I spent my money eagerly hoping to get the very best quality and reliability and flexibility and compatability and functionality. I am very disappointed with the Fibaro Home Center 2. It has plenty of spare capacity but that's because I can't get it to do very much. The two CPU's sit near idle at 2% and 6%, there's lots of spare RAM (75% free plus cache of 8%) and 89% unused storage.

When I compare spending $1,089 for the Home Center 2 with the lack of support from Fibaro to the simple like $199 Automationbridge and the support I get from Skaro, I know which is money well spent and which is just a brick. Hint: Skaro is not the brick, it's awesome.

Here's an example of thick as two bricks thinking: Fibaro are very arrogant in refusing to properly support the Aeotec Dimmers and Switches so their energy monitoring features don't properly synchronise and the on-off status doesn't update consistently if the momentary wall switch is used. Of course, that's because Fibaro has their own less functional and more expensive dimmers and switches which I also have. Trying to get support from Fibaro is frustrating as all heck. They won't provide anything like real support - just generic boilerplate excuses.

Years ago, I used to program in Assembler and ran an IT consulting business so I know a bit about coding but LUA isn't supposed to be for fixing glitches and I don't really want to be patching stuff when I expect it to work flawlessly.

I have both Amazon Echo and Google Home/Next voice support which are far less useful because the interface via the Automationbridge can't make up for the lack of proper support by Fibaro. For example, neither Google nor Amazon recognise z-wave lights as lights. Amazon and Google recognise Hue lights as lights and they recognise other devices such as Harmony and so on but they don't show the Fibaro z-wave lights as lights on their Apps. That's just plain annoying and stupid and you would think Fibaro would fix that, even for their own devices.

Fibaro software is constantly trying to catch up so you need to be running beta software to fix glitches - for example in Netatmo support. If you spend nearly $1,000 on Netatmo devices for weather monitoring, you would hope they are properly integrated but not really. Not without the trusty plug-in from Skaro and even then you need LUA to make it work half-properly so forget Google Home or Alexa for voice questions like "What's the temperature in the master bedroom?" or "how much rain have we had today?"

I wish I had bought something else as my controller. So, do I blow nearly $1,100 and get something else? I'm torn.

Thanks smarthome - extremely happy with my new home center 2. What difference to my old vera controller, this box has single handedly made me excited about home automation again. Will never go back!

Such a great product, responds very fast and the layout is the best i have seen.
SmartHome are great to work with and love their range of products and friendly service.

Quality hardware with an intuitive interface that can probably achieve any goal.

I first dipped into home automation with insteon a few years back. Setting up basics was easy, and adding the hub made it fairly easy to do create basic scenes. But...trying to do any logic was just about impossible (eg, manual override for a light on motion detection, or any 'IFTTT' style logic).

So after chatting with SmartHome I decided to start over with Zwave. I tried to cheap it out with the Aeotec USB and my 'always on' media centre PC, but after trying half a dozen different pieces of software, it was clear that they really aren't meant for noobs. So I decided to pony up for the HC2 with some trepidation, because it IS expensive.

Un-boxing the kit was a pleasant experience. The unit is housed in a well engineered aluminium shell, with a detachable plate that will eventually hide the cabling. Plugging in, though, I was greeted with some error that prevented any set-up from starting :( Googling eventually led me to a 'how to reset and restore from backup' with a combination of button holds and power cycling, and after that, the initial start up wizard worked like a charm. I'll never know why it was in this initial state (it was shrink wrapped so hadn't been tampered with), just unlucky I think.

But once up and running, the unit was a breeze. Adding devices is really straightforward (especially compared to the PC software methods) and so you can get up and running pretty quickly.
The simplistic IFTTT "Magic" scenes are real simple to use, and guide you through a bit of a wizard. If all you want is to do things like switch on/off a light when motion/certain temperature/a button press is detected, then this all you need.

The real beauty, however, lives in the block interface. This is still point and click, but now you have the possibility to set/read variables, include multiple conditions and so on. For probably 98% of a need, this block interface is all you need to create some quite complex scenes if you wish.

Finally, there is LUA. This is full on coding. To get you started, you can one way convert any block scene into LUA and then just adjust as required. Plenty of flexibility here, but you will need to learn the commands. I haven't yet to be honest, but I have copied and pasted LUA code around to customise some scenes.

Prior to firmware 4.130, the HC2 did not have templates for the Aeotec RGB bulbs - which meant controlling the colours etc required code. That's now resolved and you get sliders to change values realtime in GUI as well as having 'setcolor' commands in the block scene interface.
If you install the mobile app, then the HC2 can also keep track of your location for triggering scenes [eg, switch on lights/heating as you approach the house] if you wish, as well ad being able to send notifications to the device (eg, motion detected).

All in all, a great device and easy to use. Recommended to anyone. Only negative is the high entry price.

A few weeks into my HC2 and really glad I ended up going with this. The HC2 is super responsive and has some powerful features that are pretty easy to use.Have now added a range of Aeon, Remotec and Fibaro sensors and devices and everything is working perfectly. The powerful block graphic interface is great and I've been able to setup all my complex requirements using it without needing to go into the scripting language. Using IFTTT integration needs some improvement so that you can use the block graphic interface but that's my only negative comment so far. Fibaro ANZ support is super responsive whenever I've had questions.

The most well thought out z-wave controller I have ever owned. Easy to setup and use and unbelievably powerful (I haven't even scratched the surface yet). I recommend this product without hesitation.

I have been using vera for my zwave controller for the past 4 years. I was going to upgrade to the vera edge, but after doing some research online I decided to go with the fibaro home centre 2. I am so glad I did, it is a country mile better than vera. Expensive but so worth it.

Great system set up in an hour and works perfectly.