Thanks for the shout-out! Good to see Home Assistant through a new set of eyes... I think you're definitely on track with your conclusions, and I'm glad to see larger creators getting into it!
Thanks Aaron! I appreciate your support as I began this journey. Channels like yours are invaluable to the rest of us trying to figure out this crazy world of Home Assistant!
Home Assistant is the only system that is making actual real world progress in connecting all of the various different manufactures and it offers super flexible options which are not available from the big names.
@@rogerhuston8287 I was also happily impressed at how many devices it just detected and setup, it still takes a bit of learning and its not for the guy who simply wants to tell Alexa to turn on his ceiling fan or whatever but its easy enough to be useful for a lot of people now.
I was 100% homekit before. Then added homebridge for unsupported devices. Then added Home assistant. Now everything I add is Home assistant first then I send it to homekit with bridge features. I also sent all my automations in HA. Homekit is now just a simple dashboard for our phones.
I’m close to the same end result. Once you get used to adding things via Homebridge, maybe also running Controller or Pushcut as a server for advanced notifications and connecting your smartphone automations with your home….the natural evolution seems just HA. Overall, I also think that the key incentive towards HA is the way Apple is dragging its feet on HomeKit.
I think the way you are using home assistant is great. Home assistant provides a very stable and flexible backbone for anyone who is interested in home automation, regardless of how in depth you want to go. It definitely takes some time to get it up and running (setting up integrations, remote access, voice assistants, and automations), but once it's established, it just chugs along in the background without any intervention in my experience. I've set it up in multiple family member's houses without problems for multiple years now.
Long awaited video 😂. Love that it’s not in depth and gives people an overall perspective. Being able to integrate non native devices was main reason to get into HA.
“Time suck” is the perfect way to describe HA. I had it several years back and slowly transitioned everything to native apple home. I then switched to HomeBridge for the few devices I have left that are not native apple home compatible after my HA setup updated and cratered itself. I didn’t have it in me to start over. I only have a few things left running on HomeBridge now that thread is becoming more prevalent.
Home assistant came with quite a big learning curve, but once I wrapped my head around automations and scripts my home actually feels smart. The same button press doing different things based on time of day, if guests are over, on who’s at home, whether power is cheaper or expensive and so much more. For many automations I have completely left buttons out of it. Things just happen on their own based on conditions and you don’t need to do anything. So flexible and infinitely customisable.
for someone who is rewring to add smart lighting, car6 everywhere etc, my goal is to integrate it all in HA. Be real how many hours would you say you've spent getting it setup to a level your happy with? Thanks
I have a love hate relationship with HA. I love all the insane things I can do with it, but I hate that trying to make those insane things work takes hours, days, weeks....and then it usually breaks shortly after lol. You're spot on with your first impressions of it.
For me, things only break when I go outside of vanilla. If I am adding stuff from HACS, trying to write templates, and trying to use helpers that is when it takes a long time to set up or is more likely to break for me. HA has been extremely stable for me over the past 24 months.
I've been using Home Assistant for a few years now, and while the ease-of-use and polish has improved massively over that time, it still has a very long way to go.
Hey Shane, as always a great video. For years, I’ve considered home assistant, but have never taken the plunge. Watching this video it seems like a fun new way how to run your home and now that I’m working from home. This is something that I definitely would love to try. One positive thing that I really enjoyed about the video was that we can use it at the back end without interrupting HomeKit. And since my wife now loves HomeKit. Happy wife happy wife, happy home.
I made the same “switch” earlier in the year after hitting a total limit of automations in Apple Home so I literally could not do any more with it. But it’s the best thing to happen in my smart home! I can do SO much more now! And I still use Apple Home in conjunction for its easy interface and to keep my HomePods relevant. I’m currently working on a video myself explaining how I like using both together 😊 And if you get into building your own WLED strips in future, be sure to let me know and I’ll send you some controllers my Dad and I designed which make it SUPER easy to get started with.
Awesome video, thank you. I’ve been thinking about switching to home assistant for a while now and I can’t believe how fast you got up and running. I would love it if you did a setup tutorial on making a dashboard on assistant
I’ve been tinkering with HA for a while now and it has been terrifying me (not really!) but now I’m diving in full head first and making the switch, it’s time to get my place actually smart… thanks again for everything you do and I hate you already for pushing me further down the rabbit hole!!! hahah I love you man!
These conclusions are spot on and you frame it perfectly. If Home Automation is your hobby, you are going to love how powerful Home Assistant is, but even though the barrier to entry is far lower than ever before, it's still not for everyone. That being said, Shane! As both a subscriber of your channel and a Home Assistant user myself, I've always appreciated your approach to the Smart Home and you holding the line on HomeKit. You occupy an important space in "home automation TH-cam". Never forget your roots!
Great video, and I agree with your conclusion that Home Assistant isn’t for everyone, but great for people that enjoy tinkering. Glad to see you’re enjoying your HA journey! ❤
Oh, my brother! You are on your way to becoming….ONE OF US, ONE OF US, ONE OF US! Shane, your videos helped me cobble together HomeKit / Homebridge / Pushcut / and Shortcuts for a lot of good and fun home automation. But earlier this year, I moved on, and started down the Home Assistant path. I have since made Home Assistant my primary home automation system. I love the power of it and the ability to apply the most logical conditions for my automations and scripts. I no longer have to force 3 or 4 systems into one home automation setup. Home Assistant pretty much does it all. Welcome! Can’t wait to see what you might do with a Home Assistant TH-cam channel. I like Smart Home Junkies for TH-cam instruction on Home Assistant. But you might find there’s plenty of room at the table for good TH-cam channels in this space.
