The BEST Smart Home System money can buy!

What's the best smart home system money can buy? Well, it's taken me about 5 years to figure out, but I think I'm there. Now I can finally answer the most asked question I get. What smart home system should I use? Because there's a lot to choose from. And up until recently I was using 5 different smart home systems at once. 5. Mainly because I run a smart home YouTube channel, but still. Way too many. So I had to make some tough decisions and cut some systems out of my home. That way I could be left with the best. Now to choose which one. I first have to separate the systems into two groups. One that is user friendly and the other that is the brains of the smart home. You see, these smart home systems are mainly good at one and not so much the other. Like they might be very easy to use, but you can't do much with the automations. Or they have powerful automations, but they're difficult to use. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. Naturally, people only want to have one smart home system. Makes sense. But like I said, those smart home systems have shortcomings and can get frustrating quickly. So what's the solution? Just toss it out? No, actually add another smart home system. Yeah, that's right. Just hear me out. I'm going to pick two systems and have them work together. That way I'm taking the best traits from each system and I can skip all that they're bad at. Then you really end up with the best smart home system money can buy. The real question is what system should I use and what should I skip? Well, in the past, I mainly focused on features and price. But the smart home landscape has changed over the last few years. Big tech companies are removing features, charging monthly fees, and even removing resources for making improvements. Not good. One of the main culprits of this is Amazon. They have some new leadership and they're making a lot of very poor decisions in my opinion. Massive cuts in the voice assistant department, monthly fees for new ring alarm users, guard used to be free but it's going to require a monthly fee, and they're even tacking on a monthly fee for the new Echo Show 8. What's the monthly fee for? To not clutter up the Echo Show with ads. I mean, how lame is that? I'm not completely abandoning Amazon. I still have a few Echos around the house but I've removed most of my smart home functionality from them. It's kind of sad because I've used Amazon for so long but I don't like where they're headed. The other smart home system is SmartThings. To be fair, I still like SmartThings for what it is and I would still recommend SmartThings for certain people. It's easy to use and works great with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter devices. It's just lacking more advanced features that used to be available with third-party options like WebCore. And for that reason, I removed all my devices from SmartThings and this was not easy to do because I made some fun videos using SmartThings and it's worked really well for me over the years but eventually I have to move on. So I went from five smart home systems and now I'm down to three but like I said earlier, two is the goal. Now for the easy to use system, I have to choose between Google and Apple. If you own an Android phone, this is a really easy decision since it's very difficult to use Apple for your smart home if you don't have an iPhone. So if you have an Android phone, Google Home is your best option for an easy to use system in my opinion and I like what Google's been doing lately. They added the script editor if you want to get more advanced, they improved their routines, and they've even added AI to help write those advanced scripts. Google is a great choice if you're someone who wants to keep things as easy as possible but have room to grow. For me personally, I'm going to use Apple HomeKit and HomePods as my user-facing system for three main reasons. One, I have high confidence that Apple is going to support their devices and systems for a long time. I don't want to get burned down the road so Apple seems like a safe bet. The second reason is privacy. Siri is so dumb that it's almost a feature and not a bug. Thank you, that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me. The HomePods don't try to sell me anything or use my data. They just handle the very few voice commands I throw at it and play music which always sounds amazing. The third reason is local control. Apple has been a big advocate for running everything locally on the devices in your house and only using the cloud if you're away from your home. This makes everything run faster and be more reliable. The Apple Home app is also really easy to use and looks nice out of the gate. More on that in a second. But honestly, if you have the ideal smart home setup, most of this doesn't even matter because you won't be using voice commands or the app that often since everything will happen automatically. Which leads us to the second half of the system, the hub. There's a lot of really good hubs out there. I mentioned SmartThings, there's Hubitat, and Homey which I just made a video on. But in my opinion, the best hub is one that's extremely misunderstood and that's Home Assistant. You might think it's intimidating because there's so much you can do or you've heard it's terrible and you'll never see your family again because of how time-consuming it is. Well, that part's true. But this has a lot to do with the dashboard because you either have to use what they auto-generate, which is a mess, or make your own which takes a lot of time. But remember how I talked about having two smart home systems working together? Well, this is where it comes into play. To save a lot of time, you could completely skip the Home Assistant dashboard and just import the devices you want in HomeKit or Google Home. Then use the app or Voice Assistant to control your main devices around your house. This is the best of both worlds because you get the powerful automations and integrations of Home Assistant with the simple, easy-to-use interface of Apple Home. I love it. And it's pretty simple to set up too. In Home Assistant, I can select what devices I want to be brought over into Apple HomeKit using HomeBridge. It keeps it all local so it's fast and reliable. My Apple Home app has lots of devices from Home Assistant and it's really easy to organize, looks nice, and it's very easy for me and my family to use. Obviously, the Home Assistant dashboard is much more customizable, but I love how easy this option is. And I know this is possible with other hubs, but what makes Home Assistant the best is why it's kind of misunderstood. Because it can actually make my life easier and save me time. Which kind of sounds opposite from Home Assistant, but let me show you. First, the device and sensor history tracking is out of this world. You have these detailed graphs for everything. You know, if I want to know my garage temperature last night at 10 p.m, it takes two seconds to look it up. And the data for every sensor is really useful for making automations. Like I can look at the energy monitoring outlets and know exactly when my TV is on or when the washing machine is finished. It's so easy. Not only that, but you can do a similar thing for when automations run or don't run when you expect them to. With other hubs, it can be kind of a guessing game on why it's not working. So I use this all the time, especially when something's going haywire, I know exactly how to fix it. You can also click on a condition to see if it would pass or fail in real time right then, which is really helpful when creating automations. Just takes all the guesswork out. But even with all that said, Home Assistant is far from perfect. Home Assistant and I have had our fair share of fights. Usually it's around integrations breaking. Those are typically fixed when I update or just reboot Home Assistant and yell at it until it starts behaving. Come on, Home Assistant, why aren't you working, you little don't make me unplug you and smart things. I'm so oh, hey, it's working. But despite some of Home Assistant shortcomings, I have way more positive experiences using it than negative ones. And Home Assistant is easier than ever to get started since you can buy Home Assistant yellow or green. They have it pre-installed so you can just plug it in and start using it. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 with eight gigabytes of RAM and an SSD. You can technically run Home Assistant on a micro SD card, but since Home Assistant's writing all that data all the time, those SD cards can fail. And that's why I'm using a solid state drive. And Home Assistant is not very resource intensive. So don't stress about using really powerful hardware. You can use something inexpensive unless you're doing something crazy like advanced voice assistant processing or something like that. I also have a Zigbee Z-Wave combo USB stick plugged into my Raspberry Pi. I'm using a USB extender to help with signal interference. I'll link what I'm using in the description. But here's the biggest reason I love Home Assistant. It's free and open source. That means some top executive at a company can't decide one day to just shut it down. It's kept alive by the community and it's the second most active open source project right now. So I feel pretty confident that it'll be around for a long time. Home Assistant also integrates with almost every device in your home that you can imagine. I mean, Jimmy Hawkins connected his Bluetooth toothbrush to Home Assistant to run a nighttime automation. It's wild all the things you can do. I have pretty much every device in my house integrated into Home Assistant. I'm not restricted with the automations I can dream up. And my family can easily control the devices using Apple HomeKit that's paired up with it, which I think makes the best smart home system money can buy. Thanks for watching. Hey, do you want to take the baby for a second? Hold on. I'm just fixing this thing in Home Assistant real fast. It'll only take a second. Yes, finally, I fixed it. Okay, where's the baby? I can hold her now. Hi, Dad. Nice to meet you. How much time went by?