Installing and Maintenance

Installing both platforms is easy. You need to download the base image for your hardware, write it on sd-card and plugging it in Raspberry Pi. Both can also be installed using Docker.

Initial configuration of OpenHAB is mainly done using the web interface. It is a well-thought process, although there are many steps to follow that can be intimidating for some users. We really struggled with Z-wave binding (even using our favourite Aeotec Z-wave Stick Gen5 or HUSBZB-1 Z-wave/Zigbee stick ). Home Assistant tries to do many things itself with very useful discovery option. There is also a push for web-UI controlled “Integration” feature that allows doing the initial configuration. Saying that at the moment we do not see how any reasonably complicated setup can be done without going into the configuration.yaml file. It is not hugely complicated but some learning curve nonetheless.

Updates are managed through web-interface for Home Assistant (formely Hass.io) and can be done by the click of the button. There might be breaking change in the releases so please do look in the documentation to check.

Things are more complicated for OpenHAB and done using a command line.

Add-ons are a strong part of both projects with a very strong community-driven development process existing in Home Assistant. You can use a number of repositories with add-ons to manage everything from MQTT to Lutron Certificates and NRV (MotionEye). OpenHAB also has a lot of add-ons (currently showing having of 310 add-ons). They all can be installed using Paper UI.

As for the servers to run, the majority of the users prefer to use Raspberry Pi (which is an energy-efficient powerful mini-computer) that is more than powerful to run both the platform system and add-ons. We also recommend looking into NAS solutions for Synology or even HP Microserver for more advanced uses.