Great vid Shane! You have a gift on being able to explain the smart home world for the rest of us, and now, making your Home Assistant experience easier for us to understand. This video was a huge help. Maybe you can compare Home Assistant to Homey Pro at some point down the road. Homey Pro is powerful and more user friendly, but I think it’s too limited on common US smart home devices at this point. I’m thinking by end of 2025 both systems will develop to a point of a meaningful comparison. I agree with a lot of the TH-cam content creators like you who prefer to use HomeKit as their Front-end UI. Home Assistant is a perfect option for the back-end like you suggested in case more advanced automations are needed. This beauty of HA is that it’s open source, private and free. Your online presence is helping a lot of us… Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the kind words! 🙏 We actually discussed my thoughts on Homey Pro vs. Home Assistant at length in a recent live stream. I think you are right on your assessment regarding compatibility. You can watch the replay of the stream here (look for chapters to skip to that particular conversation): th-cam.com/users/live5e6N-S438EU
I make HomeKit bridges for each category (lights, climate, sensors, Alarm, ect) I find this is the easiest for when you add new devices and entities later.
For advanced automations, you can add Node-Red. I've created an automation that adjusts the Hue light color in my living room to set the color based on who has the ball when my state's NFL team is playing.
I'm also starting to look at HA. I don't want to spend nights integrating my smart home, but using HA in the back office and HomeKit in the front office does seem like a good idea. In any case, I'll be sharing my experience too. And thank you for this video, Shane.
Great video as always! And on point conclusions… I am actually starting out in the UK, installing Home Assistant for people (and even companies) that are in the grey area you spoke about. Where you like the idea but it’s just not going to become your hobby. With all smart home tech it takes real time to build the knowledge required to setup a smart home that does what you want, without becoming an extra burden/annoyance. And that’s what I aim to specialise in, since I’ve been working for years doing just that for my family (especially with our son who was born with a disability right around the time I got really into all this stuff). I always appreciate your videos, the time and work that goes into them, and how well you articulate your points and advice. I’ve learnt a lot from your videos, but if there’s anything you want to learn about running Home Assistant and HomeKit side by side, you’re more than welcome to hit me up too (and maybe I’ll finally hop into your discord now there’s a Home Assistant section).
Super stoked to see they have made Home Assistant easier to get up and running. I have to admit, I wish they still sold the all-in-one plug and play Home Assistant Yellow. Getting ready to buy a Mac Mini at the first of the year, which would allow me to take advantage of Home Assistant. Only thing, I need to ensure I have a UPS system for all controller devices so that during a power loss when it comes back on, everything is not powering on at those odd times of the early morning hours.
It is a time sink, but I love it! If you have Matter devices, put them in Home Assistant and then share them to HomeKit. Make sure to get a Raspberry Pi 5, and use an NVME Ssd internally to run it in the Yellow. That makes it way faster. Also back up to a network resource such as a NAS. You can automate it.
Hi Shane! It would be great if you could do a more detailed video on using HK as the front end and HA as the backend. No one presents Home Kit as well as you do! This video was perfect timing as I just received my HA Green this week!
Thanks Shane. I like yourself have played with home assistant but I also like things just to work and keep things simple for me and my family, without having to spend my whole life working out how to get something working. I still have my home assistant running but have not used it in anger at all. I still fall back to HomeKit 😂
ONE OF US Definitely agree with your assessments. HA is definitely a bit of a power tool for sure, but it's been getting so much better over the time I've been using it (a few years now I think). Very curious to see what the future of the platform will be in time! Personally, HA's my backend for the smart home and where all of my automations live, but I do use the Home app as my typical frontend since it integrates a bit more cleanly into iOS. It's something that I certainly appreciate about its flexibility.
Glad you had Paul in the video, was waiting for it 😊 watch yours and all the other channels you showed. I use home assistant but always watched your video as a lot of the products you feature are compatible.
@ShaneCreates Yeah I like this time of year for home automation some collaborations and challenging each other. Sometimes a video of each others favourite automation or product of the year.
yes! i got in to HA around 6 month ago and i love it. i am still using Homekit in the front end but i am transitioning all of my automations to HA and only leaving scenes that i want to control via siri in Homekit, and controlling items in the home app.
The CM5 just landed, it should be a drop in replacement for CM4, and deliver a 2 to 3x speedup. If you find you need more performance, that's a decent option. It might need a bit more cooling, that's the only thing.
I've also noticed a lot of videos talking about Home Assistant, and have been wondering about it, so I'm happy to see you're tackling an overview of it. But just imagine what this video would be like if you had to avoid saying "Home Assistant" the way you have to avoid saying "Alexa". 🙂
Thanks Garance! That would have taken a lot of editing if I had to mute every time I said "Home Assistant!" 😅 Nothing worse than a TH-cam video trigging your smart speakers!
