OpenHAB – vendor and tech agnostic open source automation software for your home

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...

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.

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zero thought given to making it understandable, at least in the 2.x version), and the documentation is usually wrong/out-of-date so it is a challenge.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)

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