I’ve moved from a Fibaro HCL to a Vera Edge about a week ago. I’ve been reading up on user experiences here and see some people are pretty angry and considering moving to Fibaro in the hope that would fix things. So I thought I’d share my experience in the other direction.
As an ex Fibaro user I must say I’m pretty pleased with my Edge. It’s been running stable for a week now where my home center lite would need a reboot at least once a week, with motion sensors turning into thermometers causing fire alerts, etc. Remote access to a HCL is a pain to setup, then almost never works, and when it does, any remote management would cause the system to crash, requiring a system restart which is a pain when you’re not at home.
I like the the lua implementation in the UI7, it’s pretty simple and straightforward. I find it curious that Vera doesn’t have it’s own day/night and boolean logic in scenes, but it’s all easily fixed with plugins and lua. In my Fibaro HCL I officially did not have a lua option (you can cheat via the api though) but I am SO glad I didn’t shell out 550 euros for the “normal” home center… I saw some people upgrading from a 250 euro HCL to a 550 HC in the hope this would solve their problems, but it really is a waste of 300 euros.
The irony is that since the HCL came out last year, Fibaro has done almost nothing to make that device function properly. It uses the same HC code with a few quick and dirty limitations thrown in to “explain” the price difference. This has been implemented in such a simple way that you can just use the api to give your HCL lua functionality for instance. The HCL has no usb connector so once it’s bricked it has to be sent back to poland with at least a 6 week wait if you’re lucky… Bug fixing is only done on the HC which has a new version 4 at the moment, HCL is still stuck on an inferior 3.9. I assume Fibaro will want to have a stable HC first and then port over to the HCL, but at current rate of development that will be probably somewhere in 2016.
Honestly a 160 euro Edge is the most stable solution for me at the moment. I’ve developed for Domoticz for a while, which taught me that at least with open source (or “free” as some would like to call it) software you only get disappointed instead of angry users. There is no commercial home automation system that will deliver 100% customer satisfaction at this time, so it’s up to you how much money you want to throw at it. And honestly, please don’t spend 550 bucks on a Fibaro thinking that will be better than Vera.
