Aeotec Smart Home Hub, Works as a SmartThings Hub, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter Gateway, Compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, WiFi

I think that unless you want to go with the fully customizable, but you really gotta dive in, Home Assistant, or you are going with the extremely expensive managed platforms by companies that specialize in home automation and theaters, you can’t really beat this particular niche. So it’s pretty powerful, and SmartThings has a great community and if you want to learn and get very custom, you certainly canBut if you want pretty powerful out of the box, along with lots of abilities, since it says Z wave, zigbee, matter, Wi-Fi… This is pretty good.I am only outgrowing it because of my desire for extreme customization on the rules side. So home assistant will be next for me.I guess my main issue is that they do not handle cameras very well nor very many of them. You can get a custom driver but I didn’t find it working very well. Right now it seems like Tapo is one of the better solutions and Aqara door doorbell video really doesn’t good job on it!But for having something that can get a lot done and is very versatile, yet doesn’t require extensive training, this is probably about as good as they get. I like it more than Apple but I still use a couple of the apple features just because I have the iPhone and iPad. I’ve got a door locked that can use NFC off of my phone. That’s a no-brainer

I bought this when our smart home service went away, which used Z-Wave devices. I bought this for its compatibility with those, with other common smart device standards, and with my Philips Hue hub, as well as with Google Home/Assistant (and Amazon Alexa) for voice control. The Aeotec Smart Home Hub connects with and is managed through Samsung SmartThings, which works super well and provides for preset automations. (And there is a web interface for advanced functions, if needed.) And then by linking SmartThings and Google Home, I can control all the devices connected through the hub by voice, and set up voice controlled automations. I'm really pleased with the setup I landed on, and this hub is the critical piece. I think it's a really good value, and there's no subscription service to pay for. I'm just thrilled it's all working so well!!

So far so good. It took awhile to figure out how to hook up my honeywell pro series thermostates. I had to call someone. When I went to the z wave set up my thermostates were excluded so i had to do a factory reset to make them included. If they are already included open up your smart things app. Click the plus sign to add device. I searched honeywell and it came up. I clicked on it and it automatically connected my thermostate. U have to set up each thermostate individually.

DO I DARE TRY THE REPLACE HUB COMMAND???I was interested in upgrading from V3 to get the Matter gateway capability to prepare for the future. It was with great trepidation that I performed the switch over to this new Aeotec hub. I have over 50 light switches, smart plugs, fan controls, motion sensors, dimmers etc installed via the V3 Smarthings hub.Further more several of the devices needed special device drivers in order operate integrate properly with Alexa. In addition, all of my automation routines are done with the Alexa app. So, I was concerned that I would "break" the system and have to rewrite all of the Alexa routines and/or have to pair all of the controls to Smarthings/Alexa again. I was definitely not looking forward to the potential of having to rebuild everything. This would have taken days if not weeks to reconstitute.SUCCESS!!!!The transition was absolutely painless. Simply add the new HUB to the Smarthings App then go to the original hub and click on the Replace Hub command and let it 'do its thing' and that's it! It worked!! Everything still works! The drivers, the Alexa routines, the device names. The complete system still works as if nothing happened. The only issue I had was that the app got to 99% and hung up but it did not seem to matter. I think the only thing that did not finish was the factory reset of the original hub.Thank you Aeotec for making this work so well!