Do You Need a Smart-Home Hub?

For most people who are interested in setting up smart devices in their home, a dedicated smart-home hub is likely unnecessary. Smart-home hubs act like a go-between for other smart devices—lights, locks, sensors, thermostats. Until recently they were an essential component for controlling a smart home but that’s no longer the case. Digital assistants found in popular smart speakers, like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, are able to perform many of the same tasks as a hub but with far less fuss.

That’s not to say smart hubs aren’t useful for some people. Tinkerers, hobbyists, and power users with the savvy to plan and configure a comprehensive connected home system will find that a hub can add sophisticated capabilities that aren’t possible otherwise (see the If you still think you want a hub section).

Why smart home can be confusing

At the most basic level, smart (or connected, or Internet of Things) devices are able to interact with other devices and can be controlled remotely. Most consumer-level smart devices rely on a wireless radio signal to link up, both to each other and also with whatever device you use to control them (usually a smartphone). Several wireless systems allow devices to communicate with each other, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ClearConnect, Insteon, Z-Wave, and Zigbee, among others, but they’re not compatible with each other. Also, each standard has strengths and weaknesses, such as range, speed, or power consumption.

In addition to relying on a wireless communication method, many smart devices also integrate with different platforms, like Alexa, Google Assistant, and HomeKit, which may be exclusive or proprietary. In functional terms, the result is that some smart devices may work exclusively with one flavor of smart-home platform, while others may be compatible with a few. If you were to mosey down the smart-home aisle of a home or electronics store picking up products at random, you would find a good many simply aren’t directly compatible with each other. When buying, you need to figure out what works with what.

Considering all of the variables, you’ll quickly discover how building a smart-home system can get tricky fast. That’s one reason why smart hubs seem attractive: they consolidate compatibility as well as control among a lot of devices.

How smart hubs work

A smart hub is essentially a minicomputer tricked out with a bunch of wireless radio transmitters and receivers, all tucked into a tidy box. It connects to your home’s network and can act like a go-between, receiving and sending communications back and forth to your other smart devices using whichever of its various wireless radios as needed. And because it’s connected to your home Internet network, it allows you to send commands using your smartphone, whether you’re at home or away, which is one of the great benefits of smart-home technology.

Most hubs have their own dedicated smartphone app that lets you organize and arrange your devices as you like: by room, floor, or type. The apps typically have a dashboard that allows for direct control of devices, similar to the buttons of a TV remote—push an icon to turn on a light bulb, another to lock your door, another brings up a slider to adjust the temperature on your thermostat.

On a more sophisticated level, hubs also allow you to configure groups of simultaneous controls, what are variously called modes, scenes, or routines, which affect multiple devices at once. This is where the smart stuff really figures in. Modes refer to big-picture statuses, such as home, away, on vacation, or sleeping. You can have devices turn on or off or adjust in a precise way for each of the modes you create. And with a hub you can have those modes trigger automatically using sensors or the location of your phone, or by pushing a button. Similarly, scenes are custom-crafted setups for specific situations. You could create a “Good Morning” scene that tells your kitchen lights to come on and turn red, your smart speaker to play the first half of Van Halen’s seminal 1984, the heat to kick on to 72 and all of the window shades to roll up. Routines are more like scheduled or automated scenes: say, when you arrive home the alarm system shuts off, the garage door opens, the front door unlocks, the living room lights come on, and the second half of Van Halen’s seminal 1984 plays in the study.

Depending on the hub, the array of devices in your arsenal, and the technical chops of the person setting it all up, a fair amount of wizardry is possible. But that’s not the realistic case for many people—hubs require troubleshooting, they fail sometimes or can require customizing code, and the learning curve gets steeper the more you want to do.

What you can do without a hub

Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald

Popular smart devices are becoming more widely compatible with each other, even if they don’t communicate over the same wireless standard. Partner programs like Works with Nest and Friends of Hue allow you to link together products from different brands, with much of the technical heavy lifting done in the cloud. The result is that you no longer have to fret over the compatibility of wireless systems like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Cloud-based platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, and IFTTT also allow Internet-connected devices to work together in an essentially seamless way. As a result, you can now connect more device types and have them work together without needing hand-holding from a hub. This is the case for a few reasons.

Many devices use their Internet connection in the cloud as a place to connect to other authorized devices, which circumvents the need for them to talk directly to each other in your home. Some smart devices, especially smart bulbs and light switches, come with a gateway or “bridge” device that hooks to your home router to connect the device to your home network and the Internet, so you can control the device through a smartphone locally and remotely (Philips Hue, Lutron Caséta, and August locks are all popular products that use bridge devices). These bridges can enable compatibility with hub-free cloud platforms, like Nest or Apple HomeKit, as well as voice control via smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

Finally, the popularity of digital assistants and smart speakers—chiefly Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, and to a lesser extent Apple HomePod—has fundamentally changed the trajectory of the smart home. Though most smart speakers are technically controllers and not full-fledged smart hubs, we think for most people the difference isn’t discernable. For instance, with a basic Amazon Echo you can pair devices from popular smart brands—August, Ecobee, Hue, Kwikset, Lutron, Nest, Ring, Skybell, Wemo, and so on—use the app to configure routines, and have the ability to trigger or control them using your voice.

One noteworthy shortcoming of cloud-based platforms and smart speakers is a limited selection of sensors, such as contact sensors (for doors and windows) and room sensors (for air, temperature, and motion). On hub-based systems, these devices allow you to create complex and nuanced automations and security routines. On hubless systems, sensors are either Bluetooth-based, and thus limited to short-range use, or depend on Wi-Fi and thus burn through batteries relatively quickly (by comparison, Z-Wave– and Zigbee-based sensors can last for years on a coin-size battery).

In practice, within an hour or so you could reasonably install and configure a few Hue light bulbs, a Nest Thermostat, and a Ring Video Doorbell 2. Using your choice of smart speaker, an Android phone with Google Assistant, or an iPhone and HomeKit, you could control each light individually or have them all go on or off simultaneously using your voice or an app. You can also create a scene so that when you go to bed at night you can touch an icon on your phone or even say “nighty night” and have the lights turn off, your thermostat drop to 65, and a speaker begin playing classical music. You can certainly dream up scenarios that aren’t possible, and there are differences between what you can do between the various platforms but, in our experience, any one of these voice-controlled platforms will let most people do most of the things they’d want with most popular smart devices—and even more than they’d expect.