Home assistant is Awesome, a bit complicated ad the beginning but very intuitive afterward (when you figure out the logic) home assistant is truly WHAT YOU WANT
It's so nice to have a centralized place for my smart home. I think some of the automation ux is a bit suboptimal, as is the learning curve for terminology etc. But for anyone who is willing to put in a pretty chill amount of time over a few weekends, it's so so nice to be able to automate pretty much everything in my home and create very custom dashboards. And the sections are so much nicer. Highly recommend adding one of the third party themes because the default isn't very pretty. I think you could make a really really easy to use kit that's a few thousand dollars where you just tell it how many rooms/lightbulbs/doors you have, install all the devices in a specific order, and have the basic automations for lights etc without having to do basically anything. It's much harder when you're starting from already having smart devices you want to integrate though. On that note, I think it would be interesting to see someone like me try to set up a homekit instance with all my devices that are currently in HA; I wonder if I'd find it similarly confusing
Welcome to the HA club! I’ve been using HA for about 5 years after finding the automations in HK very limited. I still use HK as a front end for the family and it allows us to use Siri to trigger stuff
So, the lesson I learned from this is to ALWAYS put the room name in the name of the device, maybe even a 2nd descriptor if you have more than one of that thing in the same room. Studio Nanoleaf Lines, Studio Nanoleaf Shapes, etc.
It seems like the Home Assistant platform has gotten better, but it still requires a lot of research how to configure the various networks and Apple Home devices. I've had great luck with my Hubitat hub. I can easily add all of my z-wave, Wifi, and other devices. I can't do the advanced, custom automation rotuines that would likely be available with Home Assistant, but the Hubitat is plug and play, and at the moment, I don't have time to do a deeper dive into home automation.
The reason I’ve avoided systems like this is the same reason I migrated from Windows to Mac a bunch of years ago - I want to spend my time doing something other than updating, configuring, fixing, and repeating the process. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. HomeKit is “fussy” enough for me.
Which is fine, as long as none of the stuff you want to do countervenes what Apple wants you to do. Which, in all fairness, is probably stuff that's less common anyways.
If you want your HA dashboards to look a bit more like Home, there's a theme called "iOS Themes - Dark Mode and Light Mode" on HACS that should make things look a bit more familiar. Might also help with the spousal acceptance factor.
I hope that you consider doing more Home Assistant videos. I’ve been subscribed to your channel for quite a while but I believe that this is the first video that I’ve watched from start to finish.
I looked into Home Assistant briefly when I was setting up my home automation. I came to the same conclusion as you from my research, 'Home Assistant is a good option if you want to get into home automation as a hobby.' I am more interested in setting up the home automation stuff and just using it. Not looking to dedicate time to maintaining the system. I do like Apple's 'set it and forget it' style. You pay a premium for Apple's ease of use, but I can deal with that.
we're on the same boat. there's quite the learning curve but possibilities truly seem endless. its really not for everyone, and you better have some patience and experience with linux
I couldn't agree more with your conclusions! I LOVE Home Assistant and my apartment is very highly automated (with considerable effort!) BUT my partner would KILL me if I installed it at her house! She likes the Hue lights in her bedroom and loves the video doorbell/external security cameras I installed but if it gets more complicated than that.........😂 We're a "LAST" couple (Live Apart Stay Together) so lord knows what'll happen if we ever decide to cohabitate!!! Good work Shane on an honest and valid analysis of where Home Assistant lives in the smart home world. 👍👍
As I understand the yellow standard was discontinued due to issues sourcing the Raspberry PI CM4 modules following the post-covid supply chain issues. Though the benefit of the yellow kit now, is the ability to use the new RPi CM5 module instead, and get a ~>30% performance increase for the same price.
Home Assistant plus Apple Home is lit man. Although, I can get buried for 10+ hours trying to figure out an integration. Most of the time it works well with way more things. Still getting the hang of adding things into the Home App from HA. Switching everything from Amazon to Apple still.. I run HA on a 2012 Mac Mini with an upgraded 500gb SSD and I believe I put either 8 or 16gb of RAM in there for funsies. Way overpowered. But all I ever have to do is turn it back on if we have a power outage. I’m not extremely tech savvy but like tinkering.
Not sure if you noticed this during the "20 minute wait" during the setup: to kill some time you can move the mouse around and the little dots floating around in the background repel from the cursor like magnets.
I will watch every single “I was wrong about HA” video that shows up on my feed. It’s true that it was super technical earlier on but they’ve been really focused on usability after they got it super reliable
I really like my homey, I got a bridge right now which is the bare minimum when it comes to the supported devices, but I really only got reputable big brands in my smart home and they all pretty much got official support with the bridge so I don't need the homey pro yet. But I really have had no problem what so ever with homey, and with the new dashboards feature coming out soon, been testing the beta. It will be even better!
Note that Home Assistent Yellow do not have Zigbee AND Thread, it instead just have Zigbee OR Thread as it only has one radio and running multi-protocol on that an experiment that has been abandoned. So you now need another USB radio dongle if want to run both.
Alternative to a Bluetooth proxy is a cheap Bluetooth dongle plugged into the home assistant server device if Bluetooth device is within range of server.
I get it for complex home automation, but I’m just not pushing the limits of homekit myself. I have lots of lights/switches, HVAC/climate control devices, locks, and cameras, and homekit just works flawlessly for me personally. The idea of spending more time to get basically the same thing (if you’re okay with buying mainly Matter devices anyway) it’s a good value proposition for me.
