Smart Home Automation Systems Compared

“Smart home” covers two very different things, and most of the confusion comes from using one phrase for both.

One is a set of individual connected devices — a smart speaker, a video doorbell, some app-controlled bulbs — each with its own app, tied together loosely by a voice assistant. The other is an integrated control system: lighting, shades, audio, video, HVAC, cameras and access all running through one interface that was designed and programmed for the house.

Both are legitimate. They cost very different amounts, they fail in different ways, and they suit different houses. Here is how the four platforms we work with most on home automation projects actually compare.

What a smart home system controls

At its fullest, an integrated system covers lighting and dimming, motorized shades and drapes, whole-house and outdoor audio, televisions and projectors, thermostats, security cameras, door locks and gate access, irrigation, and pool equipment.

The value is not controlling any one of those from a phone — each of them already has an app. It is that they act together. One button on the way out puts every light off, the shades down, the music off and the alarm on. One press at the door of a home theater dims the room, drops the screen and starts the projector. That coordination is the entire point, and it is the thing loose collections of individual smart devices are worst at.

RTI

RTI (Remote Technologies Incorporated) is a professional control platform — the kind a dealer designs, programs and commissions for a specific house. You cannot buy it off a shelf and set it up yourself, and that is the trade-off at the heart of it.

What you get in exchange is an interface built around how your family actually uses the house rather than around a manufacturer’s idea of it. Every button, every page, every scene is authored. A handheld remote, an in-wall touchpanel and a phone app can all present the same control layout, so nobody has to learn a different system depending on what they are holding. RTI drives essentially anything with a control interface — AV gear, lighting, shades, HVAC, cameras — including equipment from manufacturers that do not talk to each other natively.

It is also the more dependable option for a house where reliability matters more than flexibility. A programmed control system does not depend on a cloud service being up, or on an account staying logged in, to turn on a light.

The costs are real, though. Changes go through your dealer rather than through an app on a Saturday afternoon, and the up-front design and programming work is a meaningful part of the project. RTI makes sense for larger homes, dedicated theaters, and anywhere a system has to be handed over to people who have no interest in administering it. It is our primary control platform, and we design and program it in-house.

Lutron

Lutron is not really a competitor to RTI so much as the thing RTI usually controls. It is a lighting control and motorized shading specialist, and in that lane it is the reference point the rest of the industry gets measured against.

Two things set it apart in practice. The first is the dimming itself — quality of dimming across load types, from legacy incandescent through to modern LED, is genuinely difficult engineering, and inconsistent low-end dimming and flicker are the most common complaints about cheaper lighting control. The second is wireless reliability: Lutron runs its lighting and shade communication on its own RF protocol rather than sharing the crowded band that Wi-Fi, video doorbells and microwaves are all fighting over.

The range is tiered, which is what makes it flexible. At the accessible end, the Caséta line is a wireless retrofit system that replaces existing switches without rewiring, and suits a house where you want a handful of rooms and some shades under control. At the professional end, RadioRA and HomeWorks scale to whole-house lighting with keypads in every room, engraved scene buttons, and integration into a larger control system.

Lutron shades are the other half of the story, and in Southern California they earn their keep on heat and glare as much as on convenience — shades that close on a schedule or a sun sensor do real work on a west-facing wall of glass.

Lutron integrates cleanly with RTI, with the major voice assistants, and with most other control platforms, which is why it is rarely an either-or decision.

Google Home

Google Home is an ecosystem rather than an installed system: the app, the voice assistant, Nest thermostats, cameras and doorbells, Chromecast-based video, and a wide range of third-party devices that support it.

It is very good at the things it is designed for. Voice control is natural and forgiving. Setup is genuinely do-it-yourself. Casting video and music to speakers and displays around the house works without much thought. And it supports Matter and Thread, the newer cross-manufacturer standards that are slowly reducing how much any of this depends on picking the right brand up front.

Where it stops is coordination and dependability. Routines can chain a few actions together, but it is not a programmed control system, and it leans on cloud services and account state — which means an internet outage or a signed-out account can take out functions you would rather were local. It is an excellent convenience layer over a house, and a shaky foundation to build a whole house on.

Amazon Alexa

Alexa occupies broadly the same position as Google Home, with a different set of strengths.

Its main advantage is breadth of device support. Alexa has been the most widely adopted target for third-party smart device manufacturers, so if you have bought connected products piecemeal over the years, the odds that they all speak Alexa are good. Its Routines are somewhat more configurable than the Google equivalent for anyone willing to spend time in the app, and Echo devices double as a whole-house intercom and announcement system, which families with kids tend to use more than they expect to.

It shares Google’s limitations: cloud dependence, no real programming layer, and interfaces set by Amazon rather than designed for your house. Like Google Home, it also supports Matter, so a Matter device bought today is not locked to one assistant.

How to choose

The honest version of this decision is short.

If you want a few rooms of lighting, some shades and voice control — Lutron Caséta plus whichever voice assistant your household already uses is the right answer, and it does not need us to install it, though we are happy to.

If you want the whole house acting as one system — lighting, shades, audio, video, cameras and HVAC on one interface that works the same way in every room, and works whether or not the internet is up — that is RTI with Lutron underneath it, and voice as a convenience layer on top.

If you are building or remodeling, decide now rather than later. Even if the control system comes in a later phase, the wiring, keypad locations, shade pockets and equipment rack space have to be planned during construction. Retrofitting is always possible; it is just more expensive and more compromised than doing it while the walls are open.

And if you already have a drawer full of apps that do not talk to each other, that is the most common situation we get called into. It is usually fixable without replacing everything — often what is needed is a control layer over the top of what is already there rather than a rebuild.

Where to start

There is no single best smart home platform, only the one that matches how a particular house is used and who has to live with it. The question worth answering first is not which brand — it is whether you want a set of convenient devices or a house that behaves as one system, because everything else follows from that.

If a theater is part of the plan, our guide to planning a home theater room covers how the control layer fits in, and our guide to designing a backyard audio system does the same for outdoor zones.

New AV Installers has been designing and installing smart home systems across Southern California since 2005. We are a licensed C-7 low-voltage contractor (#1043912) working across Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and we program RTI and install Lutron lighting and shading as our core platforms.

If you are weighing up options — for a new build, a remodel, or a house that has accumulated too many apps — get in touch for a free consultation. We will walk the property, talk through how you actually use it, and tell you what it takes.