Just got a Homey Bridge – Do I really need it vs. Brand Hubs?

Questions & Help
1

Hey everyone!

I recently picked up a Homey Bridge to start building my smart home setup, but I’m beginning to feel a bit lost about its role.

So far, I’ve noticed that many devices still seem to require their own official apps or even Homey Pro for certain basic features. It’s left me wondering if the Bridge was really necessary, or if I might be missing something here.

I want to keep things simple as I’m just getting started, but I’d love to hear from others who’ve felt the same way. How have you made the most of the Bridge?

Are there key benefits to having it that I might be overlooking? Or would it make more sense to go with individual brand hubs that Homey can connect to through their apps?

Any insights would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

2

The Bridge is, literally, a bridge device to allow pairing devices using Zigbee, Z-Wave, IR, BLE and/or 433Mhz. It does not run any apps, those are run on Homey Cloud servers. It merely bridges between the devices and Homey Cloud.

The caveats being:

  • those devices need to be supported by apps that are allowed to run on Homey Cloud
  • the apps don’t require a brand hub (for example, Hue devices only work with the Hue hub; you wouldn’t need a Homey Bridge if all you have are Hue devices)
3

You might wanna check:

Make sure the slider on top of the page stays on “Homey” instead of “Homey Pro”.
That will tell you which devices are supported in your case, and which not.

Always check the App description whether or not you need a specific Bridge (of the brand itself), like in the case of Hue.