I use HomeBridge for UniFi Protect & I love it, but I want more options/control in my smart home. I got a PC running HomeBridge server & I can run more HyperV on it so I might have to so Home Assistant.
Shane, one thing that I agree with you is running HomeKit along side with Home Assistant. One important thing is when you add Home Assistant, you could have just left the configuration of all your devices until you got more comfortable with the system. Then configure only the ones you need to work with, and leave the rest until you want too. One quick not I will make with you regarding Apple Devices with the Companion App. Sometimes the information interval between them is not always accurate. More so, for example if you are hoping that the sensor created for your phone in HA for charging status is not always accurate. In my case I setup a dummy switch in Homekit that is shared back to HA. Then I created a Shortcut on my iPhone to turn that switch off or on depending on if I placed the phone on the charger. I had created a automation that once the phone was on the charge between certain hours that it knows i am in bed and turns the lights off.
There is a learning curve, naturally, and I think there will always be. I don't think there can be a device or a service offering this much versatility with no learning curve. It is something that arrives naturally with freedom.
There are two other reasons why you might want to jump in the rabbit hole called Home Assistant. 1. Language: TH-cam channels are mostly English so they tend to address tech that supports English, but my family isn't. And support for local languages might be a deal breaker. I can't use Alexa as it does not support my language for example. Home Assistant is much stronger in this area. 2. Costs: there is a lot of cheap technology on the market that is not supported by one of the big tech platforms. Especially the Apple eco system is populated exclusively with high priced options, skipping the low priced vendors. Home Assistant is probably the platform that supports the most tech.
I switched to this because I really wanted ONE place to configure and control everything. But I expose it to HomeKit and Siri is the main way we actually use home assistant.
Have to be honest....was shocked to see this video, especially after seeing your video and switch to homey pro. Having said that, GREAT video and honest assessments on your thoughts and feelings. I have thought about HA because of dashboards, but HP just came out with dashboards so going to hold off a few. Didn't see you mention anything z wave.....thoughts on HA and z-wave?
14:35 Losing sleep, spending hours and having to manually go through each piece of hardware and configure it in HA doesn't seem very "plug and play". HACS and MQTT definitely don't scream "easy" or "plug and play" either. It seems like a very similar experience to what I had when I first used it. It took ages, but once it was up it was great. Until my HA updated and corrupted, and I had to go through the whole install again. That wasn't fun... and I just went back to homekit.
Proud to be in that intro 🤣
only 4 likes?!?! also hi
Stole the intro mate
Wouldn’t have been the same without you Paul! 😆
@@ShaneCreates be interested to see how much Home Assistant creeps into your content now. It is impossible not to get addicted to it
Hey @paulhibbert, you haven't done "Ole to Zigbee" in a while now. Miss it.
Thanks for the shout-out!
Good to see Home Assistant through a new set of eyes... I think you're definitely on track with your conclusions, and I'm glad to see larger creators getting into it!
Thanks Aaron! I appreciate your support as I began this journey. Channels like yours are invaluable to the rest of us trying to figure out this crazy world of Home Assistant!
Dying at the Paul Hibbert clip. 🤣Classic.
Home Assistant is the only system that is making actual real world progress in connecting all of the various different manufactures and it offers super flexible options which are not available from the big names.
Agree, but it's not an easy button. Barrier to entry is still high. Getting better, but still a long way to go.
This OP's comment 100%
@@rogerhuston8287 I was also happily impressed at how many devices it just detected and setup, it still takes a bit of learning and its not for the guy who simply wants to tell Alexa to turn on his ceiling fan or whatever but its easy enough to be useful for a lot of people now.
I agree that Home Assistant is the "well, if I have to" option. The video explained it clearly. It's not for everyone.
@@sirobin171 💯 Home Assistant is what big tech should have done and what matter keeps threatening todo
I was 100% homekit before. Then added homebridge for unsupported devices. Then added Home assistant. Now everything I add is Home assistant first then I send it to homekit with bridge features. I also sent all my automations in HA. Homekit is now just a simple dashboard for our phones.
I’ve been on a journey doing the same! I now use HomeKit as the family-friendly dashboard, and leave the complicated stuff to Home Assistant.
@@babu981 lol I do the same now too
Same here! I'm even in progress of moving all my Hue lights to default Zigbee as well. My wife doesn't even notice while she is on HomeKit
I’m close to the same end result. Once you get used to adding things via Homebridge, maybe also running Controller or Pushcut as a server for advanced notifications and connecting your smartphone automations with your home….the natural evolution seems just HA. Overall, I also think that the key incentive towards HA is the way Apple is dragging its feet on HomeKit.
+1. Planning on deleting all my HomeKit stuff out and adding it back via the HA bridge over this coming Christmas break.
Finally, you becoming one of us ❤
LOL! That Paul Hibbert is one crazy lad! 😂 I love him
I think the way you are using home assistant is great. Home assistant provides a very stable and flexible backbone for anyone who is interested in home automation, regardless of how in depth you want to go. It definitely takes some time to get it up and running (setting up integrations, remote access, voice assistants, and automations), but once it's established, it just chugs along in the background without any intervention in my experience. I've set it up in multiple family member's houses without problems for multiple years now.
Long awaited video 😂. Love that it’s not in depth and gives people an overall perspective. Being able to integrate non native devices was main reason to get into HA.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!
“Time suck” is the perfect way to describe HA.
