I'm having second thoughts about Indigo

I decided to give Indigo a chance after they decided to move to a subscription model in the hope that things would improve here. After almost a year, I see absolutely no indication of faster development pace or richer features.

Now I have had a look at the free competition from Home Assistant, and I'm blown away by the richness, elegance and speed of improvement. It lets me run on a cheap Raspberry Pi 3B+ instead of replacing my expensive MacMini for the sole purpose of running the controller. It's free and not expensive. It's easy to use, and it seems to have all the same features as Indigo. It also has a full featured mobile experience and looks great with the new Lovelace UI. And Home Assistant has plugins and integrations that actually work really well.

My question to this forum is if you have any experience with Home Assistant versus Indigo, and if you see any reason at all not to make the switch.

Disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation with Home Assistant. I'm just a home automation enthusiast that got a lot more enthusiastic after finding them.

A colleague uses it, having moved from Domiticz and likes it.
However have a look at what plugins they have available. There is nothing for my alarm or heating system for example.
I did look at it but looked like a lot more coding required for it to work compared to indigo.

I decided to give Indigo a chance after they decided to move to a subscription model in the hope that things would improve here. After almost a year, I see absolutely no indication of faster development pace or richer features.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Matt and Jay have discussed this at length on the forums--here's an example.

Indigo 7.2 was released on August 28, 2018 which had lots of new features, devices and other improvements.
Indigo 7.1 was released on October 28, 2017 which had lots of new features, devices and other improvements.

Both of those are huge updates. They also have rolled out the Plugin Store. They also spend a ton of their time providing first-hand support to users both on the forums and through direct email. Would you prefer they break the updates into smaller chunks and release updates more frequently?

What is Indigo lacking for you?

Hey each to his own and if it suits your circumstances better - go for it.

I would disagree with the reasons provided however, and think the argument over feature releases is not the most important, rather stability is - and they are mutually exclusion I believe.

See here:
https://github.com/home-assistant/home- ... is%3Aissue

Glenn

I moved to Indigo from Vera a year or two ago. Indigo is far easier IMO. But that said, I am not a fan of paying year after year. I may not be typical, but I basically set everything up and have done little to no tinkering with it. So that means no new devices, etc.....it just works fine for me as is. For this reason, I have seen little value in upgrading (even though I am eligible to since I've paid).

I am a huge fan of my setup under Indigo and have no desire to look elsewhere because as I said, it just works. But occasionally I do get the urge to get under the hood and play with things, or adding a new and improved widget, so knowing there is active development helps, and being able to chat directly with the owners/developers is huge in my book.

But switching to another platform (from Vera to Indigo) was not something I did lightly as it required a good bit of time on my part to get everything working as it did before and then leveraging those improvements offered by the new platform. So for me, the business case for switching would have to be strong....like some major function I don't currently get and feel is important....and that has yet to happen.

While I don't tinker often, I do occasionally look for new gadgets that I can integrate (or new integrations for existing gadgets. This forum helps with that, but I'd love to see more on the 'art of the possible'. A forum is great for deep dives on that stuff, but I think this site could benefit from showcasing certain features or set-ups in more blog-style form (rather than discussion forum). Sort of curating stuff out of forums to bring to the masses. For example, I added the PiBeacon presence sensor....but it did take a bit of tinkering to get it working (and working well). I am not a coder so it was not easy for me. But that feature makes a huge improvement in my previous set up. Condensing the forums on that into a feature presentation on the use cases, features and functions could bring a lot more people. Anyway, just my two cents.

[jay (support)]

I decided to give Indigo a chance after they decided to move to a subscription model in the hope that things would improve here. After almost a year, I see absolutely no indication of faster development pace or richer features.

[SNIP]

My question to this forum is if you have any experience with Home Assistant versus Indigo, and if you see any reason at all not to make the switch.

@DaveL17 addressed the first statement very well - this post really illustrates how we've done so far and where we'd like to go.

For the last question, I think other posters have done a good job: consistency, stability and support are things that you are guaranteed when you purchase Indigo. They are much more hit-or-miss with open source. If those things are less important to you, then an open source solution might very well be the better way to go, that's something you'll have to decide.

While I don't tinker often, I do occasionally look for new gadgets that I can integrate (or new integrations for existing gadgets. This forum helps with that, but I'd love to see more on the 'art of the possible'. A forum is great for deep dives on that stuff, but I think this site could benefit from showcasing certain features or set-ups in more blog-style form (rather than discussion forum). Sort of curating stuff out of forums to bring to the masses. For example, I added the PiBeacon presence sensor....but it did take a bit of tinkering to get it working (and working well). I am not a coder so it was not easy for me. But that feature makes a huge improvement in my previous set up. Condensing the forums on that into a feature presentation on the use cases, features and functions could bring a lot more people. Anyway, just my two cents.

