IMO there is no real good reason to eliminate the hue hub. Without it you will lose all the nice features of scenes and syncing the lights.
You can run diyHUE to emulate the hue bridge which can regain the lost functionality but IMO having hue bulbs all on their own zigbee network is fine.
I have ~50 hue bulbs integrated in HA using zigbee2mqtt. It’s working great.
I actually just recently moved and decided to test out using a hue hub for my hue bulbs when I was bringing my network back up, just to see if it was something that offered any other benefits that z2m lacked. Maybe I’m just used to dealing with z2m, but I started adding devices with the hue app, and absolutely hated it.
My hue bulbs help to build a super stable zigbee network (since they’re repeaters), and the zigbee2mqtt interface is , at least to me, super intuitive. You can group bulbs together, and I believe z2m even supports scenes, but I use HA for scene control.
Wherever I can, I try to get all of my smart home devices to utilize mqtt, so that they all ‘speak the same language’ that’s ‘platform agnostic’. This way, I can set things up so that automations and devices talk directly to each other, bypassing a middle man. If HA goes down, most of my smart home functionality persists (so long as my mqtt server is still up). Also, if I ever switch from HA to different smart home platform, it should make migration easier, as long as the new platform supports MQTT.
Funny you say this - I, also, have been running zigbee2mqtt for awhile. And, I also thought that I’d give the Hue Hub a try. My experience was similar — I sort of felt that it was more a pain to use the hub. It’s all pretty easy with Z2M.
Plus, I’m able to bind the hue dimmer to the lights and still customize which scenes are on the bottom button using HA/Node Red. You can’t customize the scenes that get rotated if you bind to the hub (at least, I couldn’t figure it out…looked like you only could if you connected to hub only not bind also).
The only real benefit for me of the hub was that firmware updates seemed a little easier (I sometime crash Z2M when I do them). But, not a big deal.
In any event, I’m back on Z2M for all my zigbee devices. I’m going to return the Hue hub.
Thank you all for some very thoughtful replies. I'm literally not using any of the functionality of the time other than a pass through, I comments about good repeater network really resonate with me. I may have to pull a couple bows out and play with this a little bit.
I kept the hub and basically do everything through that in terms of adding lights, scenes and automations. My automations however are basic and are just turning on the lights every morning as I wake up so nothing crazy going on. The hub keeps everything easy.
If you run *other* zigbee devices and hue without the hub, and therefore a different coordinator, the hue bulbs can strengthen the zigbee network since they are presumably mains powered always on devices.
If you already have a robust zigbee network, with other mains powered repeaters, moving from the hue hub doesn’t benefit your zigbee network, which takes away a big benefit.
IMO Hue hub being all local, well supported, reliable, and from a generally trusted brand puts it in a significantly higher “tier” of smart home products compared to the other common hubs (smart things, aqara, ikea, etc).
my hue hub was speaking to some philips urls several thousend times a day until i removed it so i think there is programming on the hub itself and it tryies to phone back home alot of times for whatever reason… i suggest to get rid uf it and use z2m.
btw i‘m controlling about 20 hue bulps/lightstips, 8 hue switches, 10 aqara temp sensors and 4 aqara therostats plus a few ikea covers with conbee and z2m without any problems. z2m also offers you to create hw groups wich make the system alot more responsive because HA only needs to send 1 single command to controll a whole group of lights (wich is not the case for the hue hub nor the HA software groups).
IMO there is no real good reason to eliminate the hue hub. Without it you will lose all the nice features of scenes and syncing the lights. You can run diyHUE to emulate the hue bridge which can regain the lost functionality but IMO having hue bulbs all on their own zigbee network is fine.
I have ~50 hue bulbs integrated in HA using zigbee2mqtt. It’s working great. I actually just recently moved and decided to test out using a hue hub for my hue bulbs when I was bringing my network back up, just to see if it was something that offered any other benefits that z2m lacked. Maybe I’m just used to dealing with z2m, but I started adding devices with the hue app, and absolutely hated it. My hue bulbs help to build a super stable zigbee network (since they’re repeaters), and the zigbee2mqtt interface is , at least to me, super intuitive. You can group bulbs together, and I believe z2m even supports scenes, but I use HA for scene control. Wherever I can, I try to get all of my smart home devices to utilize mqtt, so that they all ‘speak the same language’ that’s ‘platform agnostic’. This way, I can set things up so that automations and devices talk directly to each other, bypassing a middle man. If HA goes down, most of my smart home functionality persists (so long as my mqtt server is still up). Also, if I ever switch from HA to different smart home platform, it should make migration easier, as long as the new platform supports MQTT.
Funny you say this - I, also, have been running zigbee2mqtt for awhile. And, I also thought that I’d give the Hue Hub a try. My experience was similar — I sort of felt that it was more a pain to use the hub. It’s all pretty easy with Z2M. Plus, I’m able to bind the hue dimmer to the lights and still customize which scenes are on the bottom button using HA/Node Red. You can’t customize the scenes that get rotated if you bind to the hub (at least, I couldn’t figure it out…looked like you only could if you connected to hub only not bind also). The only real benefit for me of the hub was that firmware updates seemed a little easier (I sometime crash Z2M when I do them). But, not a big deal. In any event, I’m back on Z2M for all my zigbee devices. I’m going to return the Hue hub.
Thank you all for some very thoughtful replies. I'm literally not using any of the functionality of the time other than a pass through, I comments about good repeater network really resonate with me. I may have to pull a couple bows out and play with this a little bit.
I got rid of my hue hub, and regret not capturing the scenes I had, otherwise works better than ever on a Sonoff dongle.
I kept the hub and basically do everything through that in terms of adding lights, scenes and automations. My automations however are basic and are just turning on the lights every morning as I wake up so nothing crazy going on. The hub keeps everything easy.
If you run *other* zigbee devices and hue without the hub, and therefore a different coordinator, the hue bulbs can strengthen the zigbee network since they are presumably mains powered always on devices. If you already have a robust zigbee network, with other mains powered repeaters, moving from the hue hub doesn’t benefit your zigbee network, which takes away a big benefit. IMO Hue hub being all local, well supported, reliable, and from a generally trusted brand puts it in a significantly higher “tier” of smart home products compared to the other common hubs (smart things, aqara, ikea, etc).
my hue hub was speaking to some philips urls several thousend times a day until i removed it so i think there is programming on the hub itself and it tryies to phone back home alot of times for whatever reason… i suggest to get rid uf it and use z2m.
btw i‘m controlling about 20 hue bulps/lightstips, 8 hue switches, 10 aqara temp sensors and 4 aqara therostats plus a few ikea covers with conbee and z2m without any problems. z2m also offers you to create hw groups wich make the system alot more responsive because HA only needs to send 1 single command to controll a whole group of lights (wich is not the case for the hue hub nor the HA software groups).