I had it several years back and slowly transitioned everything to native apple home. I then switched to HomeBridge for the few devices I have left that are not native apple home compatible after my HA setup updated and cratered itself. I didn’t have it in me to start over. I only have a few things left running on HomeBridge now that thread is becoming more prevalent.
Do backups and its a piece of cake lol
Welcome to the community! I use HA the same as you as backend and HK as frontend for the family. Works like a charm!!
Home assistant came with quite a big learning curve, but once I wrapped my head around automations and scripts my home actually feels smart. The same button press doing different things based on time of day, if guests are over, on who’s at home, whether power is cheaper or expensive and so much more. For many automations I have completely left buttons out of it. Things just happen on their own based on conditions and you don’t need to do anything. So flexible and infinitely customisable.
for someone who is rewring to add smart lighting, car6 everywhere etc, my goal is to integrate it all in HA. Be real how many hours would you say you've spent getting it setup to a level your happy with? Thanks
I have a love hate relationship with HA. I love all the insane things I can do with it, but I hate that trying to make those insane things work takes hours, days, weeks....and then it usually breaks shortly after lol. You're spot on with your first impressions of it.
For me, things only break when I go outside of vanilla. If I am adding stuff from HACS, trying to write templates, and trying to use helpers that is when it takes a long time to set up or is more likely to break for me. HA has been extremely stable for me over the past 24 months.
Finally! I really look forward to your future videos 🎉
I've been using Home Assistant for a few years now, and while the ease-of-use and polish has improved massively over that time, it still has a very long way to go.
Hey Shane, as always a great video. For years, I’ve considered home assistant, but have never taken the plunge. Watching this video it seems like a fun new way how to run your home and now that I’m working from home. This is something that I definitely would love to try. One positive thing that I really enjoyed about the video was that we can use it at the back end without interrupting HomeKit. And since my wife now loves HomeKit. Happy wife happy wife, happy home.
I made the same “switch” earlier in the year after hitting a total limit of automations in Apple Home so I literally could not do any more with it. But it’s the best thing to happen in my smart home! I can do SO much more now! And I still use Apple Home in conjunction for its easy interface and to keep my HomePods relevant. I’m currently working on a video myself explaining how I like using both together 😊
And if you get into building your own WLED strips in future, be sure to let me know and I’ll send you some controllers my Dad and I designed which make it SUPER easy to get started with.
What a wled strip?
@@obinna12 WLED is custom firmware for ESP controllers to manage addressable LED strips.
Awesome video, thank you. I’ve been thinking about switching to home assistant for a while now and I can’t believe how fast you got up and running. I would love it if you did a setup tutorial on making a dashboard on assistant
Nice video, Shane. I'm also dipping my toes into Home Assistant. There are definitely more enjoyable hobbies worth exploring.
I’ve been tinkering with HA for a while now and it has been terrifying me (not really!) but now I’m diving in full head first and making the switch, it’s time to get my place actually smart… thanks again for everything you do and I hate you already for pushing me further down the rabbit hole!!! hahah I love you man!
haha sorry not sorry! I was pushed down this rabbit hole so I might as well bring you with me! 🤣
I appreciate the support!
These conclusions are spot on and you frame it perfectly. If Home Automation is your hobby, you are going to love how powerful Home Assistant is, but even though the barrier to entry is far lower than ever before, it's still not for everyone.
That being said, Shane! As both a subscriber of your channel and a Home Assistant user myself, I've always appreciated your approach to the Smart Home and you holding the line on HomeKit. You occupy an important space in "home automation TH-cam". Never forget your roots!
Also, the Home Assistant support community ROCKS!!
How, where? I can't get any help with Z2M on a brand new install of HAOS.
@@MrSupersidewinder There's an support forum, discords, and a Facebook page.
@@carldevans1 thank you, I'm looking today... discord didn't work out for me, I'll look for the forum ...👀
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
HAAA HA HA! #Winner. (So TRUE!)
Perfect video for anyone thinking about starting HA. I think in time it will be the ultimate tool for automation.
Great video, and I agree with your conclusion that Home Assistant isn’t for everyone, but great for people that enjoy tinkering. Glad to see you’re enjoying your HA journey! ❤
Man $150 for the yellow and the $60 for the pie!!!! I knew I should’ve gotten into HA years ago. Great video Shane!!!
Great timing I recently jumped from HomeBridge to Home assistant, need Shane to hold my hand again.
Oh, my brother! You are on your way to becoming….ONE OF US, ONE OF US, ONE OF US! Shane, your videos helped me cobble together HomeKit / Homebridge / Pushcut / and Shortcuts for a lot of good and fun home automation. But earlier this year, I moved on, and started down the Home Assistant path.
I have since made Home Assistant my primary home automation system. I love the power of it and the ability to apply the most logical conditions for my automations and scripts. I no longer have to force 3 or 4 systems into one home automation setup. Home Assistant pretty much does it all. Welcome! Can’t wait to see what you might do with a Home Assistant TH-cam channel. I like Smart Home Junkies for TH-cam instruction on Home Assistant. But you might find there’s plenty of room at the table for good TH-cam channels in this space.
Great vid Shane!
You have a gift on being able to explain the smart home world for the rest of us, and now, making your Home Assistant experience easier for us to understand. This video was a huge help.
Maybe you can compare Home Assistant to Homey Pro at some point down the road.
