Is Home assistant catching up with Homey?

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When I first purchased my Homey Pro 2019, I did so for the reason that I wanted something that was easy to use and did not force me to use specific devices.

I hopped on the Homey Train slightly before it was ready for prime time, but after about 6 months, Athom had ironed out the worst bugs and I was very happy.

The reason that I did not go for Home Assistant was that I value my time, and at the time Home Assistant seemed to demand a lot of configuration, writing scripts and so on compared to Homey.

I am quite apt at computers and belong to the C=64 generation. I am very knowledgeable about Linux, Windows and OSX, however over the years I have arrived at the conclusion that I am most efficient and have the lowest blood pressure in OSX, even though I run all three OS:es at home.

I have also felt quite efficient with Homey. The “node red”-type of programming has suited me well. And even though I have ventured out into homey script territory, I would prefer not to.

This year i switched to Homey Pro 2023. This also seemed right, as I continued to have the impression that Home Assistant demanded to much of an effort and time. (Mainly manual typing of scripts and obscure errors much in the same way that still plagues Linux.)

However, I am open to the fact that I might be wrong. I have recently seen videos showcasing installations of Home Assistant where preconfigured hardware may be bought and setup and automations now seem to be able to be done completely without having to type any code.

What attracts me to Home Assistant is that I am under the impression that it is the more compatible platform and also that I am able to upgrade zigbee radios as well as zwave independently.

Given all the information above, what is your opinion for a person like me? Is it time to move away from Homey? Has Homey in general been superceeded by Home Assistant? Are there any areas where Homey still is better?

I have Zero experience with Home Assistant, so I have no ideas of its benefits and drawbacks.

Thank you in advance for your input.

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It’s not uncommon for people, like yourself, to have an opinion about HA without ever having really used it.

As a HA user for many years now, I find it amusing that people keep repeating the same story over and over again: “you need to be a programmer to be able to use it” or “it’s very difficult” or “it’s unstable”.

(The strange thing though is that some of those people are absolutely fine with having to use HomeyScript to be able to do with Homey what they want, and that’s actual programming, something that I’m fairly sure about 99,99% of HA users have never done)

But HA has improved a lot the last couple of years. I don’t think I can remember having to set up an integration (HA’s equivalent of Homey’s “apps”) using a text editor and YAML files: everything is done using the web interface nowadays. Same for automations (“flows”) and dashboards.

It might not look as slick as Homey, and I think that’s what holds off a lot of people, but I don’t spend my days configuring my devices or automations, once they are running, they are running, and HA has proven itself to be extremely stable for me. Plus it supports more devices, has a more active developer ecosystem, and is actually open and fully local.

If you want to honestly try HA, I would recommend using Home Assistant OS. Don’t choose the Docker option or a separate Linux installation unless you know what you’re doing. You should be able to run HAOS in a virtual machine, but ideally you should try it with the official HA hardware.

HA won’t be for everyone, some people just can’t get used to it, and that’s fine, but especially for people that already have experience with home automation, HA often comes as a big (positive) surprise, especially if the reason for them trying HA was because of problems that they had with Homey. Homey can be great, but if things don’t work, it’s a black box that provides almost no information on why something isn’t working.

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Thank you for that thorough answer. The solution that I was going for if I was to try HA would be the Home Assistant Green or similar. Would you recommend that or a RPi or other hardware?

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I would suggest the Green. The RPi is officially supported too AFAIK, but doesn’t come with eMMC storage out of the box, only SD, and you really shouldn’t be running an OS on an SD card. Also, the Green comes with Home Assistant pre-installed.

But I don’t have any experience with running HA on the Green or RPi, I run it the “hard” way (in Docker).

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Thank you very much for the input.

Once upon a time, I deliberately had a single point of failure Linux solution, including my own custom compiled kernel (more fun with the radio spectrum
That way :slight_smile: ) containing a custom built heat pipe cooled hardware WiFi-router/FW solution etcetera (you know the drill), so Docker would work for me as well, but the older I get, the more of a dedicated hardware person I become. :slight_smile:

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The Docker setup suits me well, but it’s more involved than having a dedicated OS (HAOS will provide easy ways of installing additional requirements like a database, an MQTT broker, etc, that you’d have to set up yourself if you would use Docker or run HA on a regular Linux).

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Some time ago i had ha on a vm hosted by a windows server. I found it too difficult so moved over to homey. Then, recently i wanted to integrate ezviz cameras, and only ha has ezviz integration.
So now i use both, homey pro & ha os (i use a mini pc). They talk to each other using mqtt and webhooks.
For now, homey is ‘in charge’, and ha is a ‘smart sensor’ for homey. But i am getting more experienced with ha. Still i think each is best of their own worlds. Homey flows are superior. I still struggle with ha node red equivalent.
Some stuff can be done in homey in minutes but takes hours to get it implemented in ha. Like:
(Trying to get auto mqtt device registrations in ha for instance). Homey has variables, ha has helpers? Ha has superior ble, homey ble is a joke.
I use a lot switchbot, the homey app is very smart and efficient for handling rate restrictions, the one in ha is slow polling.

And ha starting looks like the old novell server. Why do i need to see all the processes starting. Make a verbose mode or something.

