Tested: Homey Bridge | High expectations, minimal efficiency

The Homey Bridge concentrator is a dream. Control all its home automation devices from different manufacturers on a single interface, replace all its hubs by just one for less than $100 is a tempting offer. But in our case, it was of little use.

WE love

Unless you can find everything from a single manufacturer, most home automation enthusiasts must learn to deal with several applications, or even install several hubs on their router. This is our case, with around 40 light bulbs, sockets, switches, thermostats, speakers, doorbells and other smart devices, 3 hubs and 16 different manufacturers.

Hard, the life of techno critic and incorrigible amateur of connected gadgets.

Here is the Homey Bridge, “the last hub for the smart home you’ll ever need,” promises the manufacturer, Athom BV, headquartered in the Netherlands. Compatible “with a thousand manufacturers”, this hub uses almost all the wireless protocols that abound in a house, from WiFi to Zigbee via Bluetooth, infrared, Z-Wave and even the 433 MHz, sometimes used by older devices.

Everything starts very well with the installation of this big hard plastic washer, which you don’t need to plug in near the router since it relies on wireless. We download the application Homey from the App Store or the Google Play Store, we create an account and our Homey Bridge is immediately detected.

Small coquetry, the puck has at its base a rotating ring of multicolored light, which can be deactivated in the parameters.

It’s in the second tab of the app Homey that we can add our home automation devices, from a search menu. We type the “brand name” and, if it is compatible, we are prompted to enter the connection information with this manufacturer.

Let’s be positive and present what worked in this first part. A LIFX bulb, a TP-Link switch and a Roomba vacuum cleaner were able to be fully supported by the Homey Bridge, with all their usual functions offered. Our Sonos devices have also been added, with minimal controls for volume, stopping, or forwarding or rewinding songs.

The other interesting function is in the “Flow” tab. In summary, home automation devices can be associated with hundreds of triggers. For example, the sunrise or your presence turns on a light bulb, plays music or opens a blind. The possibilities are virtually limitless and the ones we tried worked well.

Last function, you can get the power consumption of the devices turned on and monitored by the Homey Bridge.

To connect more than five devices, a subscription to Homey Premium is required, which costs $3.99 per month, which is very reasonable. You are entitled to three months free with the purchase.

We love less

For four compatible manufacturers, we ran into brands that weren’t compatible exactly nine times. That’s bad news: three of them, Sinopé, Cync and Insteon, are our favorites and account for two-thirds of our home automation devices.

Three other brands, WiZ, Nest and LG, were added but provided absolutely no control. Seeing a Nest Cam appear with the message “No commands available” is useless.

Minimal Sonos speaker control is good, but we’re a long way from what the app allows His bone.

One buys ?

We cannot exclude that some home automation enthusiasts come across brands that are 100% compatible with the Homey Bridge. Philips Hue, Sonos and Fibaro, in particular, are specifically mentioned on the Homey site.

But in our experience, this purchase is simply not worth it. Devices from our four compatible manufacturers don’t even need a hub. All of our devices, without exception, are recognized by the Google Assistant and Alexa and can be controlled by voice or from mobile apps. Here we have two examples of platforms much more universal than the Homey Bridge.