Homey Pro is powerful and more user friendly, but I think it’s too limited on common US smart home devices at this point.
I’m thinking by end of 2025 both systems will develop to a point of a meaningful comparison.
I agree with a lot of the TH-cam content creators like you who prefer to use HomeKit as their Front-end UI. Home Assistant is a perfect option for the back-end like you suggested in case more advanced automations are needed. This beauty of HA is that it’s open source, private and free.
Your online presence is helping a lot of us…
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the kind words! 🙏
We actually discussed my thoughts on Homey Pro vs. Home Assistant at length in a recent live stream. I think you are right on your assessment regarding compatibility. You can watch the replay of the stream here (look for chapters to skip to that particular conversation): th-cam.com/users/live5e6N-S438EU
I make HomeKit bridges for each category (lights, climate, sensors, Alarm, ect)
I find this is the easiest for when you add new devices and entities later.
For advanced automations, you can add Node-Red. I've created an automation that adjusts the Hue light color in my living room to set the color based on who has the ball when my state's NFL team is playing.
I'm also starting to look at HA. I don't want to spend nights integrating my smart home, but using HA in the back office and HomeKit in the front office does seem like a good idea. In any case, I'll be sharing my experience too. And thank you for this video, Shane.
Great video as always! And on point conclusions…
I am actually starting out in the UK, installing Home Assistant for people (and even companies) that are in the grey area you spoke about. Where you like the idea but it’s just not going to become your hobby.
With all smart home tech it takes real time to build the knowledge required to setup a smart home that does what you want, without becoming an extra burden/annoyance. And that’s what I aim to specialise in, since I’ve been working for years doing just that for my family (especially with our son who was born with a disability right around the time I got really into all this stuff).
I always appreciate your videos, the time and work that goes into them, and how well you articulate your points and advice. I’ve learnt a lot from your videos, but if there’s anything you want to learn about running Home Assistant and HomeKit side by side, you’re more than welcome to hit me up too (and maybe I’ll finally hop into your discord now there’s a Home Assistant section).
Super stoked to see they have made Home Assistant easier to get up and running. I have to admit, I wish they still sold the all-in-one plug and play Home Assistant Yellow. Getting ready to buy a Mac Mini at the first of the year, which would allow me to take advantage of Home Assistant. Only thing, I need to ensure I have a UPS system for all controller devices so that during a power loss when it comes back on, everything is not powering on at those odd times of the early morning hours.
I have been die hard Apple home only and just installed Home Assistant less than a week ago. Funny timing for this video!
It is a time sink, but I love it! If you have Matter devices, put them in Home Assistant and then share them to HomeKit. Make sure to get a Raspberry Pi 5, and use an NVME Ssd internally to run it in the Yellow. That makes it way faster.
Also back up to a network resource such as a NAS. You can automate it.
Let’s go Shane!!! Welcome!
Hi Shane! It would be great if you could do a more detailed video on using HK as the front end and HA as the backend. No one presents Home Kit as well as you do! This video was perfect timing as I just received my HA Green this week!
Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate the suggestion. I will certainly consider this for future video topics. 😃
Thanks Shane. I like yourself have played with home assistant but I also like things just to work and keep things simple for me and my family, without having to spend my whole life working out how to get something working.
I still have my home assistant running but have not used it in anger at all.
I still fall back to HomeKit 😂
ONE OF US
Definitely agree with your assessments. HA is definitely a bit of a power tool for sure, but it's been getting so much better over the time I've been using it (a few years now I think). Very curious to see what the future of the platform will be in time!
Personally, HA's my backend for the smart home and where all of my automations live, but I do use the Home app as my typical frontend since it integrates a bit more cleanly into iOS. It's something that I certainly appreciate about its flexibility.
Glad you had Paul in the video, was waiting for it 😊 watch yours and all the other channels you showed.
I use home assistant but always watched your video as a lot of the products you feature are compatible.
Thanks for the support! Paul is awesome! And so are all the others!
@ShaneCreates Yeah I like this time of year for home automation some collaborations and challenging each other. Sometimes a video of each others favourite automation or product of the year.
@ShaneCreates Thanks for taking the time to reply aswell.
Welcome to the Rabbit-hole, would love to see a update video in 1 year to see how deep you have gone.
yes! i got in to HA around 6 month ago and i love it. i am still using Homekit in the front end but i am transitioning all of my automations to HA and only leaving scenes that i want to control via siri in Homekit, and controlling items in the home app.
The CM5 just landed, it should be a drop in replacement for CM4, and deliver a 2 to 3x speedup. If you find you need more performance, that's a decent option. It might need a bit more cooling, that's the only thing.
Never clicked on a video so fast*
😆 thanks for watching brother!
NO WAY I was thinking the same thing
Simp
Cool vid!! I use hoobs which is equivalent but adds a layer of support considering they certify certain plugins.
I've also noticed a lot of videos talking about Home Assistant, and have been wondering about it, so I'm happy to see you're tackling an overview of it.
But just imagine what this video would be like if you had to avoid saying "Home Assistant" the way you have to avoid saying "Alexa". 🙂
Thanks Garance! That would have taken a lot of editing if I had to mute every time I said "Home Assistant!" 😅 Nothing worse than a TH-cam video trigging your smart speakers!
