Automation Hub Reviews - Top 8 Home Controller Systems

The home automation industry is like the Wild West right now. If you thought that Blu Ray vs HD-DVD was a terrible format war, imagine if there were ten different companies with ten different approaches all vying for your money.

That’s the sort of situation that we find ourselves in here. These home automation hubs represent visions from several different companies who are all hoping that one day their technology will be the default everyone uses. This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good, because the competition is likely to lead to a better product that we will all eventually use. It’s bad because no one knows which system is going to be the overall winner and being an early adopter is often a painful experience. Just ask anyone with an HD-DVD collection.

Still, we can make do with our mishmash of automation devices that, although they can’t always talk to each other, can live alongside one another.

For those devices that CAN understand each other, albeit with a little help, there are these home automation hubs. I’ve pulled together some of what seem to be the most popular ones and had a look at what they can do to figure out which I would be willing to buy.

I have put my best choices at the top, and the rest of the reviews are below in no particular order.

Oh look, it’s a 56Kbps modem from the late 90s. No wait, that’s from now? Yeah, this is a pretty yucky looking device. Still, hubs are meant to be hidden and maybe it looks this way so that no one will steal it. It also doesn’t help that it is one of the more expensive products in this market.

Anyway, it works with some of the better-known home automation brands such a Nest, Schlage, Yale, and so on. Unlike the Insteon that can barely handle 10 devices, the VeraEdge will manage as many as 220 devices. I doubt that too many people will have anything near that. I think I get why the VeraEdge costs a bit more, since they specifically mention home and small business applications.

You can also view multiple cameras on a single dashboard screen, control lights, locks. The whole shebang. There is one big issue and it is not apparent from the marketing material. This only works with WiFi or Z-wave devices. If you have devices that do not use either of these protocols then you’ll have to look elsewhere, if you are already locked in the Z-wave ecosystem then you’ll most likely be very pleased with the Insteon.

When I think “home automation” I don’t think of a little box hidden somewhere that I control using my smartphone or tablet. Sure, I expect to have remote access, but a lifelong diet of Sci-Fi movies has trained me to expect some built in controls as well, dammit. If the Starship Enterprise had touch control panels on the wall in the 24th century then by gosh I want them now.

This control panel and central controller fits into a standard double switch mounting and lets you control smart lighting, home security, and intercom services if you add more panels to other rooms. It has a built-in wide angle camera, so if you put these guys in each room you also have easy surveillance and communication. You can also access all of this via the app as well. The panels also have alarms built-in and you’ll get intrusion alerts on both iOS and Android.

Here is the issue though – this is not really a home automation hub. It doesn’t work with Z-wave, although the company plans to integrate ZigBee support later.

It is also very expensive, but if you can afford to put one of these in all your most important rooms you’ll get something damn close to what future visions of home automation should look like. Just be aware of what you are getting.

Who would have thought that Samsung would have become the smart electronics juggernaut that it is today? I sure wish I’d bought some stock in the beginning of their market domination, but now I’ll just have to hope that my rare Pokemon cards will one day be worth a fortune.

This tiny little device is the second generation SmartThings hub. SmartThings is an open platform, which means it should play nice with a lot of devices.

This product can handle a number of communication protocols. Specifically it can handle ZigBee, Z-wave, and of course Internet Protocol. All of the devices that you have that make use of any of these protocols have the potential to work with the SmartThings Hub.

This new generation of hub from Samsung now has a backup battery, which means it will keep working for up to 10 hours. What about the internet router it has to be attached to? Good question – the hub can also keep doing parts of its job that do not specifically require internet connectivity, so all your battery powered sensors and such will still be on monitor.

This hub is compatible with products from a long list of manufacturers, and basically if something has the word “SmartThings” somewhere in its description it is likely to work with the app you use to tell the hub what to do.

Based just on the paper description this product has best pick potential, but when you read what owners of the hub are actually writing the image is far less rosy.

There are multiple accounts of wonky software devices, settings not being triggered, and just general dumbness, which is not what you want in something with “smart” in the name. It seems that it will take a few more generations before SmartThings becomes rock solid enough to recommend.

As you can probably tell from the name, this device is solely for the Z-wave faithful. This Nexia bridge unfortunately needs a $9 per month subscription in order to manage your home through it, which I think is not a outdated business model, but there you have it. With this bridge you can control 200 Z-wave devices, which is more than the average person will ever need.

The upside of the whole subscription thing is that the internet connection that lets you control your home remotely is encrypted, so it is unlikely that someone will hack your house and open the locks.

Not much more to say about it frankly. It works as advertised, but that subscription requirement is a real bummer.