Where is A+ with HA? as compared to SmartThings?

[movemaine]

I need to pull the trigger on something.

I was looking at SmartThings, but dislike the cloud requirement for Home Automation and the possibility of commercialization of some aspects (pay to play).

I appreciate that Almond+ appears to work with a lot of sensors & devices and that it can run local, but it appears that SmartThings is more mature (but requires more fiddling for certain devices).

What is the roadmap for home automation and the A+? Are you seeing regular releases? Is it ready for primetime, or is there enough momentum that it will be there soon?

Thanks!

[SecureComp]

There are several threads that include this topic. The search function may help you find a lot more info.

The Smart Things hub works well enough once you get through the setup. If you want to do anything "special" it is labor intensive, clunky and requires a fair bit of DIY effort.

The Almond+ works well with the it's supported list of sensors, is an all in one solution, can be managed via the LCD interface and has an API if you are into the DIY App thing.

[kiucheng]

I had a look on the Veraplus hub. It looks better on supported device compared to Almond+ and it does not require cloud connection to work. They had a bit of issue when the VeraEdge came out and most of them has been ironed out. Now I am just waiting for a few months until they iron out the bugs on the VeraPlus then I will probably jump ship.

[rldreams]

SmartThings supports a LOT more devices than A+ a lot of which are through community written device handlers. However only officially supported devices will run locally. Once I realized that most actions are ( currently ) run through the cloud, I was turned off, given past experience with cloud based systems ( Wink) and the 5-10 second delay on triggers. However 8 months in that has not been the case, trigger response has been withing 1-2 seconds, so while not the 300-500 ms I was getting with A+, they are still tolerable.

To give you an idea of how many devices are supported, 8 months ago I had I think 37 ( maybe it was 47 ?) HA devices on A+.  I now have 117 ZW and ZigBee on SmartThings. That doesn't include all of the LAN devices,

 One advantage of cloud infrastructure is a lot of cloud to cloud integration with things like Amazon Echo, Harmony remote controls, Nest, IFTT, etc.  As far as the comments about ST being " pay to play" that is incorrect . There are plans " in an upcoming release" ( we all know what that means ) to support cloud recording of IP cameras directly through ST. Like most cloud IP camera recording there will be a fee to keep your videos stored on their cloud.  THERE IS NO FEE FOR THE HA SIDE OF IT.