The post will cover the main aspects that you need to think about when choosing a Home Automation platform.
These are two best open source smart home hubs/platforms, in this article, evaluation on home assistant vs openhab 2019.
OpenHab
It’s an Open Source Home Automation Platform. It is vendor and technology agnostic. As a result of this, if a device is popular, it will likely be supported by the platform sooner or later.
It is developed in Java, which gives you endless devices where you can run the system. The community is very well established and helpful. Its architecture is based on bindings that bring support for different smart home devices.
Add-ons give openHAB a wide array of capabilities, from User Interfaces to the ability to interact with a large and growing number of physical Things.
Add-ons come from openHAB 1/openHAB 2 distribution, Eclipse SmartHome project. The development process is relatively quick with the latest version being updated in May 2018 with the update before on the December 2017.
Home Assistant
It is developed using Python 3 for the backend and Polymer (Web components) for the frontend components.
As the open-source product, it is licensed under Apache 2.0. From the development process perspective, the project recently adopted a two weekly release cycle with one extra week for beta testing which resulted in the improved quality, but there were still buggy releases recently.
It is very lightweight compared to OpenHab and Home Assistant while still delivering a decent number of features. The configuration is mostly done through a web interface and you can use plugins to extend the functionality.
MORE OPTIONS: Openhab Alternative
OPENHAB
Configuration
OpenHAB2 SIMPLE UI no config files
The User interface is not as beautiful as the one in Home Assistant but it is very decent and customizable.
Being more mature and stable
Runs on many popular platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OSx
It is mainly done using the web interface. It is a well-thought process, although there are many steps to follow that can be intimidating for some users.
Updates
It far more complex and time consuming and require a command line to get the updates available as Add ON.
Supported Devices
System can work with main IoT protocols such as Bluetooth, Z-wave or Zigbee. For Z-wave.
OpenHAB having a smart hub is to be able to integrate all your devices together.
OpenHAB has a built-in tool called Bindings to support Z-wave devices (and claim to currently support 792 devices from 111 manufacturers
Relevant: Openhab bindings
Automation Rules
The basic way to create and deploy automations is using Xtend, Xtend is a flexible and expressive dialect of Java, which compiles into readable Java 8 compatible source code.
Blockly is another tool to create own managing, it’s a client-side JavaScript library for creating visual block programming languages and editors.
User Interface
Paper UI is a system administration
Basic UI updated modern web
HABmin is a more modern, professional and portable user interface
Mobile Apps
Openhab does have a more well in place developed android apps which offers more secure and solid apps.
HOME Assistant
Configuration
Home Assistant more innovative and flexible platform to control your smart devices
It is easy to manage from the Home Assistant UI allowing creation/restoring snapshots of your configuration and can easily be extended using Hass.io add-ons including Google Assistant and Let’s Encrypt.
Home Assistant tries to do many things itself with very useful discovery option.
A push for web-UI controlled “Integration” feature that allows doing the initial configuration.
Installation process for Home Assistant is very similar to OpenHab. You just need to download and burn the image of HassBian.
Updates
Updates are managed through web-interface for Hass.io and can be done by the click of the button.
Supported devices
Home Assistant has a built-in Z-wave control panel with things being a little less convenient for Zigbee.
Home Assistant having a smart hub is to be able to integrate all your devices together a total 1400 components widely announced by Home Assistant.
Automation Rules
The first and the most basic one is using YAML (more on comparing YAML and xTend below).
Node-RED is another way to manage automation rules. It is a flow-based development tool for visual programming developed originally by IBM for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services as part of the Internet of Things.
Xtend VS YAML
Xtrend
It’s a very powerful scripting language with many complex structures and functions available. At the same time there are many unhappy users. Main complaints are on the lack of clear documentation, no support for functions, odd syntax, and no real tooling.
YAML
YAML, as we stated above, is not really a dialect of a programming language but human-friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages.
User Interface
Home Assistant standard UI doesn’t require any configuration and for newly or beginners it is quite easily and fairly less complex than openhab.
Mobile Apps
Home assistant do have apps on IOS and android but seems less flexible, robust and overall less developed than openhab offers.
VIEW MORE: Open Source Home Automation Solutions
Verdict
Openhab
Requires some sort of knowledge to know how to insert command to integrate devices, fairly complex and time consuming, but have far more options and features than home Assistant.
Home Assistant
More User Friendly, easy to manage for the beginners.
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Hassan Zaka
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