[quote=“kigmatzomat, post:11, topic:199656”]
-I was a Vera customer! Reason why I setup Ezlo is because Vera didn’t provide me what i needed. Both quality and capability. That was in 2013. They certainly have come a long way, but still some to go.
Ah. You should be aware that many people here think that vera peaked around 2014 and it’s been a rocky road since.
Back then it would have UI5. It was a solid, reliable but not flashy platform.
UI6 was a short lived sequel that was widely panned and, I think, only shipped on one product. Lots of people tried to downgrade from UI6 to UI5.
UI7 was released in a hurry to replace UI6. It is Web2.0 metaphors with a lot of white space and way too many page refreshes. Despite the slow UI, at first blush was an upgrade over UI5 as it supported the 500 zwave series features. (I bought a veraplus with ui7 for door locks and garage door controllers that required the new security). There was some issues with the wifi features but it didn’t seem bad at first. Ui7 (and maybe ui6) required using new cloud systems.
However the quest for new features has apparently come at the cost of stability. There is Alexa support but I think 3 firmware releases in the past 2 years have been officially retracted. Sometimes the issues the firmware created required users to disenroll and re-eneroll devices, which is both time consuming and erases all related scenes, requiring reprogramming. The onboard services for the new cloud features are directly contributing to the instability, even when nothing is using those services.
Right now, a lot of users would be happy if UI8 was UI5 with support for the current zwave feature set.
You will note many threads on people discussing options to escape vera, like HomeAssistant and HomeSeer. I have a couple hundred dollars of vera gear and many hours of scripting effort. I abandoned that sunk cost and spent another couple hundred dollars on a Homeseer controller.
I don’t know what vera’s corporate customers say, but their direct customers are pretty much kept by the price/performance ratio because of its local processing and fairly robust (3rd party app based) device support. If all was good, you would still need to keep an eye on Hubitat, which is in the same price/performance zone but is new so device support is still a little light.
But if the cloud-service components cause issues when offline (which they can over time) then it isn’t fully local, and Wink/Smartthings becomes competitors and they are cheaper and more widely available.
And if vera developers keep leaving, you lose the device support that makes you feature comparable to HomeSeer and more appealing than Hubitat (which is currently siphoning users away from SmartThings).
At which point vera will lose all but the most die hard direct customers and will become the cable box of home automation where the users refer to it as “that smarthome box my (insert service here) company gave me for free/$5 per mo. It’s ok but I wouldnt buy it if it wasn’t part of the bundle”.[/quote]
kigmatzomat ,
very insightful indeed.
1)Product must work
2)Product must be cost effective
3)Product must address all of user’s home automation needs
4)Product must be available to developers so that they can develop their own versions of home automation products.
Vera seems to be stuck at 1…to be honest, its an easy problem to fix (once you know how, and luckily thats we do! ) We will deliver all 4 but we are gong to start with 1…there has been much focus on stability or bug fixes in the development team due to resources…that is going to change! We will get the team to focus on stability and bug fixes asap. No point in adding features to a product that doesn’t work!
Keep the feedback coming, afterall we are building all these for you! It has to be to your satisfaction!