SmartThings to Home Assistant: Joining the Dark Side

[Music] hey what's up this is reid as many of you know i've been a smartthings user for years but lately i've been using home assistant more and i thought it could be helpful to share my experience using the two systems you would be surprised at how powerful home assistant has become it's a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural i put off giving home assistant a fair shot for a while but there were a few things that finally pushed me over to the dark side believe it or not it's not just because things run locally there are plenty of advantages of having the hub run locally it's faster works without the cloud and you don't have to worry about a company shutting things down that's all great but it wasn't a good enough reason for me to spend a lot of time and effort switching there were two main things that finally convinced me integrations and native automations smartthings has a lot of devices it can integrate with but there are some missing pieces with home assistant it's a little bit more rare for something to be incompatible let me show you some of the devices around my house that work with home assistant lg washer and dryer check my cue garage door opener denim receiver check unify cameras with a live feed in the dashboard yes lutron shades and light switches within sleep sensor hue lights no problem samsung frame tv check it even works better in my opinion than with the smartthings app created by samsung come on to you for smart life devices yep google calendar and spotify check check that's just a tiny sliver of all the things it works with and you know what yoda says once you start down the home assistant path forever will it dominate your destiny well that's what i think he said for example i have my unifying network connected to home assistant and it's a really accurate present sensor since it uses my phone connected to the wi-fi to know if i'm home or not what's cool is that home assistant starts off easier than you would expect it scans your local network and suggests integrations with the devices that you already have this worked for more devices than i thought it would and setting up this way is very easy like the audio receiver i didn't even know it was compatible until it popped up all i had to do was hit accept and i was connected what's also really interesting is how well it integrates with echo devices amazon devices usually do a lot of processing in the cloud so you wouldn't think it would integrate well with home assistant but it does there is this integration called alexa media player and it's fantastic i can do almost all the amazon assistant functionality from home assistant i can play music sound effects custom messages and trigger routines directly from a home assistant automation it's amazing on a scale of easy to set up versus impossible it was kind of somewhere in the middle similar to a lot of the other home assistant struggles but once it was all set up it was really easy to use smartthings does not integrate as smoothly to get it working with my echoes i have to use virtual switches to trigger amazon routines it's not the most elegant way but it gets the job done so you can kind of see the difference between the two home assistant is front heavy with inconvenience but once you get past that it's much easier smartthings is easier from the start but can be slightly inconvenient over time i think for me the extra effort of home assistant is worth it for all the integrations everything just works together as you would expect it to now with automations they are similar but home assistant has one key advantage over smartthings that is more advanced functionality in their native automations so what does that even mean well smartthings has great automations but it is still limited on what it can do say you want to press a button and have some smart lights turn on but you want the lights to be bright white during the day when they turn on and dim warm white if it's night you would have to create two automations and smartthings for this but with home assistant you would just create one this can help keep all the logic in one place which is great for organization and reducing issues with conflicting logic with smartthings you can install a third-party smart app called webcore to do advanced automations like this i really like webcore but who knows what it will be like once smartthings updates their smart apps in the future whereas home assistant and their native automations i can feel confident that it will be the same going forward while i am liking these advantages that come with home assistant there are definitely still frustrations a lot of things work out of the box with smart things so the good and the bad are less extreme you can do some pretty great automations with smartthings but there are some things that are pretty frustrating nothing i lose sleepover though home assistant on the other hand has really big highs and really low lows basically you're digging through documentation and building out a smart home on your own but when things do work out well you can feel on top of the world but there is a dark side staying up till 2 a.m trying to debug an issue and wondering how you got to this point in your life yeah that happened to me a few days ago with a usb zigbee stick home assistant is dangerous but it's possibly worth it maybe if this makes you nervous to switch to home assistant you can actually integrate smartthings into home assistant to bring in all of the smartthings devices you can use both systems together it works really well but of course it's not perfect some devices like the ikea button do not work with home assistant when connected through smartthings but it still gets a lot of information from the devices that it does work with like the smartthings multi-purpose sensor there are also some devices that work with smartthings and not home assistant so this integration is great to pull in those extra devices into home assistant that's why i will have my smartthings hub still plugged in even though it's not my main hub if you're on the fence about giving home assistant a try i would definitely consider it it's obviously not for everyone and some people will prefer a more simple solution like smartthings but home assistant is also not as difficult and scary as some people might say it is like pretty much what i was saying 30 seconds ago yeah just just ignore that and join us if you only knew the power of the dark side i mean home assistant actually i'm often surprised at how easy developers have made home assistant to use if you're getting started with home assistant i'll link a page that can direct you to all the best content out there there's also a great video i saw recently by dr z's he goes over 10 and a half tips for getting started with home assistant i'm not saying it's only good because my face is buried deep in a video somewhere but it is really helpful and i learned some tips myself so go check out that video if you haven't already thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] i feel a disturbance in the force hey i knew it you're destined for great things join me and together we'll rule this house with home assistant

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 142,112

Keywords: Smartthings, smartthings vs home assistant, home assistant review, home assistant automation, is home assistant worth it, smartthings hub, smartthings to home assistant, home assistant setup, home assistant beginners, smart home, home automation, smart home solver

Id: 3xMvjOig8J4

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021