Recently, I’ve been reading about Dave2‘s adventures with his new Homey Pro, which he is using as his smart home controller. For context, Dave2 has tried to use devices certified for Apple HomeKit for years, and it’s been a struggle. Devices disappear randomly, automations fail to work, and so on.
The Homey Pro is an all-in-one smart home controller, supporting Zigbee, Matter, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (and optionally Ethernet), Infrared and RF devices, in one neat package. That’s basically every smart home protocol covered. There’s also the Homey Bridge, which is available separately to increase range, but it can also be bought separately.
Dave2 has written five blog posts about his journey: part one, part two, part three, part four and part five. If you’re considering buying a Homey Pro, I would suggest reading each one – especially if you’re moving away from Apple HomeKit.
How does the Homey Pro compare to Home Assistant?
As regular readers will know, I’ve basically gone all in on Home Assistant as a smart home controller. It works fine for me, and I like its do-it-yourself nature up to a point. Where Homey stands out is that everything is in one box, and, as far as I can tell, you don’t need to sign up for developer accounts to integrate services. That removes a large amount of friction which can be intimidating to new users. Home Assistant Cloud makes integration with Google Assistant and Alexa much easier, but it’s a paid add-on.
However, where Home Assistant stands out compared to Homey Pro is the number of integrations. Homey Pro offers a good range of apps, and has an open SDK. But there isn’t the same range as Home Assistant, and there doesn’t appear to be the equivalent of HACS to install additional integrations.
Whether Home Assistant or Homey Pro is right for you depends on how much time you have, and how much control you want. The Homey Pro will work much better out of the box, and it should be quicker and easier to get started with it. Home Assistant is definitely more complicated, even if you buy a device with the software pre-loaded, but it’s much more powerful and customisable.
One final thing to bare in mind is updates. Homey’s developers have committed to supporting the current Homey Pro model until January 2028, but that’s only three years away. They’ve also recently been acquired by LG, which may or may not be a good thing long-term. It should be noted, though, that in last month’s Home Assistant update (2024.11), LG contributed their own official ThingQ integration, so you can monitor your smart Kimchi refrigerator. Hopefully that means that Homey is in good hands.