When I was evaluating both projects about 5 years ago, I went with openHAB because they had native apps with native controls (and thus nicer design imo). At the time, HA was still deep in YML config files and needed validation before saving etc etc. Not great UX.
Nowadays, HA has more of the features I would want and other external projects exist to create your own dashboards that take advantage of native controls.
Today I’m using Homey because I’m still a sucker for design and UX after a long day of coding boring admin panels in the day job, but I think in another few years when the hardware starts to show its age that I will move to home assistant. Hell, there exists an integration to bring HA devices into Homey but that would require running two hubs and potentially duplicating functionality. We shall see.
I keep it simple, I use the HomeKit bridge integration to expose the Home Assistant devices that I want in iOS. I don’t expose everything, though, some of the more advanced or obscure devices I purposely keep hidden in Home Assistant. It strikes a nice balance in my opinion.
i’m assuming you can do something similar with Google home, etc.
but like you said, you could always build your own dashboard from scratch if you wanted to.
> HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in [...] community.
Home Assistant seems insurmountable to beat at that specific metric, seems to be the single biggest project in terms of contributions from a wide community. Makes sense, Home Assistant tries to do a lot of things, and succeeds at many of them.
Unless you have a hard-on for JVM services, HA is the better XP these days.