Homey Pro vs Hubitat: Which Local Hub?

These two hubs answer the same question, which is why people end up comparing them: how do I run a smart home that does not depend on someone else’s servers and does not bill me every month? Homey and Hubitat both say the automations execute on the box in your house. Both say the hub keeps working through an internet outage. Neither charges a fee to control your home.

Past that shared premise they are almost opposites. One is a polished, expensive box with nearly every radio in the category inside it. The other is a plain, cheap box with better Z-Wave, an Ethernet port and admin pages that look like a router’s. Everything below comes from what each maker publishes on its own site — we own neither unit, and our method is to read the manufacturer’s page rather than the retail listing.

The short version

Buy the Hubitat Elevation C-8 Pro if your devices are Z-Wave and Zigbee, you want the hub wired to your router, and you would rather spend the difference on the devices it controls. It is the rational purchase for most people who want local control, and it is not close on price.

Buy the Homey Pro (2026) if you need Zigbee and Thread in one box, if you want Bluetooth and infrared devices in the same system, or if the thing that has stopped you adopting a local hub is that the local hubs all look like network equipment. You are paying for breadth and for the app, and both are real.

How we compared them

Hubs are unusually easy to compare badly, because the interesting parts do not show up in a feature list. We ranked these two on five things, in this order:

1. Radios— which devices you will be able to add in three years. This is decided by hardware, and hardware is the one thing a software update cannot fix.
2. What actually runs locally— both claim local automation, so the question is what still needs the internet.
3. Five-year running cost— the sticker plus every optional service you will realistically end up wanting.
4. The hardware around the radios— network port, antennas, memory, what is in the box.
5. The software you will live in— the app, the rules engine, and how each one bridges to Alexa, Google and Apple Home.

Note what is not on that list: a score. We own no units, so we do not publish one. Every figure below is a published specification, and where a maker does not publish something we say so instead of filling it in.

Side by side

1. Radios: the Thread and Zigbee catch

This is the most important paragraph on the page, and it is a wrinkle most comparisons miss. Hubitat’s standard C-8 Pro carries Zigbee 3.0 and Z-Wave 800 with Long Range, each with its own external antenna, plus Matter 1.5 and Bluetooth. It does not carry Thread. Hubitat sells Thread in a separate Thread edition of the same hub — and Hubitat states plainly that this model does not include built-in Zigbee. The Thread radio replaces the Zigbee radio rather than joining it.

So on Hubitat, Zigbee and Thread are a choice. On the Homey Pro they are both standard, alongside Z-Wave, Matter v1.5, Bluetooth LE 5.0 and infrared. If you own Zigbee sensors today — and most people with a mesh network do — and you also want a Thread border router for the newer, low-power Matter accessories that are increasingly Thread-based, the Homey is the only one of the two that does both on one box. Our Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Thread guide explains how to tell which radio your existing devices use, and that is the check to do before you order either hub.

Now the honest counterweight, because the cheaper hub wins a round here. Hubitat publishes Z-Wave 800 with Long Range at the US 908.4 MHz frequency. Homey publishes Z-Wave 700 Series and makes no Long Range claim on its spec list. Both will pair an ordinary Z-Wave lock or sensor perfectly well, but Long Range is the feature you want for a sensor on a detached garage or at the end of a driveway, and the box that costs a fraction as much is the one that has it. The Z-Wave Alliance, cited below, is the authority on what each generation adds.

Two Homey radios have no Hubitat equivalent at all. Infrared turns the hub into a remote control for equipment that never got smart — an older TV, an air conditioner, an amplifier. And 433 MHz is on the spec sheet with a caveat we cover in full in the Homey Pro review: Homey’s own page says 433 MHz transmission is currently turned off in the US, Canada and South Korea. Strike it off the list if you are buying here. It is one of those regional asterisks that never survives the trip into a retailer’s bullet points.

2. What actually runs locally

Both makers are unambiguous, and that is worth stating because most of this industry is not. Hubitat: “Automations run locally inside your home — not in the cloud — so your smart home devices and security rules continue working even during internet disruptions.” Homey: the hub “runs entirely on-premise, ensuring minimal latency and maximum reliability” and “is always up, even when your internet is down.”

