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

openhab.org

21–30 of 36 posts

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

#21

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…

> Is openHab any better? I would say: firm no. See my other comment in the thread as to why.

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).

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

#22

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…

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.

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

#23

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…

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.

HA claims to offer MySensors integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mysensors/

Does that not work or is something missing?

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

#24

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…

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.

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

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is openHab any better? I would say: firm no. See my other comment in the thread as to why.

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.

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

#27
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.

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

#28
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

For me it has. Killed it's own configuration on several occasions or just hung.

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

#29

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…

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.

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

#30
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.

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