I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features.

I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1].

It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files.

[0]: https://nodered.org/ [1]: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assista...