Our household has embraced DIY and budget home automation; the lynch pin in this setup is the the little Raspberry Pi sitting next to me. Of the more mature HA tools that exist, Home Assistant and OpenHAB both have a RPi deployment, Hassbian and OpenHabian, respectively.

The lowdown

I'm not sure why I went with OpenHAB first, I guess they seemed a bit further along with integrating all the tools required to make this work. While technically right, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The front end (Discovery and WebUI) of OpenHAB might be more refined but once you wanted to make anything work it was back to CLI and editing flat text files. I still might like their folder and file hierarchy better, but the java-ness of everything starts to peak through.

Home Assistant is backended by python tools and infrastructure. It took me a while to remember that everything is done inside a python virtualisation, so trying to use their tools in the vanilla CLI doesn't work.

Unless you need privileged root access most of my consoles stay in the environment.

sudo -u homeassistant -H -s
source /srv/homeassistant/bin/activate

Home Assistant is in a current state of flux with a new card-based frontend, Lovelace, in the works. You can preview it now, and also set it as your current default. I did both because it is a definite usability improvement. But alas, doesn't render on my tablets, so some other panel solution needs to happen. :(

OpenHAB felt more ... open. But the interactions with periperals was too disjointed, I was working on text files that got nom'd into a live database that had no CLI tool for item removal. The last straw was losing the mesh of zigbee devices and not being able to find it again. I wasn't willing to kick the dead horse of rebinding all our smart devices. Thus I felt it was time to move onto HA.

It's interesting to compare the values of the two; they both are operating in the same niche with very different philosophies. HA is moving more quickly to GUI tools that manipulate the underlying text configuration. It took a bit of hooking in, but their configurator web-based text editor makes me not miss the custom syntax highlighting that OpenHAB used in nano (cli text editor).