Why I Migrated My Smart Home from SmartThings to Hubitat Elevation

HomeKit support is available on Hubitat Elevation smart home hubs (as of January 2023)! Finally a seamless solution to connecting your Z-Wave, Zigbee, and WiFi devices to Apple’s HomeKit network and controllable from the Apple Home app. Learn more

After many years of satisfied SmartThings automation, I started wanting more from my IoT hub and began looking for better solutions. I was so invested in SmartThings at that point, with over 100 Z-Wave and Zigbee devices in the home, but then I found the Hubitat Elevation hub and realized what I was missing out on.


The primary and most compelling feature Hubitat holds over SmartThings is local automation execution. With SmartThings, if my home network went down (either ISP service outage, or operator-error in tweaking router settings) my entire SmartThings hub would become unreachable. Additionally, the lag between tapping or pressing a button and SmartThings executing the command was becoming noticeable. With Hubitat, it is essentially instantaneous automation response time.

View the full list of officially supported devices for Hubitat C7 Elevation smart home hub.

Have you ever clicked a Z-Wave button to toggle 10 independent lights – and they one-by-one slowly turn on? SmartThings would complete this task in about 5 seconds, and in a random sequence. With Hubitat, it takes less than half a second (most of the time) with group lighting support for coordination.

The data security offered by a completely local LAN IoT hub, compared to Samsung SmartThings which stores data and home information in the Cloud, cannot be any more robust than what Hubitat offers.

The best part? Hubitat Elevation hub is compatible with 99% of my existing SmartThings Z-Wave and Zigbee devices. And the documentation from Hubitat is the best I’ve ever seen, making the transition as seamless as possible.

• Hubitat Getting Started Guide
• Hubitat Compatible Device List – comprehensive and up-to-date
• Adding Your First Device to a Hubitat Hub
• Hubitat Community Forums (with frequent Developer/Admin replies)

With Hubitat, my data stays on my Local LAN network, never reaches the cloud, and my automations are the fastest I’ve ever experienced. The Hubitat Elevation hub has taken my smart home to the next level! And it only took 1 weekend to migrate al my devices, rules, and automations.