Home assistant is Awesome, a bit complicated ad the beginning but very intuitive afterward (when you figure out the logic)
home assistant is truly WHAT YOU WANT
It's so nice to have a centralized place for my smart home. I think some of the automation ux is a bit suboptimal, as is the learning curve for terminology etc. But for anyone who is willing to put in a pretty chill amount of time over a few weekends, it's so so nice to be able to automate pretty much everything in my home and create very custom dashboards. And the sections are so much nicer. Highly recommend adding one of the third party themes because the default isn't very pretty.
I think you could make a really really easy to use kit that's a few thousand dollars where you just tell it how many rooms/lightbulbs/doors you have, install all the devices in a specific order, and have the basic automations for lights etc without having to do basically anything. It's much harder when you're starting from already having smart devices you want to integrate though.
On that note, I think it would be interesting to see someone like me try to set up a homekit instance with all my devices that are currently in HA; I wonder if I'd find it similarly confusing
HASS + NodeRed == 🔥
Welcome to the HA club! I’ve been using HA for about 5 years after finding the automations in HK very limited. I still use HK as a front end for the family and it allows us to use Siri to trigger stuff
So, the lesson I learned from this is to ALWAYS put the room name in the name of the device, maybe even a 2nd descriptor if you have more than one of that thing in the same room. Studio Nanoleaf Lines, Studio Nanoleaf Shapes, etc.
Your life will never be the same again.
Hmmm, bit of an ambiguous message. . . . . .
I agree. After using home assistant my virginity grew back. Never knew that could happen.🤔
@@TenshiR 😂 I head Paul's voice in my head saying the same thing while I was up at 3am working on my Home Assistant configuration. 😅
@@ShaneCreates 🤣🤣🤣🥲
Yeah you won’t get sleep trying to figure why your automation doesn’t work or you just thought of something else you can automate 😂
It seems like the Home Assistant platform has gotten better, but it still requires a lot of research how to configure the various networks and Apple Home devices. I've had great luck with my Hubitat hub. I can easily add all of my z-wave, Wifi, and other devices. I can't do the advanced, custom automation rotuines that would likely be available with Home Assistant, but the Hubitat is plug and play, and at the moment, I don't have time to do a deeper dive into home automation.
The reason I’ve avoided systems like this is the same reason I migrated from Windows to Mac a bunch of years ago - I want to spend my time doing something other than updating, configuring, fixing, and repeating the process. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. HomeKit is “fussy” enough for me.
Which is fine, as long as none of the stuff you want to do countervenes what Apple wants you to do. Which, in all fairness, is probably stuff that's less common anyways.
If you want your HA dashboards to look a bit more like Home, there's a theme called "iOS Themes - Dark Mode and Light Mode" on HACS that should make things look a bit more familiar. Might also help with the spousal acceptance factor.
Glad you like it 😊
I've been soooo happy since I migrated everything to home assistant, it's so much more stable.
I hope that you consider doing more Home Assistant videos. I’ve been subscribed to your channel for quite a while but I believe that this is the first video that I’ve watched from start to finish.
I looked into Home Assistant briefly when I was setting up my home automation. I came to the same conclusion as you from my research, 'Home Assistant is a good option if you want to get into home automation as a hobby.' I am more interested in setting up the home automation stuff and just using it. Not looking to dedicate time to maintaining the system. I do like Apple's 'set it and forget it' style. You pay a premium for Apple's ease of use, but I can deal with that.
If you use Apple shortcuts or want to use it - screw it, you have grown into HomeAssistant. You. Will. Love. It.
Paul Hibbert, hell yeah! 🤣
we're on the same boat. there's quite the learning curve but possibilities truly seem endless. its really not for everyone, and you better have some patience and experience with linux
Awesome! Glad you joined the HA gang!
I couldn't agree more with your conclusions! I LOVE Home Assistant and my apartment is very highly automated (with considerable effort!) BUT my partner would KILL me if I installed it at her house! She likes the Hue lights in her bedroom and loves the video doorbell/external security cameras I installed but if it gets more complicated than that.........😂 We're a "LAST" couple (Live Apart Stay Together) so lord knows what'll happen if we ever decide to cohabitate!!! Good work Shane on an honest and valid analysis of where Home Assistant lives in the smart home world. 👍👍
Thank you Michael!
I am using Homekit Bridge to enable things so I can use it in homekit as I very much prefer and I want to use my Homepods and such.
As I understand the yellow standard was discontinued due to issues sourcing the Raspberry PI CM4 modules following the post-covid supply chain issues. Though the benefit of the yellow kit now, is the ability to use the new RPi CM5 module instead, and get a ~>30% performance increase for the same price.
That makes sense. Thanks!
Home Assistant plus Apple Home is lit man. Although, I can get buried for 10+ hours trying to figure out an integration. Most of the time it works well with way more things. Still getting the hang of adding things into the Home App from HA. Switching everything from Amazon to Apple still.. I run HA on a 2012 Mac Mini with an upgraded 500gb SSD and I believe I put either 8 or 16gb of RAM in there for funsies. Way overpowered. But all I ever have to do is turn it back on if we have a power outage. I’m not extremely tech savvy but like tinkering.
Great advice Shane! You really need to enjoy this to get into it. If you just want to turn lights on/off, this is not for you.
Really like your take on this! Thanks!
Not sure if you noticed this during the "20 minute wait" during the setup: to kill some time you can move the mouse around and the little dots floating around in the background repel from the cursor like magnets.
