I have tried both OpenHAB and HomeAssistant extensively.
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 online
I concur. The data model was what finally turned me off to OpenHab. I just couldn't wrap my head around the weird terms and ways stuff is configured.
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.
agree with most points, recently upgraded to OH 3.x though and I have to say they have abstracted a lot of their complexity (particulary like the new semantic model) HomeAssistant I found harder to use for a very very specific reason, it didn't have a MySensors binding. thats it :/ so yes in general HomeAssistant is better, until it doesn't support what you want.
OpenHAB suffers from the developers reinventing the wheel every 2 years. I started using version 1 for automating my house in 2015. I didn't bother with the UI, since I'm running a web based dashboard I wrote myself, but the underlying "hub" and plugin infrastructure combined with the REST services and the HTTP eventstream API let me combine my custom scripts and devices (which speak MQTT) with stuff from hardware vendors and cloud services (zwave, zigbee, netamto devices, ebus heating control, caldav). In V1, all configuration could be done via plain text files, and automatically applied when the files were changed. That made it very easy to change the setup while still having it in version control.
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.
Deutsche Telekom is using OpenHAB as the basis for its smart home offering and hired some of the core contributors to OpenHAB. Maybe this lead to the fast depreciation cycle. The same thing happened to Angular: its primary developers where using it for Google internal projects and they also introduced breaking changes all the time.
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).
I have had an openhab install running in a rpi without any issues for several years now. Everything in the home is MQTT-based (Tasmota firmware on the switches) and it sends messages to the broker to control stuff. The local reliability is rock solid and cannot be faulted.
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)
> appear to have basically just put a web UI on their java inheritance tree with zero thought given to making it understandable
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.
I've been using OpenHAB for a year. I can't recommend it.
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.
as a home assistant user (home assistant core user) I am fairly tired of baby sitting it. Is openHab any better?
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...
You could always come join me on the KaithemAutomation project :P
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 am interested in what baby sitting you have to do with HA?
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.
I've used home assistant for 4 years. After being fed up with constant breakages, I moved to Hubitat. It's a closed source separate appliance, but it's very capable, fully local and reliable (used it for 1.5 year now, with 0 issues). And not breaking things is taken much more seriously there.
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’ve been using openhab for a few years now. Relentlessly reliable on the rpi, easy to customise, and it’s doing everything from balancing our power grid to managing water distribution to turning the lights down when I put a movie on.
I like it. Never tried honeassistant though, so can’t compare.
my experience with HA is very much the same, and I am also tired of baby-sitting HA. Last time it broke I didn't have time to fix and think maybe investment into OH will not be wasted. I'd like to set and forget, not to spend my time to assist something that is supposed to make my life easier.
I have no practical experience with OH, so cannot comment on the 1st point. However if I only want to set and forget, then the rest is pretty much irrelevant. I'd say HA is great for people who like to tinker and have a lot of time (and don't mind fixing broken things constantly).
Has HA broken without being touched for you? In my experience, as long as I don't touch it, it keeps on chugging along (with a notable exception for the recent winter-time bug).
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 remember running this on Raspberry Pi probably 7 or 8 years ago.
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!
OpenHAB is a much older project built on Java(?) IIRC. As a user of both I MUCH prefer HomeAssistant. Integrations seem to be updated and added much more frequently, and are often based on other open source project rather than native functionality being added to the home automation platform itself.
I looked at OpenHAB when I was looking to move off HomeAssistant. Much more dated project, more raw, and requires even more babysitting than HomeAssistant.
I've used both, and moved from OpenHAB to HomeAssistant around 4 years back. Both required some upkeep from time to time, but HomeAssistant lowered my maintenance and debugging time. The OSGi architecture used in OpenHAB felt pretty clunky running on a small Raspberry PI or similar system compared to HomeAssistant. OpenHAB always felt like overkill for my simple use case of a small home containing few sensors and lights.
i had the same question, I just recently installed HomeAssistant and found it quite good (and I was able to relatively quickly make changes both to configuration & code for addons).
This is not true. You can easily forward a port on your router and point to your local HA installation, including free LetsEncrypt certificates.
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.
HA remote access is not paid only, it works fine if you make it accessible from your local network. You can also do Google/Alexa integration on your own, there are instructions in the documentation.
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.
My pwrsonal setup is using cloudflare's tunnel so it doesn't even need port forwarding. And then I did alexa myself since I have an aws account anyway for some free tier stuff.
You can still access HA directly through a browser, of course. And if you set up a VPN (ala PiVPN or something similar), you can access it anywhere, as well.
My recommendation: use HomeAssistant, do not bother with OpenHAB
Rationale: