Wink vs SmartThings: Which platform to choose?

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With the growing number of smart devices makers on the market, and the proliferation of bespoke smart home hubs along with them, you may want to look at some options for consolidating your smart home setup. Smart home platforms provide a more brand-agnostic approach to integrating and controlling smart devices, but these too generally require some sort of hub in order to do this.

Wink and SmartThings are two well known platforms that offer to simplify the business of managing your devices. While there are some key similarities, the two are targeted at different user segments. Wink is going after the less tech savvy, or at least less time invested, smart home user, where Samsung’s offering started out as a more enthusiast focused product that’s been working towards a broader market.

Regardless, both of these platforms require a hub in order to gain access to their ecosystem, so when considering the question of Wink vs SmartThings we need to look at their hub products in conjunction with platform capabilities.

A Quick Look

Aeotec SmartThings Hub

✔ Supports Alexa, Google Assistant, Bixby, IFTTT
✔ ZigBee, Z-Wave, WiFi, Cloud
✔ Deep enthusiast access and support
✔ Connect via WiFi or Ethernet
✔ Official support for over 5000 devices

✘ Limited local control
✘ Some tasks still need legacy app

This is the current model SmartThings hub from Aeotec. The SmartThings platform has been going from strength to strength since it was acquired by Samsung in 2014. While originally very enthusiast focused, growth and maturity have opened the system up to a more diverse user base. With the new hubs and smart phone app it is now easier to get going with SmartThings, and the list of officially supported devices is now quite respectable.

Official support means that devices are automatically recognized and all their features are fully supported inside the SmartThings app. These are the easiest to use with the platform, but it’s not limited to those alone. Thanks to an open framework and support for industry standard protocols like ZigBee and Z-Wave, enthusiasts can roll their own support for additional devices. Many of these will work at a basic level anyway, but you can often find community developed device handlers that add the necessary functionality to make them work at their best.

Obviously this means you need to be a bit more tech savvy and invested in your smart home, but also means you aren’t held back by a single company deciding what products you can use. The key downside to SmartThings is that control and automation is largely run by Samsung’s servers, so if they have an issue, or their is an internet problem between you and them, most of your smart home stops working.

This is improving though, as SmartThings has announced the next phase of their transition to a new core architecture that will allow for much more local control, at least for automation rules.

Wink Hub 2

✔ Supports Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT
✔ ZigBee, Z-Wave, WiFi, Bluetooth, Lutron, Kidde
✔ Single user friendly app
✔ Connect via WiFi or Ethernet

✘ Limited local control
✘ Subscription required
✘ Poor Support
✘ Limited range of supported devices

Wink, powered by the latest Wink Hub 2, was founded on the principal of simplifying building a smart home back when this was very much the domain of professionals and hard core tech heads.

In order to do this Wink created a platform that takes care of all of the back end support needed to connect to and control smart home devices. But the limitation of this is that all of that support is bespoke and needs to be added by Wink for each device.

While this does means a seamless and simple user experience, the list of supported devices is ultimately limited to what Wink chooses to add. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as all the necessary devices types are represented and most of them are leading products in their categories.

For the buyer that wants an easy way to get going on a smart home this approach works, and simply means you need to buy supported products from the outset.

Wink has had a tumultuous life, though, changing hands a few times, and recently going through a period of major stock shortages and apparent revenue issues. Stock seems to have recovered more recently, and they have moved to a subscription model in order to address their profitability.

While this has rubbed a lot of existing users up the wrong way (resulting in the trashing of their customer reviews), new users can factor that in up front.

Things To Consider Before Buying

Why use a platform hub?

Smart device makers all have their own apps, and many have their own hubs as well. Some of these hubs are simply to provide connectivity with your home network and the internet, while others are attempts to lock you in to their own limited smart device eco-system. The result is that you need to use a plethora of different apps to control your devices, or limit yourself to voice commands only through your chosen voice assistant.

What a smart home platform does is provides a way of combining all of these different branded products with different communication technologies into one cohesive smart home experience. This not only simplifies the app experience, but allows for much more comprehensive automation of your home by allowing one command and control system to manage them all.

You could go with a platform like Alexa, which does achieve these results in a limited way, but a dedicated local hub will typically support devices that use different protocols as well, which reduces your need for additional hubs and broadens your options in terms of devices you can use.

What protocols are supported?

You can think of a protocol as a language. Devices need to speak the same language in order to understand each other when sending commands and requesting updates. These protocols are necessarily standardized and offer various pros and cons, but the main thing for the end user is for your platform to be able to talk to as many of them as possible.

