Hubitat Elevation Smart Home Hub (Review)

Home automation is becoming more of a normal interest thanks to smart speakers like Alexa and Google that have been making the journey much easier on novice users. Then you have hubs like SmartThings that make the jump to something a lot more involved, a bit easy as well. However, for advanced users, you don’t always have the deep control you might be looking for. For when you want to take things further than SmartThings, with deep customizations while not limiting yourself to proprietary devices. You do have Vera, which has a deep back-end to it when it comes to custom code, but they haven’t exactly been quick at modernizing their hub sadly.

So where does that leave you? Control4? Sure, if you can afford the cost and the time to set it all up. However, there is now the Hubitat Elevation Hub. A hub that is centered around those looking to design their smart home out as a unique habitat vs a generalized configuration or interface. A hub that truly gives you a lot of control over what it does and how its interface looks. Not only that, but it also supports an extensive list of devices across multiple platforms and protocols.

Design

The physical design of the hub is quite simple. Measuring just 3″x3″ (and just over a half-inch in height), it is one of the smaller hubs we have worked with and weighs almost nothing.

It features an Ethernet port and USB input (for power) on the back, an LED status light on the front, and that’s it. The rest is just holes for hot air to be dispersed/released with. So the only thing you have to worry about is plugging it in, connecting it to your router, and you’re ready to download the app.

It does come with an Ethernet cable as well as the USB cable and wall adapter. So there is nothing needed from you other than the devices you want to connect to it.

Setup/Performance

Once you have downloaded the app (iOS or Android), it will walk you through registering with Hubitat for an account.

When you choose to sign up with a new account, it takes you to your phone’s browser to register (at least it did for us). It then walks you through the same setup instructions that come in the box (plug it in, download the app, connect). Then you get a page by page tutorial that briefly covers some of the features and sections of the hub.

This includes where to go to add new devices, where to go to install apps, change settings, and so forth. Then you name your hub and assign a zip code to it (for certain features). After that, it will check for updates and let you know if there is a firmware update (in our case there was), and wrap things up for you.

Adding a device is pretty simple, and compares well to most other hubs. It brings you to a screen where you can choose from a list of options: Zigbee, Z-Wave, Iris, LAN Devices, Cloud Devices, and Virtual Device. We have a few Zigbee devices to test it with, so we choose Zigbee, which initiates the Zigbee pairing process. You then trigger the same on the device you want to pair, and they should both talk to each other as needed. Now you have a device added.

At first, the device screen is in a table format like a spreadsheet or HTML table, listing all of the connected devices. You can click on their model name to access various functions and settings. This is where it becomes obvious that this hub is more for intermediate users. Which means not for beginners.

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You aren’t immediately invited to a dumbed-down list of shortcuts, icons and other easy to interact with elements that represent the various functions of the connected devices. Instead, it feels more like dealing with the “backend” of the system.

It feels quite similar to Linux, where you have to add packages (or “apps” as they are called), that extend the abilities of the hub to include everything you personally need from it. Things like Dashboards (your simple interface), Safety Monitor (allows alarms, locks, and other devices to interact in a way that a security system would), lighting automation, groups and scene support, rules engine (for creating automation rules), notifications, support for third-party devices/hubs, support for third-party services like IFTTT and more.

So you kind of begin with an empty slate. You then have to tell it what you want this hub to do, or have access to doing. So we installed “Groups and Scenes”, “Dashboard”, “Safety Monitor”, “Rule Machine”, IFTTT support, and more.

Now we have access to creating dashboards that contain the familiar layouts that you are used to seeing when it comes to controlling the various devices on the network. You can create multiple dashboards that have different purposes (like listing ALL devices or selecting specifics ones, like locks, lights, etc). You can name each dashboard as you like as well. This way you can create a favorites screen of your most-used devices, and then groups for everything else (maybe by device type, or maybe by the room they are in).

We like to break everything down into rooms. This way you that you can access a different dashboard for each space you are in (ie, Living Room, Kitchen, Backyard, etc).

With the newly added “apps” you can now create rules for each device, as well as notifications that you can send to your mobile device. You can interact with third-party services like IFTTT (ie, every time you get a tweet on Twitter, you can trigger one of your light bulbs–or all of them–to blink). This is always an important feature of a smart hub since IFTTT opens you up to potentially hundreds if not thousands of possibilities. As long as an IFTTT recipe can be made for something, you can bring that into your network as a feature. You also have access to third-party devices, like Alexa and Google Assistant, so that you can control the hub using your voice.

