Vera vs Homeseer Zee S2

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

Since there’s a lot of talk about dissatisfaction with Vera and discussion about Homeseer, I thought I’d share some thoughts and experiences. Of course, this is all my opinion - but I’ve had a Vera Lite for a few years and also have a Hometroller Zee S2. I was pondering the differences/benefits a few months ago, so hopefully this helps someone.

The Zee S2 is basically a raspberry pi 2 running the Linux version of Homeseer. So it has some decent power, memory, power consumption, and expandability.

Device pairing/removing: The vera was substantially easier. Its battery let me carry it to devices that needed to be within a meter of the vera during pairing. The Zee needed to be plugged in and connected to my lan with a cable to do the same thing (which required some creative solutions). No contest here.

Power Usage: Both controllers sip power (probably less than 10watts). Homeseer can be a real power hog if you buy the software and install it on an old computer.

Price: The Vera lite is only about $90 and the plus is $150. The Zee S2 is on sale for $170. I’ll have to buy the Tasker plugin ($40) and the Imperihome plugin ($40) for a total of $250. The tasker plugin for vera (autovera) is free and imperihome works without any plugins.

Automation: Homeseer Zee S2 wins here. The vera has extremely basic scene capabilities. I don’t think it can even do a decent “if” condition without a plugin. You can buy the PLEG plugin to get some better logic control, but plugins can be a gamble on low memory devices like the vera lite. The Zee’s logic system is very robust.

I’ll keep both (one for home and one for office). The vera lite was just fine for my small 20-device system. I think it does everything that it’s supposed to for well under $100. It had an annoying habit of adding a dozen or so phantom devices every 6 months, but it was stable and never crashed. It would occasionally lose communication with some of my old CA600 switches, but I hear they are garbage so I’ll split the blame between them and the vera. It’s definitely not a good choice for large systems. It should be obvious, but why would someone use a $100 brain to control several thousand dollars worth of switches and devices?

The Zee’s interface is rich in features (possibly too rich) and more responsive than the Vera’s UI7 - even though homeseer is still stuck in the 90’s from a design standpoint. The vera needed some finagling and some plugins to get my Aeon power meter and Monoprice devices to work properly. All the devices worked correctly on the Zee without any additional setup. They also seem to be a little more responsive on the Zee. The zee feels a lot more like a piece of software that’s slapped onto some hardware than the vera (that’s what it is), so it can be more intimidating than the Vera’s more modern, but simple, interface.

I didn’t have many issues with my appropriately-sized system, but I’m certain that my Lite couldn’t handle many more devices. Time will tell of the Zee will do the same.

I’m open to any questions…

#2

Nice post,
I just tried Homeseer S3 and found several reasons to stick with Vera.
Here are some of my reasons:

  • Milight/Limitless LED plugin only works on Linux. (I don’t feel like getting a license of Windows to run HS3, also I don’t think it will be stable as 24/7 device to run on windows)
  • For almost every integration, you will need a plugin, even Z-wave is not a native feature, and most of the plugins that you need will cost you more than $29 dollars. Zwave is free, but things like Hue lights, Apple Homekit, Lutron, JSON, Weatherbug all will cost you money.

Yes it does have some superior features like timing of events, like if a motion sensor goes on, you can set an action to be triggered 20 minutes after the last motion.

Considering the quality of the plugins and the steps to get some working I rather stay with Vera. I thought homeseer would be plug and play but it’s not, you ended up doing lots of hacks to get things working and for that I can stay with Vera where most of the stuff is free.

#3

Also, when browsing devices on Homeseer S3 (Running on a I5 Quad Core + SSD + 8GB RAM) it was slow, the UI was not responsive as I wish after I had about 80 devices. I was running HS 3_0_0_280

Since I ugpraded to vera 1.7.760 my UI is well responsive with occasionally JS Freezes. I’ve about 50 devices ( lights, switches, locks and sensors).

#4

Very informative. Thank you.

#5

More details (primarily for me in case I ever set up another homeseer device…)

First the plugins. Despite what you might hear, they are not always substantially better than the Vera plugins. The help doc from the Tasker plugin’s author says “My biggest barrier in this project has been following. The English language. I?m not a programmer. Work takes all my time up.” I appreciate the effort that this person has made, but it makes it hard to justify the $40 plugin price.

The tasker plugin for Homeseer is a mess. It’s just a collection of Tasker items coupled with AutoRemote. It doesn’t appear to be able to push notifications from Homeseer to Tasker (you have to look up each device’s ID and write a task that pulls its status manually). AutoVera is light years ahead of it because it keeps a simple list of your devices. It also pushes updates from Vera to tasker if anything changes, so you don’t have to manually poll everything. This is probably my biggest disappointment.

The Imperihome plugin ($50 I think) is also not as good as Vera’s. Imperihome will query your Vera’s devices and set up is very easy. In Homeseer, you have to manually set up and name each device that you want Imperihome to see. I still haven’t figured out how to get the all-in-one thermostat widget to work - I can only pull the temp, hvac status, and target temps separately. There’s probably a way to do it, but with the Vera you literally just select the thermostat and Imperihome takes care of setting it up.

