What Is a Smart Home Hub and When Do You Need One?

A smart home hub, or a smart home controller, is the heart of your smart home. It unifies the different devices in your home into a single system, making them work together. It also provides a single app to control your entire home.

In the smart home world, many smart devices are from various brands and manufacturers. One company might excel at producing thermostats, another at making switches, and a third at offering the best lights or LED strips. For example, you could have a smart TV from LG, a speaker from Sonos, lightbulbs from Philips Hue, and a thermostat from Tado.

Bringing all devices from different brands under one umbrella is challenging, but it is precisely where Homey shines.

What Is a Smart Home Hub?

In a modern smart home, various wireless technologies power different devices. In addition to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, you have Infrared, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, and protocols on the 433 MHz band. All these devices can't talk to each other natively because they connect using different technologies.

A smart home hub, like Homey Pro, allows all your smart devices to communicate seamlessly. No matter the communication technology they use, Homey Pro speaks all the required “languages,” acting as a translator between devices with different connectivity protocols.

As a result, a universal hub like Homey Pro no longer limits you to brands and their communication protocols. Homey gives you the freedom to choose any smart home device that fits your needs.

Hub Usability

You don’t want to take a crash course in different smart home technologies to get everything to work. And you certainly don’t want to brush up your programming skills to turn on the lights. That’s why a smart home hub needs to be universal and easy to use.

Everyone wants to create something different in their smart home, but they also want an easy-to-use system to achieve that. That’s why we’ve made Homey.

Homey Pro is a smart home hub that connects with practically every smart device. It’s designed to be versatile but easy to use so that you and anybody else can get the smart home of their dreams. You focus on the fun things. Homey will take care of the rest.

The best part? You don’t need fancy wiring, complicated computer programs, or installations. Just your Homey and the Homey smartphone app. Your whole home can literally fit in your hand.

Home Automation with a Smart Home Hub

Straightforward smart home control is one thing, but smart home automation is the endgame: creating a home that automatically does what you want it to do. The less you need to grab your phone to control devices, the better. This is where smart home hubs play a critical role, and Homey excels at it.

Homey allows you to automate devices from different manufacturers using a variety of communication protocols without any compatibility challenges. Whether your devices use Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, or other technologies, Homey works with them all.

For example, you can use a Fibaro button to turn on your Philips Hue LED strip or an IKEA motion sensor to activate your Dyson tower fan. Homey is brand-agnostic and can talk to more than 50,000 smart home devices. 

Homey Flows drives automation in Homey, which lets you create simple “if this, then that” rules to link devices with simple actions. Homey offers Advanced Flows for more advanced setups, which provide greater flexibility with multiple conditions, triggers, and actions. Advanced Flows allows you to design complex automation tailored to your needs. It’s a limitless canvas for smart home automation creativity.

Future-Proofing Your Smart Home with Homey

As the smart home landscape rapidly evolves, future-proofing your setup is essential to ensure long-term compatibility with new devices and technologies. Homey Pro adapts to these changes, offering support for 8 communication protocols out of the box, including Matter.

This flexibility means that as new devices hit the market, your Homey hub will be able to support them, allowing you to continually expand and upgrade your smart home without needing to replace the hub. With over 50,000 devices already supported, Homey’s commitment to multi-protocol functionality ensures that you're not locked into any single brand or ecosystem.

Additionally, Homey provides software updates that keep your smart home up-to-date with the latest advancements in automation and device integration. The hub’s robust platform is built to evolve, with features like Advanced Flows giving users the ability to create increasingly complex automation as they grow more comfortable with smart home technology. Homey’s upcoming Dashboards feature is an aesthetic and functional addition, giving users a visually engaging way to monitor and control their devices in real-time.

As the smart home industry shifts toward more unified and standardized protocols like Matter, Homey’s support for multiple technologies and its adaptability guarantee that your smart home remains efficient, functional, and cutting-edge well into the future.

Get Started

If you’re looking to create a real smart home, it’s wise to start with the world’s best smart home hub. That means a potent, versatile, and friendly smart home hub. Therefore, we’ve designed Homey Pro to be exactly that, so we welcome you to discover Homey.