UpaSmartHome
UpaSmartHome vs Homey: Raspberry Pi DIY Hub or a Ready-Made Smart Home Hub?
Homey is a polished all-in-one hub with many radios and brand apps; UpaSmartHome is a low-cost Raspberry Pi setup focused on heating, relays and alarm sensors. Here is how to choose.
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Homey and UpaSmartHome both promise a smart home that runs at home instead of in someone else's cloud. They get there in very different ways: Homey is a finished consumer product with its own hardware, UpaSmartHome is software for a Raspberry Pi with a phone app built around heating and relays.
A typical example
Take a house with a gas boiler, five rooms, an underfloor heating pump, a garage door and a washing machine in the basement. With UpaSmartHome you put a Zigbee temperature sensor in each room, wire the boiler, pump and garage door to relay channels, and add a water leak sensor next to the washing machine. Each room then keeps its own target temperature, the garage door opens from the app or by voice, and a leak sends a push alert. With Homey you can build the same house, but you assemble the heating logic yourself from Flows, and you start from a more expensive hub.
Side by side
| UpaSmartHome | Homey | |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee USB stick, or our 399€ starter kit | Homey Pro hub, or the cheaper Homey Bridge with Homey Cloud |
| Radios | Zigbee (Zigbee2MQTT), Wi-Fi Tasmota relays, Pi relay boards | Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, 433 MHz, infrared, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (Homey Pro) |
| Heating | Built in: a room sensor and a relay with the same name work as a thermostat; circulation pump and time schedules included | Possible with Flows and thermostat apps you set up |
| Automations | Purpose-built: thermostats, schedules, pulse relays, garden watering zones | Flows and Advanced Flows - very flexible, for any device |
| Security sensors | Door/window, motion, water leak, vibration with instant push alerts | Supported through Flows and notifications |
| Voice | Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Alexa via Matter, Alexa skill | Google, Alexa, Siri shortcuts and Matter |
| Cost | Free app and local mode; optional cloud 50€/year for remote access and push alerts | Paid hub; Homey Cloud is free for a few devices, with a subscription beyond that |
| Openness | Open REST and WebSocket API, self-hosting supported | Web API and an app SDK for developers |
Where Homey is better
If your home mixes many brands and radio standards - Z-Wave locks, 433 MHz blinds, infrared TVs, Zigbee bulbs - Homey Pro talks to all of them from one box, with no Raspberry Pi or USB sticks to set up. Its Flow editor is easy to learn, and the app store covers a long list of brands.
Where UpaSmartHome is better
For heating, relays and alarm sensors it costs much less and needs almost no setup: there are no Flows to build, because multi-room heating, boiler and pump control, schedules and leak alerts are what the app is made for. It runs on a Raspberry Pi you may already own, works fully without the cloud, and has an open API if you want to build on top of it.
Bottom line
Choose Homey if you want one polished hub for every brand and radio in the house. Choose UpaSmartHome if heating and relays are the main job and you want it running for the price of a Raspberry Pi and a few Zigbee sensors - see products and prices, or compare with Home Assistant.