Each device maker will choose a protocol for their device to use to communicate, so your platform needs a way of talking to it. This may be via a hub provided by that device maker that connects to your WiFi, but preferably your main smart home hub will be able to talk to them directly. The most common protocols at the moment are WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and Z-Wave. Supporting those will cover the vast majority of smart home devices on the market.

There are other proprietary protocols, such as Lutron’s Clear Connect, which can be a bonus to have, but the worst case scenario for those is that you’ll need an additional hub or bridge device from that maker to add them to your smart home.

What is local Control?

It has become common for smart devices to run via their brand’s cloud service. The reasons for this are typically to provide remote access and multi-user access through their own smart phone app, and to get around a lack of standardization in the industry. Platforms like Alexa leverage this to enable support for a huge number of devices by letting the device maker deal with all the control and communication necessities through a custom skill.

The downside to this approach is that you are highly dependant on the internet, and the maker’s servers working properly. Reliability and performance take a hit in these cases, and there are obvious security considerations as well whenever you need to have devices exposed directly to the internet and share logon credentials between services.

Local control means that your smart home hub talks directly to the device on the local network, whether it’s WiFi or another protocol. These communications are isolated from the internet, and encrypted locally. This offers significant security benefits, and ensures the best performance and reliability for device control and automation.

Wink and SmartThings don’t have much in the way of local control. You have some basic access to simple device commands, but automations and many device types simply won’t work if there is an outage with SmartThings or the internet. These outages do occur, so it’s something you’ll need to keep in mind going with either of these options.

Ease of user over flexibility

Unfortunately, even though protocols are technically standardized, there are still a lot of reasons that prevent things working the way each device maker intends out of the box in every case.

To overcome this all smart home platforms offer official device support that provides the best possible user experience for a specific set of devices. These lists tend to be expanded over time as platform companies expand their offerings.

Naturally, limiting yourself to only the official list can easily lead to frustration when the device you want to use isn’t supported. Some platforms will allow you to use it anyway, as the basic support provided by the protocol standards allow them to at least recognize the type of device and talk to it.

Further to that are platforms that support deeper access to the system and allow people to make their own device handlers to add that additional functionality. This may not be something you want to deal with, but having the option at least gives you some future proofing and peace of mind should you decide it’s worthwhile later.

Samsung SmartThings Details

Having enthusiast roots, the SmartThings platform provides a best-of-both-worlds approach to home automation. A growing list of supported devices that can be easily configured in the app makes for a solid base for the everyday user, while the deep developer access allows for complex automation rules and custom device support for basically anything that uses one of the protocols supported by the platform.

Device Support

The key protocols are there on the gen 3 hub, being WiFi, ZigBee, ZigBee 3, and Z-Wave. This will get you access to the majority of the devices on the market, although you may need that custom support if they aren’t officially listed. Additionally SmartThings provides a ‘cloud-to-cloud’ service, which is similar to Alexa in that it allows for device handlers to communicate between the SmartThings servers and those of your chosen device maker, such as Ring.

There are currently over 400 devices with integrated support. You can check out the official list of “Works with SmartThings” devices to get an idea of what will work right away. Other Z-Wave and ZigBee devices will be useable in some form as those protocols provide some standardized way of interacting with unknown devices. The functionality you get without a custom device handler will vary, as individual implementations require specific information to tell SmartThings what a device can do and how to access those functions.

Connection

The Gen 3 hub normally connects to your network via WiFi, but also has a wired Ethernet port. The wired connection ensures reliable connectivity and performance, but may not be practical for your situation.

An interesting bonus on the SmartThings hub is the inclusion of battery backup. This uses 4 AA batteries to give you a few hours of operation in the event of a power failure, but you’ll be limited to local control of other battery powered devices anyway (unless you have similar backup for your internet router as well).

App

Currently, there are still two apps in play for controlling SmartThings. The new app is required to set up the gen 3 hub, and provides a cleaner interface for most users to do what they need to do. Some of the more advanced features are still lacking, however, and those advanced users will need to use the Classic app for some things. SmartThings is working to migrate all that functionality and more into the new app over time, but it’s not there yet.

In the new app, you can do about 90% of the what you need now, including adding new supported devices, creating scenes that control a number of devices all at once, custom automations based on triggers, set up rooms to organize your devices, and add other users so they can control devices and be detected as members of the home.

In addition to normal smart home controls, there is also a Home Monitor feature which functions similar to an alarm system with different states (arm/disarm). For each state you can configure alert behaviors for things like smoke, leak, and motion sensors.

Customer Support

SmartThings has an extensive library of self help articles on their support site, as well as an extremely active community of tech savvy experts that can help with everything from simple issue to adding custom device support. International phone and email support is also provided and well staffed.

