because of the lovelace interface which we discussed earlier you have access to fully configure and customize your home assistant instance just as if you were on the desktop you can create automations with a trigger a condition and an action so all the things you really need home assistant has a similar setup which also allows you to quickly and easily create automations from the lovelace ui also with a trigger condition and action nice home assistant does slightly agile open have here because it has slightly more options for triggers more granular control over conditions with and or or not and slightly more options for actions but again both impressive options when it comes to this style of automation for those of us that prefer both can create automations through text editors or config files and for those of us that are visual kind of people both have the ability to add automations through drag and drop style editors node red on home assistant and men on openhab this is entirely subjective but i personally find nodread a bit more intuitive with its linking style system however i was able to create an automation on having without looking up any documentation whatsoever so your mileage may vary on which one you prefer i'm going to give the wind to home assistant in the automation category due to having a bit more customizability however both have excellent interfaces and options for automations so i'm sure you won't be disappointed with either moving into the final category let's take a look at the update cycle community and stability both openhab and home assistant have very large and active communities which is great looking on the official openhab forum we can see that around 120 new topics created every week certainly a very active community home assistant by contrast has around 530 new topics created per week which is incredible taking a look through both forms i'm pretty confident that any issue you have will be answered very quickly by both communities in terms of updates both are very active and again release very frequent updates home assistant releases about every three weeks a major version with minor versions in between and openhab currently has about a four week release cycle according to the last couple of releases the final one is stability i'd like to jump in and mention that i haven't tested openhab long term as i don't use it as a daily driver so it wouldn't be fair for me to make judgment there however i did run into some minor niggles none of them deal breaking but i still thought i would let you know the first one was this kind of annoying ui bug when installing add-ons the spinning circle would sit there for ages and never stop spinning yet refreshing the page would clearly show the add-on as successfully installed there are a few other instances of ui issues i ran into also check out the mobile app in demo mode here and how these elements are all squashed together and unreadable a couple of other bugs i ran into would just generate error messages with nothing helpful in them like this one where i created a rule in admin and then when i went to go back into it i can delete it or edit it and it would just give me this generic error message in the bottom corner not a big deal at all but just something i thought was worth mentioning by contrast i've been running my current installation of home assistant for around one and a half years and i've updated to almost every release that's came out since then the only issue i've ever ran into is where everything stopped working but this turned out that the machine had actually run out of disk space so this was self-inflicted again both have excellent communities are very well maintained and updated so i don't think you'll be disappointed in this aspect once again they are very close and i am going to disregard the stability aspect since i haven't been able to test openhab for the long term but i think i'm going to give it to home assistant in this regard with the slightly larger community so with all the information that we've run through today which one should you choose as your daily driver for me oh home assistant wins hands down when it comes to choosing between these two personally openhab's unnecessary complexity ends up being its downfall for me personally however having said that it is something that can be improved upon and i do want to keep checking in on the openhab project i've been impressed with what i've seen so far whilst i do think home assistant is a superior choice personally i do highly encourage you to check out both projects and see what both have to offer you but which one gets your vote i'm actually really interested to see which one you guys are using or which one you want to use so be sure to let me know down below but anyways that's going to do it for this video thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed if you did please like and subscribe but that would help me out massively thank you again to all my supporters on patreon and i will catch you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 144,858

Keywords: home assistant vs openhab, home assistant vs openhab2, home assistant openhab, openhab vs home assistant, home automation, smart home, home assistant, hassio vs openhab, openhab tutorial, home assistant tutorial, openhab automation, openhab review, home assistant review, home assistant for beginners, openhab for beginners, smart home software, smart home app, best smart home software, best smart home automation, openhab2 vs home assistant, hassio vs openhab2

Id: A4jrE_MtRWc

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Jenz27]

Migrated from openHab to Home Assistant over a year ago. Was totally worth it!

[u/string69]

Both of them are winners. I choose openhab some time ago.

Both can help a lot.

[u/sour_brambles]

Good video, I'm already down the Home Assistant rabbit hole. Unrelated but Is that a north east accent?

[u/Yoram001]

The endless growing support of devices keeps amazing me. HA is the winner in my opinion. Using it now about 4 years i think. Tried a lot of other options, but nothing beats HA

[u/youmeiknow]

Gonna check out sometime later, hopefully OP gave his decision instead of generic statement as "based on your need". 🤞

[u/Verbunk]

I started with OpenHAB when they were 1.x (command line config only). After 2.x and PaperUI ... it turned south immediately. The community is really great there ... I wish they didn't make such a dramatic change in their production branch when it was still ... like 20% baked (my opinion).

Going to try HomeAssistant just because.

[u/Thermacon]

The Home Assistant iOS app does support NFC tags as of a couple updates ago (I think). Great video!

[u/slipnslider]

Let's not forget about Mozilla WebThings. Whatever happened to that? Was it any good?

[u/stevanobalabala]

Good unbiased video.