To be honest Home Assistant is not as "Set and Forget" that could be Philips Hue for example. I could totally see me help relatives to set up a Hue system, or thinking about making a business out of it. Regarding Home Assistant, I have a very basic set up but the few times it breaks after update or randomly shut down without notice would make support a nigtmare for me to engage non tech savy friends in it. Let's be honest, it's hard to imagine a business relying on it for the moment. Way too unreliable and time consuming.
Philips Hue is very stable when it comes to controlling the lights via Zigbee and them meshing properly. The customer facing part (mobile app, cloud integrations, etc.) though... whole another story. Not to mention the relatively frequent and sometimes almost arbitrary changes to their app and stuff like forcing you to have a registered account now.
Yes, Home Assistant is not in the same ballpark at the moment but their all-in-one hardware bridge is actually a good point to get there in the long run. You can plonk that thing down, auto-discover all your Hue lights pretty much like in the Philipps Hue app and you're almost good to go. Scene and Room setup is a bit more cumbersome than with Hue but still doable.
I for one have moved all my Philips Hue lights to Home Assistant a while ago and never looked back. Everything runs a lot more stable, faster and I haven't had any issues with it. The only problem I've had in the past 12 months (even with regular updates) was my kitchen lights not turning on anymore and it turned out my Hue motion sensor there simply ran out of battery.
Thank you for all the infos. You just reminded me i'm a bit biased regarding Hue because I use the Third party app Iconnecthue (ios only) wich is STELLAR. Always been very ahead of Philips schedule regarding features, way more powerful, and the best balance between friendlyness and efficiency. One of the best piece of software i've been using this last decade. Thank you very much to the team. Indeed, running Hue with official software is more cumbersome and limited.
The recent move from Philips lead me to consider running everything through Home Assistant but I'm not ready yet. Configuring accessories and scene with Iconnecthue (especially splitting behaviors for week/week-end or during day) is too smooth and powerful). Also the Hue Bridge is rock solid, while my HA instance isn't. I could consider it if I were alone but i'm not. Maybe when I'll stop playing with HA and break things.
For the moment, using adaptive lightning on my Hue bridge controlled lights through HA is an incredible joy tho.
Absolutely understandable. I've actually been in the exact same situation when I was still using Philips Hue. I was using HuePro on Android, which is (or unfortunately rather, was) also an incredibly powerful and well polished application maintained by a third party. I got confused a few times when people brought up issues only to discover that the base Philips app was lagging behind a lot in functionality and user friendliness.
As it stands, I definitely understand your approach. Personally, I would also recommend any non-tech-savvy person or people who don't want to mess with it for a while to just use the Hue bridge with HA, if they were to try it out. The Hue bridge is really rock solid, no complaints there.
In case anyone else stumbles upon this and is curious, I'm now using a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle and a Raspberry Pi and at least for me, the stability of the local Zigbee network is as good as it was with the Hue bridge before.
I think that's largely because they're not targeting non-techical users at the moment. However, I think in the years I've been using HA, things have been moving more in that direction.