SmartThings App: Home page, Controls, and Automations

SmartThings App: Home page, Controls, and Automations

Wink Details

With a strong focus on ease of use Wink relies very much on their own app to provide that user experience. This approach results in some inherent limitations in what devices you can use, and what level of automation complexity is possible. If you’re new to home automation this may well be a good thing, as some of the more complex rule engines can be quite daunting to approach if you aren’t familiar with that sort of tech.

Device Support

With the Wink Hub 2 you actually get very good protocol support, not only covering the same common protocols as SmartThings (ZigBee, Z-Wave, WiFi), but also Bluetooth, Lutron’s proprietary Clear Connect lighting system, and devices using Kidde’s home automation system. These reduce the need for additional hubs if you choose those type of devices, but they are still a bit niche.

I’ve counted around 100 specifically supported devices on Wink’s list covering all the necessary smart device categories, so if you’re starting out you can focus on those without too much issue. As with SmartThings, Z-Wave devices and ZigBee lights will work in a basic way as those protocols provide some standard methods of communicating regardless, but any additional features beyond basic functions are unlikely to work, and there’s no way you can extend Wink yourself to fix that.

Connection

The Wink Hub 2 offers Wifi and wired Ethernet connection, with the hard wired option helping to ensure reliability for your hub connection depending on your WiFi setup and placement options.

As the hub also drives your ZigBee and Z-Wave devices, even though those protocols provide some mesh capability allowing devices to relay through each other, you might find that you need to place the hub in a location where hard wiring is not practical.

App

The ease-of-use approach is very evident in the design of the Wink app, with an almost child-like design with large, friendly, device icons. One advantage to the very curated approach Wink takes to device support is that each can be given bespoke setup instructions right there in the app, including specific steps and photos to show you what to do.

While the automation capabilities are not up the the level of SmartThings, there is still plenty there to provide the functionality most users would need. This includes Shortcuts (which are like scenes on other platforms), Robots which provide simple automation rules based on triggers, and Events which allow for the creation of time-based schedules.

Robots are known to have some reliability issues in terms of triggering when they should in every instance. Wink provides IFTTT support with their subscription which is similar, but only allows for a single trigger condition and action, where Robots can have multiple conditions and actions, so it’s not necessarily a easy workaround, and unreliable automation rules can be a nuisance.

Customer Support

With Wink seemingly having some financial challenges prior to introducing their subscription model, they’ve dropped their phone support and gone to just email and social media. Customers have reported poor response times from the email channel as well, which is not great for a company that is courting less tech savvy users.

The Wink support site does have an extensive set of how to guides tailored to each supported product, which seems good, but there is not a lot around other app functions like setting up Robots and Events beyond a very basic FAQ. This seems like an oversight, although they may be banking on the app being very self explanatory.

Wink App: Adding Devices, Robots, and Controls

Wink App: Adding Devices, Robots, and Controls

A Comment on Alternatives

As noted, both of these platform choices offer primarily cloud based control of your smart home. This naturally comes with risks in both security and reliability. There are choices that favor secure local control, but are not necessarily as easy to jump in to. Two good choices that come to mind are Apple’s HomeKit, and the startup Hubitat.

HomeKit offers a growing list of high quality, well supported devices, with features that cover both ease of use and substantial automation capabilities. The key barriers to entry here are the need to be in Apple’s ecosystem and the relatively high price of HomeKit accessories. If you are an Apple user, though, the security, local control, and extensive Apple integration are well worth considering.

Hubitat is more along the same lines as SmartThings, with their Hubitat Elevation hub offering broad device support with similar protocols and device numbers, and deep enthusiast complexity. This is provided without a need for a cloud service at all, although you can opt in to one purely for their remote access features. Getting into this one is not for the faint of heart, though, and while it isn’t as hard core as some other platforms in terms of required tech skills, it not something that would be suitable for smart home beginners.

The Verdict

Wink vs SmartThings? Well, while Wink offers an excellent platform for home automation beginners and those not wanting to get bogged down in their own tech support, the recent concerns around the financial viability of the company are significant cause for concern. The switch to a small monthly subscription may resolve this, but it’s too early to say.

Given that situation, and the reported floundering of their support services at the present time, it’s a hard ask to recommend them, even for newcomers. Samsung’s offering is robust and well supported, and while the complexity is certainly higher, you’ll also be future proofed in terms of both the company’s survival and your own growth into more complex home automation scenarios.

You can get started with SmartThings with just the Aeotec SmartThings Hub, or combine it with a router upgrade using the SmartThings WiFi mesh system.

David Mead

David Mead is an IT infrastructure professional with over 20 years of experience across a wide range of hardware and software solutions. David holds numerous IT certifications and has dedicated himself to helping others with technology throughout his career.

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