Once you finish setting everything up and head back to the app, you will realize that the app itself is actually quite simple to use. It is heavily dumbed down compared to the web interface. This feels more like a normal smart hub interface. Given, it does come across as a little too simple at times.

The app is broken down into three tabs, including your dashboards, GeoFence status (where you are in reference to your GeoFence), and app settings.

The dashboard tab looks exactly like the dashboard tab of the web interface, where you first choose which dashboard you want to head off to, and then the various options within it. You can customize the dashboards in many ways, including grid and font size, and colors or backgrounds,

The GeoFence tab is where you choose the size of the geofence around your home. This controls how various rules and devices will react to you coming and going (the parameter of such). We wound up turning it off in settings (for now) since it didn’t seem to work. It shows the green geofence many miles away from where the office really is. So if it doesn’t know where you are, it doesn’t quite help you. So for now, this option is in “the can” until they can fix this.

The settings tab is exactly that, and there are only a few settings to pick from, including turning GeoFence on or off, as well as debugging. There are buttons to log out, send geo event and clear all events. The rest is just statistical information, like showing the name of the device you are on, the name of the hub you are connected to and version information.

For the size of the hub, it works quite well. It seems to be speedy when it comes to devices responding to various commands and you can do a lot with various configurations of rules, notifications and third-party devices and services. When we hit a button to turn a switch on or off, it happens within a second. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for the button to refresh in the app with the device’s current state afterward, but at least the action itself was instantaneous.

The “Rule Machine” has a lot going for it, where you can dive deep into the configuration of your events, triggers and more. This is also a section where you will want experience with this kind of thing in order to freely browse around without getting overwhelmed. There is a lot of terminology and flexibility within the rules that you get to play around with. The benefit of this is that you can do things with rules that you may not be able to (at least easily) with other hubs.

The “Safety Monitor” app is similar in purpose to the Rule Machine, outside of the fact that it is solely for devices that can be considered as part of your “alarm” system for when you are away. The status of this is triggered via the current state of the hub, when you set it between away, home, etc.  Door locks, motion sensors, window/door sensors (open/close) and more. You can configure how you’d like it to interact with you via notifications, as well as other devices around the house. So essentially, you have an alarm system that requires no third-party management services that drain your wallet every month.

IFTTT is a huge feature (as mentioned). You can bring in so many different online services, as well as other devices and hubs that also support IFTTT (that Hubitat may not support directly). Again, if you can create an IFTTT recipe, you can make things happen.

Another huge selling feature is its support for so many devices. The following list includes a number of brands that work with this hub, including Zigbee, Z-Wave and more. They even support Iris devices, which were a brand by Lowes (hardware stores) that they (Lowes) eventually shut down services and support for. Those users can now bring those devices over to Hubitat so that they can continue using them vs having to buy into replacements and start all over again.

Some of these brands seem to be natively supported by the hub, where some others require that you download one of the “apps”. Either way, this adds up to an extensive list of supported devices. Z-Wave support alone opens you up to so many options. Now, factor in the above-mentioned statements in regards to IFTTT and imagine how far this list can possibly stretch.

Another great feature is the fact that If you are home with the app, you can still control the hub even in the event of loss of internet. You do require access to the internet as well as their services to be online (cloud) in order to access it remotely (anywhere in the world). However, if you are at home trying to interact with your devices while your internet is down, you will still be able to.

You have the ability to backup and restore your settings as you please (like most hubs). This way if you upgrade the hardware to a new hub or something happens and you lose the settings on your current one, you can restore them easily so you aren’t having to start from the beginning. This is done from the web interface (not the app).

On top of all of this, the price of the hub is only $90. Most of the other hubs typically fall around $99-$150 and in some cases more. So it has a lot of positive things going for it, that could potentially make this a major player in smart home setups when it comes to intermediate or advanced users. Again, beginners probably won’t fare so well since the setup might scare a normal novice away. But if you have experience with building out smart home setups, you might just find yourself falling in love with this hub (once you yourself have figured out the whole setup process and gotten things running).

Our Conclusion

The hub is so very small, yet so very powerful. At first, it doesn’t do much until you build it out with the proper apps and configuration. However, once you have done so, you now have access to one of the largest lists of devices and services ever supported by a hub. Given, you do need to know your way around a smart home setup to master the hub and hit the ground running. Novice users might be a little scared to use this one and might opt for something a little more simpler and user-friendly from the start. For everyone else, this is a powerful hub. It also has a great price tag to it, enabling users of any budget to be able to jump right into things.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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