We actually agree. We redesigned the Compatible Devices app on the website to help (somewhat) with this issue by integrating devices that plugins in the store support. That should more fully illustrate the kinds of things that Indigo can integrate.

But we realize that there is also a place for long format write-ups as well. The problem really is that we (Matt and I) often don't use these solutions, so trying to write a blog post or a use-case wouldn't be practical for either of us. What would be very helpful for our user community that aren't super technical would be to have them contribute this sort of content to the community. I bet we have some great writers out there that could write up some nice "guides" to accomplishing some tasks. We opened up the Wiki to other users hoping to get people involved in writing up things like that but have had virtually no uptake.

So I'll throw this out there again: if you developed a solution and would like to write it up for public consumption, contact us (support AT indigodomo DOT com) and we'll work with you to get it up somewhere. We have the wiki and the blogs (we would welcome guest blogs like this), either of which could easily handle a nice how-to solution guide with images. We'll figure out how to get it into the right place - we just need the content.

Thing is - if you want to experiment, Indigo will do pretty much anything Home Assistant will do. You can use the awesome Greensky MQTT plugin to talk to almost anything, you can even communicate back-and-forth with Home Assistant if you choose. Like the Sonoff switches and Tasmota firmware? They work just fine in indigo with MQTT, I have about 11 of them around the house. Also, you say you're not into coding, well get into it because you will be doing A LOT with Home Assistant, either in Python (with AppDaemon), or in YAML (where's the vomit emoji??). You said you don't like paying a yearly fee? Well - if you plan on using Home Assistant with Amazon Echo, or accessing it remotely and want to use the HA cloud service to do so, you're going to pay $5/month which is roughly the same as Indigo's yearly fee. You don't HAVE to use the cloud service, but if not you're back to config and coding... I feel like I can speak to this because I do in fact run Home Assistant (HASSIO in a Docker container on an Ubuntu VM). There are a few things that it supports that Indigo doesn't and the Python libraries needed are in Python 3 so natively writing a plugin isn't possible with Python 2.7 in Indigo - BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!! I can connect Home Assistant to Indigo (using MQTT) and expose those Python 3.x devices in Indigo and control them just as if they're native to Indigo! If HA dies and I can't see those devices until I restart HA (it WILL happen, HA is not stable, at least not like Indigo).

As others have said, good luck and we all wish you the best if you decide to leave, but don't think that you're hampered by Indigo compared to the "openness" of something like Home Assistant.

If there is something specific you want help with in Indigo, post it. There are a lot of experimenters and somebody is bound to get you going in the right direction!

All the best!
Terry

On a slight side note but kinda relevant topic.. have you guys (Matt and Jay) considered rebranding it from being called a subscription model to say a maintenance plan? I read comment after comment about it and I wonder if renaming it may settle folk down a bit?


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[jay (support)]

On a slight side note but kinda relevant topic.. have you guys (Matt and Jay) considered rebranding it from being called a subscription model to say a maintenance plan? I read comment after comment about it and I wonder if renaming it may settle folk down a bit?

I don't want to make it seem like we're trying to hide the fact that it is a subscription. And of course it's more than a maintenance plan since it also includes the reflector (and probably other stuff in the future). We wanted it to sound more inclusive than just maintenance (we talked about calling it maintenance but that didn't feel like a complete description).

And it would take a non-trivial amount of work to change the branding...

You consider taking out the garbage non trivial


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You consider taking out the garbage non trivial


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Now that's funny!

Everything I say is funny. Well.. people laugh.. at me mostly.


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[jay (support)]

Well.. people laugh.. at me mostly.

+1.

I’d pay the annual subscription fee just for the tech support and for access to the playful banter.

I would disagree with the reasons provided however, and think the argument over feature releases is not the most important, rather stability is - and they are mutually exclusion I believe.

This. I've said this before, but I think we are unfortunately in the mobile-app-centric age... and the speed of mobile development is, generally speaking, a faster lane because people expect many updates and the life of the app, on average, is much, much shorter than on the desktop (using that term generically). Only a handful of mobile apps have survived more than a few years. They iterate and break sh!t and, well, it is usually not a super critical thing despite the outcry from users. Then they fade away.

On the other hand, the desktop and HA software in particular MUST be stable. Sure, the "slow" release cycle will irk some people and lose some customers; and to each his own, if that is import to you then who are we as a community to judge that. BUT, look how many former Vera and SmartThings customers are here for the sole reason that their updates freaking breaking everything.