The practical consequence is the same on both: a motion-triggered light thinks on the hub and comes on in the time the sensor takes to report, instead of making a round trip to a data center while you stand in a dark hallway. An internet outage downgrades your smart home to a normal home rather than a broken one. Our smart home without internet guide goes device by device through what survives an outage on each kind of system.

Where they diverge is remote access, and this is the comparison’s quietest surprise. Homey includes remote access, the app store and voice-assistant integration with the hub. Hubitat sells Remote Admin as an optional monthly subscription for administering the hub while you are away. Hubitat’s documentation is fair about the limits of that: Remote Admin “is not required to access your hub from a local network or use built-in remote features like cloud Dashboard access.” So you can check and control your home remotely on a Hubitat without paying; what costs money is changing its configuration from somewhere else. For most households that is the difference between a convenience and a necessity, and only you can say which it is.

3. The running cost, which is this site’s whole point

Neither hub needs a subscription, and both makers say so in their own words. Hubitat’s product listing: “Hubitat does not require subscriptions for ongoing use.” Homey’s spec page lists remote access, the app store and voice-assistant integration as included, with Advanced Flow, Energy, Dashboards and Insights carrying no extra charge. Against the cameras and alarm kits most people buy alongside a hub, where the monthly plan quietly becomes the larger half of the five-year total, both of these are the good end of the market. The arithmetic is in our running-cost guide.

The optional services are where the two part company, and Hubitat’s are the more layered. Hubitat sells Cloud Backup (ten cloud backups, no extended warranty), Hub Protect(five cloud backups plus an extended warranty), or both together. A cloud backup includes things a local backup does not — Z-Wave, Zigbee and File Manager, subject to a 100 MB limit — which in practice means it can migrate your paired mesh devices to a replacement hub without you re-pairing every sensor by hand. Anyone who has re-paired thirty Z-Wave devices will understand why that is the feature people actually buy.

Then the part worth reading twice. Hubs bought directly from Hubitat carry a 90-day standard warranty, and Hub Protect extends it for the duration of the subscription. That is a short standard warranty for a box you intend to leave powered on for a decade, and the longer one is behind a recurring payment — so the cheaper, subscription-free hub has a warranty story that quietly points back toward a subscription. Homey’s paid add-on is narrower: Cloud Backups, billed yearly, with backing up to your own Mac or PC free. Homey also publishes a software support commitment — updates “until at least June 2031” — which almost nobody in this category prints at all.

Add it up over five years and the Hubitat is still much cheaper, even if you subscribe to Hub Protect the whole time. The Homey’s case on cost is not that it is cheap; it is that it replaces a drawer of bridges, and that nothing recurring is required to keep it doing so.

4. The hardware around the radios

Here the expensive hub loses a round it should have won. The Hubitat ships with built-in Wi-Fi and Ethernet, an Ethernet cable and a US power supply in the box, and an external antenna for each mesh radio— one for Zigbee, one for Z-Wave. Those antennas are the difference between a sensor at the back of the house pairing and not pairing, and they are visible proof that someone optimized this box for radio range rather than for a shelf.

The Homey Pro has internal antennas, no Ethernet port, and sells an Ethernet adapter separately. For a hub whose entire argument is reliability, making the wired connection an accessory is an odd decision, and anyone putting this in a wiring closet should budget for the adapter. Homey does win on memory: 4 GB of RAM and 8 GB of flash against the Hubitat’s 2 GB, on a 1.5 GHz quad-core ARMv8. That headroom is not decorative — on Homey, every brand you integrate is an app running on the hub, and Homey ties the app count directly to the memory, saying the 2026 model has room for well over 100 of them.

One logistical note on the Hubitat: Hubitat sells the US version for shipment to the 48 mainland states only, and it also sells direct from its own store, where the price is not always the same as the Amazon listing. Check both before you commit. The buttons further down show Amazon’s live price at the moment you loaded this page.

5. The software you will actually live in

This is where the money goes. Homey’s app is the most approachable thing in local-first smart home software: a real phone app, a visual automation builder in Advanced Flow, energy monitoring and Insights, all included, and a catalog Homey describes as devices from over 1,000 brands. It is the hub you can hand to someone else in the household without writing instructions.

