So what's this beautiful, tested and reliable alternative to Home Assistant? did you ever find it? Guess baking your own like OP did is out of the way as per your last sentence.
Home Assistant is the big one, biggest community, most integrations, you can pay for their cloud stuff to get easy integrations to the big corps above. They also have a dedicated device they sell you can use to run HA.
Domoticz is a bit of an odd bird, I never figured out what was their value propositon
OpenHAB is the one I'd pick if I had to install a system for someone else than myself. It's not exactly easy to configure (the object/entity structure is a bit weird IMO), but it has a pretty decent amount of integrations and it's rock solid German engineering made with boring old Java.
If you want control, my suggestion is to use HA only for the integrations and do all of the brains somewhere else. Either a self-made program that pokes HA using its API or directly via MQTT or Node RED.
I'm still using it. Upgraded from the C5 to the C7 a few months ago. I use almost entirely Z-wave devices, and the HomeKit integration built into Hubitat makes it easy to manage them all like native HomeKit devices.
Managing probably any Z-wave mesh isn't something I'd recommend for a non-techie, but it doesn't generally requires consistent maintenance. And with Hubitat, it's a small standalone box that does OTA updates.
For me it fills a pretty big gray area between mass market consumer ecosystems and Home Assistant.
Simple, rock solid functionality. If you want more, write scripts.
I really like the approach.
Don't ever open that C++ code base unless you have a barf bag.
I started making contributions and gave up because I have better things to do with my time then ruin my soul.
I will also note that they stole the MQTT protocol from Home Assistant - so at least they need ideas from elsewhere. (ie openzwave died so domoticz needs to rely on the same NodeJS subsystem infrastructure of HA)
I love the concept of domoticz - lua, but my god the architecture and implementation is a tire fire.
Is that better or worse than a dumpster fire?
https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/issues?q=crash
segfault, leak and hang are also fun ones. Apparently the massive memory leaks in the python integration has never been fixed. Not surprising, one look at hardware/plugins/Python*.cpp is bad for your health.
I'v gone from home assistant to smart things to openhab and its been stable and simple to set & forget.
It's great to setup via the UI, easy to backup and restore as once you actually start to build it into the foundations of your house you start to value the stability of it
I’ve tried developing custom components for HA and it was so bad, there’s no docs at all and Python being untyped language doesn’t help either. Just out of curiousity I’ve googled OpenHab docs to understand if I could achieve similar there and their docs are awesome, full and well written. (and it’s Java so half of the code IntelliJ will write for you)
We package Ignition as a docker image, an installer, or just a simple zip archive you can decompress and launch, so it's easy to self-host or deploy to a cheap cloud tier. The biggest downsides are that there will be a bit of a learning curve to using it (as with any new tool), the documentation being focused on commercial use cases, and similarly, we don't offer first party drivers for common home protocols (zigbee, zwave, etc). But we have pretty good docs, a free online learning platform, and pretty active forums. 3rd parties have written various drivers for home use.
I'd love for more in the home automation/maker space to know about and use it. We don't monetize maker edition in any way, and so don't really promote it, but I'd love to see the home userbase grow (and hopefully by extension, the hacker/maker community who might be able to help contribute to drivers and other resources).
It's an open platform built on the JRE, with a public sdk and example modules (plugins) and related tools available on github.com/inductiveautomation. The software is in use to automate virtually every industry, so it's fairly well tested (at least to the extent that a toolkit can be).
Maker Edition info is available at: https://inductiveautomation.com/ignition/maker-edition
Disclosure : work for inductive automation, but otherwise don't have a financial interest in people using Ignition Maker Edition or anything of that (aside from any side effects that come from broader adoption in general). My selfish interest is in a larger home use community so there are more cool projects to check out, resources to share, open source modules published, etc.
All statements here are my personal views.