Hubitat Elevation Home Automation Hub (Model C-7) Compatible with Alexa, HomeKit, Google Home, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Lutron

Good: Reasonably easy to set up. Reaches everywhere in my house without meshed devices.Bad: Very erratic operation. I have a very simple setup at present: one Z-wave-plus dimmer controlled by one Zigbee button via the "simple automation rules" app. Worked perfectly for the first week, then degraded to where it currently works correctly about one in five attempts, and that only after up to a five-second delay. Log is recording every button press and every successful control attempt, and the lights respond instantly to commands via the web interface, so I conclude it's a software issue. No diagnostics routines that I can find other than logs. Hub also takes an unreasonably long time to reboot.Ugly: Not nearly as customizable as the ads make it out to be. I had hopes of being able to attach a Python or Lua script directly to a given device event. Instead, we have Groovy, which is OK as far as it goes, but organized into "apps" that have no organizational relationship to the devices they're managing. Also, it looks like the scripting itself is not customizable (no custom or add-on libraries) and, from the messages I've read on the community website, the company has a rather arrogant position to the effect that it's going to remain this way. Whatever. If the built-in apps actually worked, this wouldn't bother me as much as it does.(IMPORTANT NOTE: I haven't fully explored the apps area as of this writing, and I could be completely wrong about all of this. If so, I will update this review and include a humble apology to the company. But I don't think I am.)Bottom line: This device has tremendous potential, filling a need that few if any other companies are addressing. As of now, however, that potential is some distance from being realized. I will note that all of the available apps seem to be under active development, so this could change quickly. At least for now though, this thing is no more reliable than the X10 gear it replaced. Three stars, mostly because the hardware seems good and the company looks to be actively enhancing the software. Will update if/when the situation here changes.UPDATE, about a year and a half and several software updates later:My biggest problem with this device appears to have been resolved - it's been months since this thing has failed to respond to a switch command, or delayed the response more than a second or so. The lag is still longer than I'd prefer - a second is a LONG time with modern CPUs; I was expecting a quarter that or less - but acceptable.Unfortunately, my second biggest problem remains unresolved. It is still unreasonably difficult to program the hub for more than simple trigger/action operations. I recently set up an away-from-home rule set that switches the now-four Z-wave-enabled lights in the house on and off to mimic the typical light usage while I'm at home: office lights on during the day and maybe an hour or two at night, living room lamp on from sunset to 11ish, that kind of thing, ideally with some random variation so they wouldn't go on/off at the same times every day. It took me over an hour of clicking and drop-down selecting and entering and updating - and, entirely too often, editing or removing rules that somehow didn't end up the way I wanted them - to get even close to what I'd had in mind. (And my initial test shows that it may still not be working "right".) What bugs me about this whole process is that I could define this rule set in about a half-dozen lines of Python or JavaScript code, total elapsed time about five minutes. I very much wish that the hub offered an "expert" mode that would let you simply enter a javascript or python...or, hell, java or ruby or even BASIC, script, save it and have it execute without having to go through the throes of putting together a custom "app" in Groovy for each individual function you want. I want this badly enough that I'm considering investing in a multi-protocol transceiver and a small Atom motherboard, rolling my own HA hub with Home Assistant on Linux, and abandoning the Hubitat altogether.Sum of topic: The Elevation box has improved quite a bit in the past 18-odd months, but it's still nowhere near the open, ultra-flexible home automation platform Hubitat makes it out to be. It's usable, but that's all. Sticking with the three stars.UPDATE, another year and a half and several more software updates later: My core opinion of this device remains *mostly* unchanged. Hubitat has done quite a bit to improve the user interface, but in my opinion it is still unreasonably difficult to set up anything resembling complex actions among multiple devices. There are, however, three saving graces that has caused me to bump my rating to about 4 1/2 stars, rounded up to five because I just realized that, despite its shortcomings, I'm still using this thing after five years:First, they are still supporting this thing after five years. That's refreshing in an industry that doesn't like to spend money on supporting older hardware, and rarely hesitates to leave you hanging when they decide it's no longer profitable. The updates are periodic and have almost always been worthwhile. Compared to when I bought this, it's faster, more reliable, easier to set up - relatively speaking; it was almost unusable at first - and supports more devices and protocols.Second, they added an app that provides a decent API. This lets you control the box from other computers on your home network with reasonably simple commands supported by almost any PC that can plug into a network. This lets me work around the Elevation's scripting shortcomings with Python and shell scripts running on my home server. I'm an IT professional so I may well be biased in this regard, but for me, setting up activities involving multiple conditions and actions affecting multiple devices is a LOT easier in Python than on Hubitat's platform. I still wish I could do Python directly on the box, but this is good enough. (Actually, looking at Home Assistant integration is on my to-do list. It looks possible, and would be the proverbial game-changer if it works well.)Third, the price has come down somewhat. Not a lot, but combined with the API this changes the buy-build equation a great deal. As a home automation hub, it's still mediocre. As a sophisticated, multi-protocol, networkable HA device controller, it's a bargain.So after five years I've finally come to appreciate this thing. I'm even considering looking at the C-8 Pro to take advantage of the newer protocols my newer HA devices support. Good job, Hubitat.