Now back to the device setup. To pair my battery-operated devices I brought them to the Zee and paired them. It was fairly simple, but it required downloading an app to my phone and using that to put the Zee into pairing mode. In contrast, the vera has physical buttons on top of it (+ to pair, - to exclude). Once the devices were paired I took them back to their spots in other rooms. Unfortunately, most of them stopped communicating with the Zee. So I had to go to each device, wake them up (usually by removing their cover) and then start a full zwave network optimization to rebuild the network. It took a lot of searching to figure this out. I guess the network needed to build new routes for them since they moved. I don’t know for sure and I don’t remember doing that when I set things up with the vera. Anyway they seem to be working fine now.

In the vera, the dashboard makes it really clear if a device is not communicating properly. In Homeseer, it’s not clear at all. I could see that a device hadn’t updated for a while and then I had to go into its settings and test its connectivity to confirm that there was a problem. That led to a period of distrust for me. At least with the vera I knew right away if something was amiss.

Another difference is how homeseer handles polling. I think the vera polls everything every 2 minutes or something like that. Homeseer doesn’t do that. If a device has instant status it is not polled (makes sense). If it doesn’t have instant status homeseer sets a polling rate of around 20 minutes. You can change it to whatever you want, but the defaults seem way too long to me. On the plus side, homeseer uses a little trick to get instant status out of some devices that don’t have it. Apparently some devices will send a pairing signal when you press their button. Homeseer can interpret that as a button press and update the status nearly instantly. I don’t think the vera does this. So it was a pleasant surprise to see my old CA600 switches show near instant (2 seconds max) status updates.

In the end, I’m still ok with Homeseer. But it’s definitely not the night and day improvement that some people expect. I am really liking the events engine. But I’m very satisfied with the vera lite that’s handling a few devices at the office. Homeseer would not be worth its price and hassle in that situation.

#6

[quote=“virtus, post:5, topic:192344”]More details (primarily for me in case I ever set up another homeseer device…)

First the plugins. Despite what you might hear, they are not always substantially better than the Vera plugins. The help doc from the Tasker plugin’s author says “My biggest barrier in this project has been following. The English language. I?m not a programmer. Work takes all my time up.” I appreciate the effort that this person has made, but it makes it hard to justify the $40 plugin price.

The tasker plugin for Homeseer is a mess. It’s just a collection of Tasker items coupled with AutoRemote. It doesn’t appear to be able to push notifications from Homeseer to Tasker (you have to look up each device’s ID and write a task that pulls its status manually). AutoVera is light years ahead of it because it keeps a simple list of your devices. It also pushes updates from Vera to tasker if anything changes, so you don’t have to manually poll everything. This is probably my biggest disappointment.

The Imperihome plugin ($50 I think) is also not as good as Vera’s. Imperihome will query your Vera’s devices and set up is very easy. In Homeseer, you have to manually set up and name each device that you want Imperihome to see. I still haven’t figured out how to get the all-in-one thermostat widget to work - I can only pull the temp, hvac status, and target temps separately. There’s probably a way to do it, but with the Vera you literally just select the thermostat and Imperihome takes care of setting it up.

Now back to the device setup. To pair my battery-operated devices I brought them to the Zee and paired them. It was fairly simple, but it required downloading an app to my phone and using that to put the Zee into pairing mode. In contrast, the vera has physical buttons on top of it (+ to pair, - to exclude). Once the devices were paired I took them back to their spots in other rooms. Unfortunately, most of them stopped communicating with the Zee. So I had to go to each device, wake them up (usually by removing their cover) and then start a full zwave network optimization to rebuild the network. It took a lot of searching to figure this out. I guess the network needed to build new routes for them since they moved. I don’t know for sure and I don’t remember doing that when I set things up with the vera. Anyway they seem to be working fine now.

In the vera, the dashboard makes it really clear if a device is not communicating properly. In Homeseer, it’s not clear at all. I could see that a device hadn’t updated for a while and then I had to go into its settings and test its connectivity to confirm that there was a problem. That led to a period of distrust for me. At least with the vera I knew right away if something was amiss.

Another difference is how homeseer handles polling. I think the vera polls everything every 2 minutes or something like that. Homeseer doesn’t do that. If a device has instant status it is not polled (makes sense). If it doesn’t have instant status homeseer sets a polling rate of around 20 minutes. You can change it to whatever you want, but the defaults seem way too long to me. On the plus side, homeseer uses a little trick to get instant status out of some devices that don’t have it. Apparently some devices will send a pairing signal when you press their button. Homeseer can interpret that as a button press and update the status nearly instantly. I don’t think the vera does this. So it was a pleasant surprise to see my old CA600 switches show near instant (2 seconds max) status updates.

In the end, I’m still ok with Homeseer. But it’s definitely not the night and day improvement that some people expect. I am really liking the events engine. But I’m very satisfied with the vera lite that’s handling a few devices at the office. Homeseer would not be worth its price and hassle in that situation.[/quote]

Totally agree with you, when I started doing the math on software + plugins it ended up being much more expensive that I imagined that for $40 bucks the plugin would be pristine, like a paid Iphone app. However that threw me off, the plugin that I paid so much was a pain to ensure it worked and needed lots of tweaks.

I also tested some other systems, OpenHAB/OpenHAB2 , Home-Assistand and Domoticz. So far Domoticz was the most impressive in features, quality and speed. OpenHAB2 is promising but not ready, I feel it might take more than 6 months until it can be released and proven stable.
I almost switched to Domoticz but I felt shy for the work needed and a few tweaks that I would have to do by hand on the Sonos area.
If somoene is looking to replace a pc running Homeseer or is looking to build a solution based on PC or Raspeberry Pi I would definitely recommend Domoticz.