Understanding Smart Home Ecosystems

What are Smart Home Ecosystems?

A smart home ecosystem is a single place to manage devices in your home. Usually this is culminated into an app on your phone and/or tablet, but it also can integrate your phone itself, smart speakers and displays around your home, and end devices (lights, switches, sensors, thermostats, locks, etc.). Often times people choose their eco system based of which phone they purchase, but that might lock you, or a family member into something that's not the best choice.

Popular Smart Home Ecosystems

Currently the most popular smart home ecosystems are Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home.
I will write up an article explaining the Pros and Cons of the big tech eco systems next, as I have used them all.

Honorable mention to (Samsung) SmartThings, as that is the platform that led me to the open smart home, before they were purchased by Samsung.

While not the most popular, by marketshare, Home Assistant is, in my opinion, the most flexible, and sustainable choice in smart home ecosystems.

Why Home Assistant is the Best Choice

Home Assistant is local first, meaning by all means it tries to talk to your devices locally, inside your house.
It has a robust built in automation engine, and support for 3rd party ones, like Node-Red, which help me visually create automations (my brain works better with pretty pictures than lines of code).
They are aggressively working to make their built in automation editor easy to use and free of code.
They support so many devices, and if they don't out of the box, the device can likely be brought in through a community custom component.
Home Assistant, along with other partner software packages like Music Assistant are owned by a non-profit organization that is set up in a way that no company can ever buy or influence them.
You can try it out for free, all you need is an old computer you may have considered junk, or a cheap Raspberry Pi.
Nabu-Casa, the commercial entity that spun out of Home Assistant offers affordable pre-configured computers and adapters to make owning Home Assistant and setting it up even easier.

The only con, is that all of this flexibility, and the amazing features that are offered, make it a bit intimidating to somebody first approaching this stuff, hopefully the pre-configured Nabu-Casa devices will start to address that concern.