I have both ST and Hubitat and mess around with them both a lot. I can share my experiences so that you have more information in order to decide what best fits you. It's basically a competition between open source and a corporate product. SmartThings has very good support from a reputable company. They have a full time team always doing updates and patching security vulnerabilities. Hubitat relies more on the robust community of users and developers to keep up with an ahead of competition. Think Linux vs Windows or Apple. With Hubitat, you have a lot more custom made tools. The developers range in skill though. They can be hobbiest or professionals and that skill reflects in the app. Good ones work great. Bad ones are glitchy. The apps also are not continuously supported with patches and upgrades. They may be for a while, but since these people are not paid for their work, they cannot afford to give the tools the time and work out of their own lives to keep up with all of that. That said, often times when the support for a tool wanes, somebody else comes along and picks up the pieces. You also have other people taking the tool and improving on it. So, there is a lot more creativity and innovation and custom solutions in the Hubitat world than the SmartThings world. Now, don't get me wrong, the SmartThings community is just as robust and they do a lot of custom handlers as well. The difference is that Hubitat is dependent upon the community of developers, SmartThings is not. Hubitat markets itself as primarily a locally executed platform. Where your commands and information do not go out to web servers in order to process, and then return. My issue with that is that both the fans of Hubitat, and the marketing of it are a bit misleading. For example, if you are using a voice assistant, you're using cloud support. If you are using IFTTT, you're using cloud support. If the product requires the use of an app on your mobile device, you're using the cloud. So, a lot of things that happen on Hubitat use cloud support. Conversely, the opposite argument is often used against SmartThings. That it doesn't execute things locally. This is also not true. A lot of my devices on SmartThings execute locally. I will concede the point that SmartThings has a lot more to do to catch up with Hubitat in the amount of local execution they are compatible with. It is absolutely fair to say that Hubitat executes MORE things locally than SmartThings does. One issue that I do have with Hubitat has to do with ceiling fans. It doesn't like them. At least, it doesn't like ceiling fans with lights. Hubitat will see a ceiling fan as three devices rather than two. If you use a switch to turn on and off the light, and a fan controller switch to turn on and off, and adjust speed of the fan, Hubitat will see the first switch for the light as the light switch. It will also see the fan controller switch as a light switch and a fan controller switch. So, when you tell the light to turn on, it turns on both the light and the fan. If you tell the light to turn off, it turns off both the light and the fan. You can't natively manage the light without also impacting the fan. Now, there are work arounds for this. That's where the awesome community comes into play. But you have a lot of work to do, in research and coding to make it all work. SmartThings doesn't have that problem. Conversely, Hubitat can work with some things that SmartThings cannot. So, my take away from that is that Hubitat is great, but it's more work. If you're like me and love to tinker, then that more work will be more fun for you than frustrating. If you're busy and don't want to spend that kind of time, then SmartThings might be for you. Remember my Linux vs Apple comparison? Hubitat is great and lets you do a lot of thing. SmartThings just works.
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