Why I moved from Hubitat to Home Assistant
I ran a Hubitat hub for years and liked it. Somewhere along the way I stood up Home Assistant too, because it handled a few things better (some Aqara sensors, mostly), and for a long time I was happy running both.
Running two hubs stayed painless thanks to the Hubitat integration for Home Assistant, a HACS add-on that pulls Hubitat devices into HA over Hubitat’s Maker API. Expose a device in the Maker API and it shows up in Home Assistant automatically, state and all, so HA could see everything while Hubitat still ran the radios.
What changed recently is the tooling. LLMs are genuinely good at writing and fixing Home Assistant automations, because an HA automation is plain YAML in a file and there are years of community examples the models have already learned from. Debugging one used to be an afternoon; now it’s a quick back-and-forth. So I’ve been repairing automations I’d let sit broken for years, and getting more ambitious with new ones now that the cost of getting them working has dropped.
That’s the real reason Home Assistant wins for me now: the config lives in code. I keep automations.yaml in git, hand the whole file to an assistant to review or extend, and get back a diff I can read and commit. The one wrinkle is that HA’s GUI editor rewrites the whole file on every save, so I match its serializer (PyYAML’s CSafeDumper, block style, keys left unsorted) to keep a save down to a one-line diff, and I put rationale in each automation’s description field since comments don’t survive. On Hubitat the logic lived behind a UI I couldn’t diff or point a tool at.
Two more things pushed me to go all-in. Monitoring Home Assistant itself with Grafana is great, and I’d rather run one system than keep two in sync: renaming an entity across both hubs is clunky, and one source of truth is simpler. I picked up the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2, Home Assistant’s official Z-Wave adapter with Z-Wave Long Range support, to move the last Z-Wave devices over, a real range upgrade from the old Hubitat box.
A few sensors are still on Hubitat, and it served me well for years. But with everything in code and one hub to manage, I’m not going back.