OpenHAB – vendor and tech agnostic open source automation software for your home
openhab.org
openhab.org
My recommendation: use HomeAssistant, do not bother with OpenHAB
Rationale:
. OpenHab is very powerful but requires the user to invest a lot of time to configure it properly
. OpenHab data model is very, very (and in my opinion unnecessarily) convoluted and it takes a lots of work/time to wrap your head around it
. OpenHab is implemented in Java and drags along with it all the heaviness/unwieldiness of the Java world. In particular, if you want to do anything a little complex, that implies writing a Java plugin.
. Home Assistant is Python. For simple, code-based changes to the system, YMMV but I personally think that Java vs. Python ... Python wins hands down.
. Home Assistant works "out of the box" for most things, and is also very flexible when you want to
. The Home Assistant community is much larger, and if you are doing exotic stuff, you'll find a ton more support onlineDoes that not work or is something missing?
I would pick OH if I was getting paid to do automation and the system had to be super reliable for years. But for my home, where I'm always tinkering with stuff I'll go with Home Assistant + NodeRED with a MQTT backend.
Then came Version 2, invented a completely new way of handling plugins and deprecated all the old plugins. Some things now could only be configured via a new UI called Paper UI, which broke my git based config. Luckily, the V1 plugins mostly still worked (though some, including zwave and MQTT, were conflicting with the V2 versions so I couldn't even soft-update the items).
A few years later, they introduced V3 which finally broke the old plugins and deprecated Paper UI. I cannot say much about this version cause I'm stuck with V2 forever - there are some plugins I use that have never been adapted for V2/3.
I hope that I can keep this system running until something better based on the new Matter standard emerges. I played with Home Assistant, but it's not really fitting my use case. I don't want shiny UI, I want a reliable system that connects all my stuff and logs all the changes to a time series database. Bonus points for giving me Alexa AND Homekit support without being dependent on someone's cloud service (besides AWS of course) - which still works great with OpenHAB for me.
They pushed people out of text files into the Paper UI and some DB. And I was constantly fighting the configuration.
Moved to Home Assistant, and so far it is good (but they also try to force usage of UI and some DB instead of pure and simple text files, which is again annoying).
However the initial config is quite a learning curve though, and is pretty user-hostile IMHO (they appear to have basically just put a web UI on their java inheritance tree with zero thought given to making it understandable, at least in the 2.x version), and the documentation is usually wrong/out-of-date so it is a challenge. Some stuff could not be configured in the Web UI and needs to be done in the CLI which is fine (if frustrating) but the docs for the CLI didn't exist or were wrong (at least when I was setting it up). Perhaps their newest version is better - I don't know. I have not upgraded for fear if having to configure everything again.
The Google/Alexa integration however is free and works, but has occasional outages (perhaps 5 or 6 times a year, sometimes several days at once). I have a local web server that runs a tiny UI to manually turn things on and off (sends MQTT to the switches/bulbs etc) that I have to rely on more frequently than I'd like.
I chose openhab over homeassistant because the Google/Alexa integration is (was?) $5/month for homeassistant. I wanted to be able to shout out loud to turn things on and off and openhab does that well with its integration (apart from the mentioned outages)
Exactly my impression. I used to work for Thingworx, more industrially oriented, and that's what was done there (also a java object astronautical culture), with an additional layer of generics to double complexity. They had some great ideas but any user would need a training class to be productive.
In 2022, I just don't understand Java development. It feels like a whole ecosystem just insisting on itself as everything else moves on.
It's complicated to understand and use. It's resource intensive for what it's doing. I've had all the configuration disappear on several occasions. It's not uncommon for OpenHAB to hang. Nowadays a crontab reboots my machine every night to make OpenHAB "stable".
Since I don't touch it anymore and the daily reboots makes it stable enough, I haven't tried running Home Assistant yet. But if OpenHAB breaks one more time, I will switch to something else, that's for sure.
The comments indicate it is a much older java project, so perhaps it doesn't do anything better?
The rate at which home assistant moves is probably its biggest strength and also its biggest weakness. Every time I upgrade something breaks and requires debugging. It's one of those things I wish I could setup and never touch again, but alas, I like to tinker...
But dashboard sucks beyond imagination. If you need any fancy UI - stay away. If you need pure automation - take a serious look at it.
I ran almost 24/7 for about 4 or 5 years in a commercial setting, and it's tinkering-friendly because the core feature is "modules" that are bundles of Python and HTML that you edit via a web IDE without needing to restart.
Plus, the device integrations abstraction is super easy and it's easy to build your own host that can use any device drivers you make.
We've also got modules for live sound mixing with JACK and CCTV cameras with ~1s latency to the UI.
I like it. Never tried honeassistant though, so can’t compare.
I would say: firm no.
See my other comment in the thread as to why.
Doing upgrades means things might break, but that is kind of understandable for such a extremely active project. ~10 new issues, ~25 merged PR's, ~4 new PR's per day for the last month.
I wish there was some way to better decouple the new things from the core though, hopefully they will figure something out so we can have stability without opting out of new features completely.
I would say my home assistant (on a Pi4) is stable maybe 95% of the time, with most issues solved with a reboot. The biggest of those rare issues is that my zigbee dongle occasionally just refuses to work which isn't really an issue with HA its self.
I tried OpenHab in the past and was not a fan, but thats not to say its any worse.
It was an interesting project because open source home automation feels very much like a hobby / non-work thing, but it was clearly created by someone with an enterprise java background. I believe there was a custom eclipse based IDE with probably at least one DSL for configuring your automation rules!
Heard of both, but never used OpenHAB
https://smarthome.university/your-smart-home-platform-home-a...
seems to be a bit dated (as there is now an android app) but gives a high level overview.
The paid service handles SSL and dynamic hostnames for you without having to expose stuff on your network. It also provides the cloud endpoint that Google and Alexa require. They in no way stop or impede you from doing any of that yourself, however.
If you choose to pay for Nabu Casa, you support the project on the one hand and on the other hand you get a HTTPS remote URL using their remote access tunnel.