Homey Pro review: A very particular set of home automation skills

I know there are people who will want to buy the Homey Pro. I’ve seen them on social media and in various home automation forums, and I’ve even noticed them in the comments on this website. For this type of person, the Homey Pro might serve as a specialized, locally focused smart home hub, one that’s well worth the cost. But you should be really, truly certain that you’re that person before you take a $400 leap with it.

Homey Pro is a smart home hub pitched primarily at someone who wants to keep things local as much as possible, forgoing phone apps, speakers, and cloud connections. That means using the Homey Pro to boost a primarily Zigbee or Z-Wave network, while also looping in local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even infrared remotes. It’s for someone willing to pay $400 for a device that offers robust local or cloud backups, professional design, advanced automation, and even a custom scripting language, along with access to some “experiments” and still-in-progress tech like Matter and Thread. It’s for someone who might want to add a select cloud service or two to their home, but not because they have no other option.

But this somebody has also, somehow, not already invested in Home Assistant, Hubitat, or HomeBridge, which are more open to both add-on hardware (like new capabilities added on by USB stick or GPIO pins) and deep tinkering. It’s someone who is willing to check that every device they want to control will work with Homey. While the device offers a pretty sizable range of apps and integrations, it’s far from the near-universal nature of major open-source projects or even the big smart home platforms. And you have to do a little checking further, still, to ensure that individual products are supported, not just the brand.

While testing the Homey Pro, I grew to appreciate the benefits of a locally controlled, self-automated smart home, with a smartly designed interface on top. If you’re already a convert to Zigbee or Z-Wave (or 433 MHz, or 868 MHz, or infrared), your other hardware works with Homey, and you have no interest in making Alexa, Google Home, HomeKit, or a DIY system the center of your home, then the Homey Pro looks like a great way to tie it all together. It’s just a very particular ball of twine, and it’s not cheap.

Welcome to my home, rainbow cylinder

The Homey Pro is a thoroughly inoffensive black, shiny, cylindrical thing, powered by USB-C and connecting by Wi-Fi or (via pass-through dongle) Ethernet. The default “Spectrum” setting pulses the colors of the rainbow around its LED bottom. It looks nice, and I saw no reason to stop it.

After plugging it in and loading its iPhone app, the Homey told me it needed software updates. There was a “Timeout after 30,0000, trying to recover” error, followed by an “Unable to find Homey Pro,” and then, the next time I loaded the app, “Homey Pro is ready for action.” This kind of thing happened more than once, with the app or web interface reporting an issue, only for me to find out later that a device was actually added or modified just fine.

The Smart Home Scene blog did a teardown and chip ID on the Homey Pro for those working at that level of smart home engagement. The short version is that it’s a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 paired with a bunch of the latest communication chips, giving the Homey Pro all the radios and a balance of computing power and energy efficiency.

Once it was working, it was time to add devices. Homey Pro is very good at adding Zigbee and Z-Wave devices, at least frequency-wise; I had no trouble getting the Homey Pro to see, “interview,” and configure a few test devices that Homey provided, along with other gear I had handy (Aqara light/motion sensors, Samsung SmartThings buttons, and a few IKEA pieces).

Homey Pro’s interface for adding devices is decent, if a bit off-putting. It’s not Homey’s fault that Aqara, Sonoff, and other mainstays offer multiple versions of many similar devices. But asking users to guess which of a half-dozen versions of a device they should try to pair and providing only lightly differentiated line drawings doesn’t make for a great onboarding experience.

A Homey representative told me that Homey will still pair a device even if you pick the wrong one, but the individual pairing instructions may not be precise. This proved true, and after a little button-holding or battery-removing, I got everything I needed into the Homey system.

As for your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-based devices, compatibility is mixed. Without doing anything, the Homey Pro saw Chromecast and Sonos devices in my house and noted that Spotify was floating about, too. By connecting through official apps, I could get all my Phillips Hue bulbs, most of my SwitchBot gear, and one of two Samsung appliances. Everything else in my home that could be added to Homey ranged in success from “kind of” to “perhaps.”