Hubitat’s interface is a browser-based admin console, and it looks like one. Its rules engine is genuinely powerful and its community forum has probably already solved whatever you are about to ask, but the aesthetic is a workbench. Hubitat publishes support for 1,000+ devices across 100+ brands — note that Homey counts brands and Hubitat counts devices across brands, so the two figures are not the same measurement and should not be read as a head-to-head. Hubitat also names Ring device integration on its listing, which is a specific and unusual thing for a local hub to carry.

On ecosystem bridges, Homey is ahead and honest about the catch. Its Matter Bridge exposes Homey devices to Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings and Home Assistant — but Homey states that only features defined by the Matter standard cross over, that infrared and 433 MHz devices may not report their real-time state, and that if Homey itself loses access to a device it goes unavailable in every connected platform at once. Centralizing is the point and also a single point of failure; we would keep either hub on a small uninterruptible power supply next to the router.

The Hubitat bridges to Alexa and Google and has no native Apple Home path, and neither hub has a speaker or a microphone of its own. Both assume you already own an Echo or similar as the voice endpoint. If your household is on iPhones and you want everything native in the Home app, a HomePod mini is the box that does that job properly, with either of these underneath it for the heavy automation. Our ecosystems comparison is the page to read if you have not chosen a platform yet, because that decision constrains the hub choice more than any spec above.

Honest cons, both boxes

Against the Homey Pro: it is the most expensive hub we list, by a wide margin. There is no Ethernet port, so the wired connection is a separate purchase. Its Z-Wave silicon is a generation behind the Hubitat’s and it publishes no Long Range support. Apple Home arrives through what Homey itself calls a HomeKit experiment, with features that do not all cross over. And 433 MHz — a radio on the box and in the Amazon title — is switched off for transmission in the United States.

Against the Hubitat C-8 Pro: the interface has a real learning curve and will feel like network administration if you are coming from a consumer app. There is no Thread on the standard model, and the edition that adds it drops Zigbee. The standard warranty is 90 days, with the longer one behind a subscription. Remote administration is a paid monthly service. There is no infrared or 433 MHz, no native Apple Home, and no voice hardware. Our full Hubitat review does not soften any of that.

Which one should you buy?

For most people asking this question, the Hubitat. It is the hub that does the thing you came for — local automation, Z-Wave and Zigbee on board, no required fee — at a price that leaves budget for the sensors and locks that make it useful. Wired Ethernet, external antennas and the newer Z-Wave are not small advantages, and the money you save is substantial. You pay for it in interface, and only you know how much that costs you.

The Homey Pro earns its price in three specific situations. You own Zigbee devices and want a Thread border router in the same box. You want Bluetooth or infrared equipment in the same system, which nothing else here does. Or the thing that has kept you off local hubs is that they look like network gear, and a polished app is worth real money to you because it means the rest of the household will use the system instead of working around it. All three are legitimate reasons. “It has more features” on its own is not.

If neither is quite right

Two adjustments are worth knowing about before you commit to either.

The Homey Pro mini is the same software on cheaper hardware, wired over Gigabit Ethernet, covering Zigbee, Thread and Matter. The catch is that Homey states Z-Wave, Bluetooth, infrared and 433 MHz arrive only with the separate Homey Bridge add-on, and the mini has 1 GB of RAM rather than 4 GB — Homey guides buyers to roughly 20 to 25 apps on it. If you own no Z-Wave gear, it is the cheaper way into Homey’s app. If you do, buy the full Pro rather than a mini plus a Bridge; that is two boxes solving a problem one box already solved.

And if what you really want is maximum integration rather than maximum radios, the Home Assistant Green is the third box in this conversation: it connects to more things than either hub here and costs less than the Homey, but its radios are a USB stick you buy and configure yourself and the platform is a genuine hobby. We set it against the Hubitat directly in Hubitat vs Home Assistant. If the honest answer is that you do not want to think about any of this, an Echo Hub or the Aeotec SmartThings hub is the saner start, and the best hubs roundup has a cheaper right answer for every ecosystem. Before spending anything, though, read do you need a smart home hub — for a lot of homes the answer is still not yet, and that is the cheapest advice on this site.