I upgraded from a Wink hub after they went subscription only. I wish I'd just done the Hubitat from the start.Now. It IS more cumbersome to set up. It's app is not full featured like Wink or Smart Things. But don't let that fool you. Unless you're a complete moron, the web interface is not only simple, but FAR perferable to getting real specific with your devices. And works MUCH better than other hubs, the Wink or anything else (apart from maybe Philips Hue, but that only runs Philips stuff, not the lights I have). It has more customization to really set things how you want them. For me, all I really wanted was a LOCALLY PROCESSED hub (very important, no cloud, unless the device requires it) that played nice with Homebridge.What's Homebridge? it's what you need if you use an iPhone or any iOS device and want random non-Homekit devices to play nice with Homekit. I've been running Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi 4 for a while and it works great, but the Osram Lightify bulbs around the main level of my house are a real pain compared to Philips Hue, the one advantage being that they're like 10% of the price.The Hubitat Hub made these lights work 99% as well as Hue. That's how good it is! Wink was a nightmare. The Homebridge-Wink plugin was buggy. The official Osram Hub you buy with your Osram lights is 'fine' if you use their app, but again, the Homebridge-Lightify plugin is terrible. You'd try to set color temperature and it tries to use colors instead of white/yellow lighting or it's just super buggy. The Hubitat WORKS. And the Homebridge plugin for it sends the correct commands to get the color you want. Sometimes you would ask for Blue and you'd get Red when I used Wink - no longer. Everything is FAST and all the colors and color temps work.HOWEVER - the best part is this. With Homebridge plugin via MakerAPI, you set which 'devices' you want shown in your Home app. And instead of just the light itself, you can also tell Hubitat to make it's own SCENES available as a Homekit accessory. Why? I mean, yes it would be nice if they showed up as actual scenes in Homekit just like Hue's hub and app do. But who cares. THEY WORK. And they work well. You simply create groups and scenes in the Hubitat back end - you know, the web interface everyone kinda complains about. But you get everything perfect, set it, and then forget about it - never have to use the Web interface again unless you wanna change something or add a new scene/group. Now you use the MakerAPI Homebridge plugin to share these groups and scenes over on Homekit, and they simply show up as simple switches to trigger a group or scene. The group is sort of redundant because you can group together accessories in Homekit anyway - but I chose not to. So I have each INDIVDIUAL light as a tile, but also a tile for the group of lights. So I can set the 12 living room lights together or separately, much easier than when Homekit groups the accessories together. Then I also have about 10 scenes for all these lights, that are just switches in that Homekit room. Hit it and it's IMMEDIATE. No cloud rubbish.Another nice feature is the fading option in Hubitat. So instead of using Homekit to create scenes (which can still be somewhat buggy/slow or not set everything correctly) just have Homekit activate the Hubitat scene which is pretty much flawless each time. In each scene there's tons of options, including the fade time. So as Siri or Home app changes a scene with a simple switch or Siri command, the lights beautifully change over 10 or 15 seconds (whatever you choose) because that's the setting you've made in HUBITAT.I've also used the Siri Shortcuts app on iPhone to create more complicated lighting changes, covering multiple Hubitat scenes and/or combining with Hue scenes for the few Hue bulbs I have. That way you can have one Siri command or Shortcut widget activate a bunch of things, incluidng multiple Hubitat scenes. I've found putting a 'scripting wait' of about 6 seconds in between Hubitat scene commands just so it doesn't get overwhelmed.Bottom line, Hubitat is the clear winner here on all fronts. It seems to work great with Alexa and everything non-Apple as well. But for getting non Homekit accessories to play nice with Home/Siri on iPhones and HomePods and Apple Watches etc, I've found Hubitat to be the best so far. The only thing I haven't tried and therefore can't compare to is the OpenHAB thing that is even more fiddly and hard to setup, apparently. Whilst I could have handled it, I think Hubitat is a great mix of both - customisation but also well put together and ready to go.I was nervous about whether it was really going to work better with the Lightify lights - but they really do. And having scenes activated by a simple switch is PERFECT. For instance, with Wink to do the same thing (activate a Wink scene/shortcut from Homekit) I had to go via the cloud through IFTTT using WebHooks. Sometimes a scene could take a minute to activate that way!! Or to do the same thing with the Osram hub, I had to set up a Dummy Switch on Homebridge that had a contact sensor embedded, which then activated an Alexa routine that watched for that contact sensor to 'activate' (which was activated manually by you hitting the Dummy switch in Homekit), which then activated the Osram scene. Again, slow, cumbersome and a dumb workaround.I haven't really bothered with the Dashboard on Hubitat. Although i can see this would be really nice on an iPad or something. Set up a nice custom dashboard with all the buttons you want, control it from the app or whatever. But the app still needs work for this to be good. I'd rather just use Home for now, as the tiles are essentially the same thing as the tiles in the Hubitat Dash.Hope this helps!