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Thank you for that input. Maybe one should have both and then have them help each other out.

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Do you mean the Linux boot log? All I see when HA starts are some unobtrusive messages at the bottom of the screen on the web interface.

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You are using the docker variant right ? , mine is ha os on bare metal. Ha is spitting all that text out of the hdmi /term

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If you want to use both, HA and Homey in combination, you can use:

  • MqttClient app and MqttHub app to export Homey devices to a Mqtt broker. Then use HA Mqtt client to auto discover the entities.
  • HA community app to import HA entities to Homey
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Obviously Homey spits out the same text during boot, you just can’t hook up a monitor to it :joy: (and even though it looks incredibly old and outdated, when there are hardware issues it can be very useful)

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There are 2 variants of this app, the official and the community . Is there a difference?. I once tried the official one, it only accepted ha devices, not loose entities.

Btw any ha noob must understand the ha concepts first, devices vs entities vs attributes
No such thing in homey, just devices and their attached variables.

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Hopefully 1 day i can purchase a homey docker image license. Then run both ha and homey on my azure stack ( onprem azure). Lol

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I can 100% recommend the HA community app. Just a no-brainer.
You can just use standard device types, or go to fully customizable devices with entities of anything you like.
And when you still miss something, you can discuss it with the dev.

The ‘official’ apps sometimes only seem to exist for marketing purposes. It works, but only very basic.

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I also use both.
Started with a used Homey back in 2020, it seemed the best fitting device to me.
After reading lots of these replies to issues: “yeah, but this and that just works @ HA”, I started with running a VirtualBox HA VM image on my linux laptop.
But the great dashboard possibilities made me curious as well.
Later on I migrated it (I just had to copy the VM) to an old NUC running Debian with VB.
At some point I “migrated” (= starting from 0) all zigbee devices to zigbee2mqtt. Z2M is such a joy.
Both HA and Homey are integrated, I wrote a tutorial for it.

For some (exotic/impopular) stuff you need to copy/paste some yaml code, but not in general.
The user friendliness of the automations part has been improved a lot this year, I have around 40 of them now;
And the new dashboard layout (& functionality!) named “Sections” is just awesome.
With every request I read @ Homey dashboard topic, I think, hmm, but that’s possible already with HA dashboards?
Ánd it’s web based, I really don’t get the idea why Homey dash is app based.

And, as a stubborn Pro19 user, I also have Matter (+ Tread), Energy Dash, and whatnot with HA integrated.
I bought Advanced Flow as add-on, and it’s really a joy to program my home with.

Advanced flow is based on Node Red, or, is probably used as inspiration if you will, but it’s quite easy to use, compared to Node Red.
I still like to manage it, but I can’t find a clear tutorial. It’s just not encouraging when nothing you do seems to work.

My 2 cents :crazy_face:

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So i would like to integrate homekit, using siri/ homekit app to operate homey devices.

I also need a filter, so not to see all devices in homekit

Do i need homekit server (apple tv) ?

What is the best /easy to implement integration, homey with homekitty or ha with homekit integration ( which in turn via mqtt (already implemented) operates the target homey device)

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HomeKitty is easier to configure w.r.t. filtering devices, but the HomeKit Bridge integration from Home Assistant supports cameras (including doorbells, etc) and media players which HomeKitty doesn’t.

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I am using both HA and Homey.

I have been a long time Homey user but have always struggled with the dashboarding capabilities.

I wanted a wall mounted dashboard that provided me with insights and easy access to devices such as lights etc.

For years I have used the Node Red/ MQTT solution as provided in an excellent way by Satoer (Node Red: A widget based dashboard working with Homey trough MQTT).

But (styling)capabilities are still limited and since a few years I now use HA for dashboarding.

Homey is in the lead and ‘owns’ all the devices (zWave and Zigbee, Solaredge, Gardena etc ) and controls all the automations via flows.

HA runs on a Pi4 and is connected to Homey via MQTT and discovers all Homey devices automaticaly. In HA I have created a custom dashboard that fits all my needs (displayed in kiosk mode on an old iPad)

In HA I have also added many other integrations and datafeeds that I like on my dashbord (such as weather data, Unifi data, carbage collection data, camera integrations etc).

I think that in this way I use the strongest point of both platforms:

  • Homey for easy device management, out of the box Zwave and Zigbee connectivity, a good looking app with remote access & notification capabilities (helps in the WAF…:wink: ) and easy automations with flows. Things that HA is not delivering yet.

  • And HA for advanced dashboarding and tons of usefull and fun integrations that homey is not delivering yet . These Integrations are realy easy to set up via the GUI, but the dashboarding I wanted still requires a lot of yaml.

And as MQTT works both ways I am really flexible going forward.
For example I can start creating automations in HA if I think that would be usefull. Currently I am not yet doing this, but with pressing buttons on the dashboard to control lights I am in fact already feeding commands into Homey.

Just my 2 cents…

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HA’s notification capabilities are much more elaborate than Homey’s though, with things like custom notification sounds, attachments, grouping/replacing/clearing, custom actionable notifications (not just Yes/No), time-sensitive/critical notifications, etc.