Great video! That’s the same way that I use Homey and when I get around to setting up my HA Green, probably the same way I will use that.
Mix Home Assistant + Apple Homekit is the way to go.
Just an FYI, blur is not destructive. If you need to sensor something important please use a solid censor bar. Blurring can be undone with some work.
I will watch every single “I was wrong about HA” video that shows up on my feed. It’s true that it was super technical earlier on but they’ve been really focused on usability after they got it super reliable
You’re gonna like the camera cards that have the sensors overlayed onto the image so you don’t have to see them separated out below each camera
And Node-Red will be there for when you want to program complex automations without coding
I’m making the switch with some speed bumps. Excited to see if you can overcome them with an Apple mindset.
I really like my homey, I got a bridge right now which is the bare minimum when it comes to the supported devices, but I really only got reputable big brands in my smart home and they all pretty much got official support with the bridge so I don't need the homey pro yet. But I really have had no problem what so ever with homey, and with the new dashboards feature coming out soon, been testing the beta. It will be even better!
Note that Home Assistent Yellow do not have Zigbee AND Thread, it instead just have Zigbee OR Thread as it only has one radio and running multi-protocol on that an experiment that has been abandoned. So you now need another USB radio dongle if want to run both.
Alternative to a Bluetooth proxy is a cheap Bluetooth dongle plugged into the home assistant server device if Bluetooth device is within range of server.
I use my Govee lights with the Govee mqtt add on , which give me the ability to set all my effects!
That's what I ended up going with as well. It works great!
Home Assistant’s OS is called HAOS - “House,” hahaaaa! Dig it.
I get it for complex home automation, but I’m just not pushing the limits of homekit myself. I have lots of lights/switches, HVAC/climate control devices, locks, and cameras, and homekit just works flawlessly for me personally.
The idea of spending more time to get basically the same thing (if you’re okay with buying mainly Matter devices anyway) it’s a good value proposition for me.
I use HomeBridge for UniFi Protect & I love it, but I want more options/control in my smart home. I got a PC running HomeBridge server & I can run more HyperV on it so I might have to so Home Assistant.
Shane, one thing that I agree with you is running HomeKit along side with Home Assistant. One important thing is when you add Home Assistant, you could have just left the configuration of all your devices until you got more comfortable with the system. Then configure only the ones you need to work with, and leave the rest until you want too. One quick not I will make with you regarding Apple Devices with the Companion App. Sometimes the information interval between them is not always accurate. More so, for example if you are hoping that the sensor created for your phone in HA for charging status is not always accurate. In my case I setup a dummy switch in Homekit that is shared back to HA. Then I created a Shortcut on my iPhone to turn that switch off or on depending on if I placed the phone on the charger. I had created a automation that once the phone was on the charge between certain hours that it knows i am in bed and turns the lights off.
Nice! Thanks for sharing!
i use home assistant as a back end for my HomeKit, also use it for its dash boards
Home assistant is awesome for bringing non-HomeKit stuff into HomeKit, like WLED
I would watch your content and wonder why you are so stuck in Apple Home. Welcome to the party… 🎉 👏🏻
Sounds like you getting hooked I played with it too. It is fun. Good luck with it
There is a learning curve, naturally, and I think there will always be. I don't think there can be a device or a service offering this much versatility with no learning curve. It is something that arrives naturally with freedom.
There are two other reasons why you might want to jump in the rabbit hole called Home Assistant.
1. Language: TH-cam channels are mostly English so they tend to address tech that supports English, but my family isn't. And support for local languages might be a deal breaker. I can't use Alexa as it does not support my language for example. Home Assistant is much stronger in this area.
2. Costs: there is a lot of cheap technology on the market that is not supported by one of the big tech platforms. Especially the Apple eco system is populated exclusively with high priced options, skipping the low priced vendors. Home Assistant is probably the platform that supports the most tech.
Home Assistant is so much better and easier than it used to be. Glad you came to the dark side with us Shane!
I prefer Homey Pro. It’s more more easiest from home assistant. Maybe in the future I will use HA
I switched to this because I really wanted ONE place to configure and control everything. But I expose it to HomeKit and Siri is the main way we actually use home assistant.
just started switching over from homekit little over a week ago, and still learning a bit but i havnt had to do any coding yet which is good lol
Have to be honest....was shocked to see this video, especially after seeing your video and switch to homey pro. Having said that, GREAT video and honest assessments on your thoughts and feelings. I have thought about HA because of dashboards, but HP just came out with dashboards so going to hold off a few. Didn't see you mention anything z wave.....thoughts on HA and z-wave?
What iPad stand do you have? Great video as always!
14:35 Losing sleep, spending hours and having to manually go through each piece of hardware and configure it in HA doesn't seem very "plug and play".
HACS and MQTT definitely don't scream "easy" or "plug and play" either.
It seems like a very similar experience to what I had when I first used it. It took ages, but once it was up it was great. Until my HA updated and corrupted, and I had to go through the whole install again. That wasn't fun... and I just went back to homekit.
MQTT integration is not that bad. When you have set up the MQTT part adding new devices is a klick or two away
oh my. I'm excited to watch this one!
The HA Scrypted addon is also awesome
Just want to point out that HAOs will show share user data options as untiked
Small detail but it shows where the priorities are