The Homey Pro (Early 2023) is a Smart Home hub with support of a lot of different connectivity standards. It supports WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, 433 MHz, Infrared, Thread and Matter. This makes it possible to connect almost all your Smart Home devices with the Homey Pro and create automations with all your devices in one place. The Homey app also offers advanced automations, called Flows. This makes the Homey Pro suitable for people with a lot of different Smart Home devices who want to control and automate these all in one place. It also reduces the need for multiple hubs, given the support for basically all connectivity standards used in the Smart Home industry.
Smart Home hub
The Homey Pro is the central hub for your Smart Home. By connecting all your devices with the Honey Pro, they become visible in the Homey app. From there, you have the possibility to create automations based on all added Smart Home devices. Given the support for many different connectivity protocols, separate hubs are no longer needed. Although the Homey Pro does cost a lot more than your average Smart Home hub, it does replace basically every future hub you would need to buy. With the Flows (automations), you have a lot of control over the behaviour of your Smart Home devices. Compared to Google Home or Apple HomeKit, these Flows are much more advanced, allowing more precise control over your Smart Home.
Flows
As we mentioned before, automations in the Homey app are called Flows. Flows are roughly based on the If This Than That (IFTTT) principle. This means an action is performed when one or more conditions hold. These conditions could be the status of a Smart Home device, such as movement registered by a motion sensor, a door opening or a light turning on. Conditions can also contain specific times, locations or the status of another Flow. It’s e.g. possible to start a Flow as soon as you leave the house, but also when another Flow starts. This allows you to combine multiple Flows for more advanced automation. In the images below, you can find an example of two simple Flows, which are triggered as soon as the conditions hold.
Homey Pro, Homey Bridge & Homey Premium
Homey offers a few different solutions for Smart Home users. The most complete and advances one is the Homey Pro hub. This hub is able to connect most of your Smart Home devices and also contains the hardware to process and manage all your devices and automations. Homey also offers the Homey Bridge. This bridge supports Zigbee, Z-wave, Bluetooth, Infrared and 433 MHz to connect your Smart Home devices. It uses Homey Premium, a cloud service, for managing your devices and automation. You can add up to 5 devices for free, you need a subscription for 2.99 a month is you want to connect more devices. The main difference with the more expensive Homey Pro is the lack of local control and support for Matter and Thread. Also not all integrations and Flows are supported on the Homey Bridge.
