Fibaro Home Center 3

I bought this to upgrade my Vera Edge, which was no longer getting updates. I had 29 devices to transfer across, but this was fairly straightforward. Compared with the Vera, the Home Center is much more capable and user friendly, and was straightforward to set up. Technical support from Vesternet was superb as always.

Used to have an entry level competitor controller. It is day and night difference. The HC 3 is significantly more responsive and easy to use

Fibaro HC3 Review Suitable for the beginner or the commercial expert. I have just replaced my seven year old Vera Edge z-wave hub with a Fibaro Home Center 3, having also tried for a week to move to a Hubitat Elevation C-8. The Vera had served me reasonably well, supporting door switches that allowed me to be emailed when they opened, a sensor wired into my existing door bell, flood sensors, 3in1 sensors, two electric Somfy blinds and half a dozen plug adapters for lights, chargers and the Christmas tree. But, its app wasn’t very rich, notifications were limited and whilst the logic setup was GUI driven, it was limited. I wanted a ‘better’ app with dashboard, a better windows dash, better GUI logic builder, more flexible notifications. I did not want to be messing around with code for drivers, nor to be reliant on others in the community for these. My recent week long experience with the Hubitat involved too much hacking about to find / install community written drivers for my Fibaro door switches and my Fibaro roller shutter switch for the blinds. Its rule builder was good but I found the dashboard to be uninspiring. The alerting via the app was decent but I would have needed to hack about to get email support on top of the push alerts. I therefore moved on to the HC3. It is twice the price of other hubs but I have found it four times easier and more fun than the others so if you can afford it… 2/3 of my devices are Fibaro, undoubtedly it is good to be within one family. The others, plug modules and sirens did all include easily and work fine. I like: Logic builder is GUI driven and easy. But, I can see the LUA script if I wish to. Alerting is a simple matter of ticking a box and includes a push to ipad and phone as well as email. Icons are easily changed and there are plenty of alternatives on the forums. Icons include more than on/off status within them, eg battery life, last activation. I can change device parameters via the GUI. Useful when I don’t always fully understand what I’m doing when following instructions from the forums. I have had no reliability issues in my first few weeks. I like the idea of the hub supporting Zigbee and z-wave. Support for zigbee may be weaker but I haven’t had to cross that bridge and will continue to focus on z-wave if I can. Vesternet: Over seven years, I have bought all of my kit from Vesternet and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them. They have given good advice and been responsive. Prices have been competitive but even if they were a few pounds out, I’d want to maintain the relationship.

Wow! Stark contrast in quality and performance compared to one other that I do have. Solid. Think drag and drop lego blocks for your rules (or what kids learn - Scratch). I also get to learn the Lua language for more complex rules. Great so far and I hope it stays this way!

awesome gateway

FIBARO Controller is a nice product but the segment of wireless home automation systems is changing very rapidly, and focused manufacturers have to be right there with products meeting those standards, which unfortunately is not the case with FIBARO. Though it is the strongest manufacturer for Z-Wave devices, none of them is with the latest Gen7 Z-wave version. Yet now the era is of Z-Wave LR. Every new Z-Wave generation has a lot of advantages to it, so then why still live in Gen5. The world is changing at a faster speed with GUI's having simplicity for the use to easily create flows, scenes, triggers, events, and any combination with a drag and drop, while Fibaro is yet keeping it's boxes locked for the installer dependency and management via installer app is only possible by certified installers. They can communicate only to Z-Wave, while several other controllers now support all the wireless devices - Zigbee, wireless, Bluetooth, rf this gives you much bigger flexibility to bring in all your devices into one platform.

I have now, more or less, completed my second installation of an HC3 having had serious and increasing troubles with a well known alternative hub which is now no longer supported by its manufacturer. The Home Center 3 is in a league of its own by comparison, though it partly achieves this by having a full range of devices manufactured in the same stable. The facilities and reporting systems I find impressive, though it would be nice to have access to a central library of model scenes and icons. I considered using the HC3 Lite but had to stay with the HC3 because of capacity and availability of Lua programming. Support from Vesternet is good, and that from Fibaro very good though sometimes difficult to get speedy replies. Certainly the one to go for if you're starting out

This is exactly what I was looking for. A controller that executes a command without hesitation, and very stable. Pairing all the module can take a while, but at the end this replacement was needed.

I have had HC3 for about two years now. I was one of the first to buy it I guess, and I had hoped that Fibaro would work to make the product more mature. I must say that I am disappointed on this point. The Fibaro team gives the impression that development has been deprioritized since they have been acquired by Nice group. I particularly dislike the iPhone app. It is takes ages to open, is messy, and doesn’t allow adding Philips Hue lights as favorites. There is no iPad app. I am also disappointed that there still no support for Zigbee. Device compatibility is worse than my old Vera Edge. On the positive side, the system is fast (even with more than 200 devices) and the Fibaro team has always been fast in providing support.

Very good experience migrating HC2 to HC3. No major problems after following instructions from Fibaro. HC3 is very stable so far and over all an improvement on the older Fibaro system.

Fast shipping. everything arrived as it should. thank you !

I’ve been using Vera for years and the improvement with this controller is night and day, no more manual polling when devices stop responding and hours of looking through forums for workarounds. I would agree with other reviews that the Fibaro support is, well, pants ! But for me 99% of devices have just worked and not missed a beat. I hope the bugs and features that are built in but not available yet are soon sorted but I love my new controller.

Love the home center 3

Pros The new HC3 is a big improvement on my HCLite in terms of speed and what it can do, I cannot comment if it a step up from an HC2. The new box looks very good. Cons The new web interface is good but could be improved, certain tasks need more clicks than the old interface, certainly on a large monitor there is a lot of unused space which could be utilised to allow direct access between say "Devices" list and "Scenes" list. There also seems to be 2 versions of the "Devices "list, I don’t understand why. The software is riddled with bugs, in my short time I have identified 4 items which don't work correctly e.g. "Date range" which spans over 2 calendar years does not work, RGBW colour selector not working well, filtering by room in "History" not working correctly and initially using "Device Groups" in scenes did not work although this is now fixed with the last software upgrade. Fibaro support is atrocious, when you submit a support ticket you get an automated reply email stating “Technical support engineer will get in touch with you soon. (Usually within 24 hours)” this is a joke, more like 3-4 weeks and generally they don’t respond at all unless you telephone them. Tickets are closed without being resolved with as message such as “We're aware of this issue and we've already forwarded it to our engineers, who are currently working on resolving it as soon as possible. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience it caused but I have to ask you for a little more patience” After getting on for a year from launch there is still no time frame for enabling the RF / Zigbee / WiFi The HC3 is still "work in progress"

This hub does what it is meant to do - no messing about. I’ve tried Smartthings and Hubitat and to be honest while the support is much better and the communities are great for those devices, their hubs are somewhat lacking when compared to Fibaro. The Fibaro community isn’t great and some want you to pay them for their help (Yorkshire Automation as an example) but to be honest, you can work all that you need to do for yourself if you put in the effort. It is worth the effort in the end. 5 star product and works as it should. Love it. Love Vesternet service also. Thank you guys. A+++++++++++