Switching to HomeAssistant

Why I Finally Switched from openHAB to Home Assistant (And I’m Not Looking Back)

For years, I’ve been knee-deep in home automation, tweaking, testing, and refining setups. If you’ve followed my journey, you’ll know that openHAB was my go-to platform for a long time. It’s powerful, flexible, and gave me the control I wanted. But recently, I made a full switch to Home Assistant — and I can confidently say it was the right move.

This wasn’t an overnight decision. In fact, I’ve been running Home Assistant alongside openHAB for quite a while. It started out as an experiment — something to poke around with and compare. My openHAB setup was the heart of my smart home, with all my automations running there and in Node-RED. Home Assistant was just “that other dashboard” I occasionally looked at.

So what changed?

A Shift Years in the Making

Over time, I began noticing just how fast Home Assistant was evolving. With every release, it seemed more polished, more intuitive, and more tightly integrated with the devices I actually use. Meanwhile, I found myself needing to work harder in openHAB to achieve the same results — especially as my setup grew.

But the biggest push came from my desire to simplify. I was tired of the split-brain setup, with automations in openHAB and Node-RED, and a secondary system I barely kept in sync. I wanted a single, cohesive platform where I could manage everything — devices, dashboards, and automations — without needing a half-dozen bridges or workarounds.

Going All-In on Home Assistant

Once I made the decision to move fully over to Home Assistant, things escalated quickly.

• Automations: I rewrote all of my openHAB automations directly in Home Assistant. It was surprisingly straightforward, and I actually found the automation editor (and YAML when needed) much more readable and flexible than I expected.
• Sensors: I finally pulled the plug on my old 433 MHz RF sensors, which had become unreliable and felt like relics from a different era (I will still use RF sensors on less critical areas). Instead, I migrated everything to Zigbee using my Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle -E as a router now and adding in the SMLite SLZB-06M Coordinator. The mesh stability, speed, and range have been a massive upgrade.
• Integrations: What once required manual configs and lots of guesswork now “just works.” The Home Assistant ecosystem is incredibly wide — nearly every device I own had native support or a high-quality community integration.
• Dashboards: It’s worth mentioning how easy it is to build custom dashboards in Home Assistant. I am working towards a wall-mounted tablet running a clean, real-time UI for family use — something I never quite got working to my liking in openHAB.

Looking Back — and Forward

Don’t get me wrong: openHAB served me well for years. It's a solid platform and still a great choice for many. But for my needs — flexibility, fast updates, modern UI, and seamless integrations — Home Assistant simply outpaced it.

This switch has not only streamlined my smart home, it’s reignited my interest in building more automations and experimenting with new devices. It feels fun again.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence, running both like I did, or hesitating to make the jump, I’d say: give Home Assistant a serious look. It's come a long way — and it might just be time to go all in.