HOOBS Inc. Avis 130

I've been a Hoobs user for a couple of years and my experience gets worse as time goes on!

The system is unreliable and troublesome to update.

Customer service is terrible and use all sorts of excuses. I foolishly ordered a Hoobs Pro over 6months ago on the basis that pre-orders can be cancelled at any time. They do not keep promises!!!!!

To make matters worse, when I left negative feedback on their FB support site I got removed and banned from the site!

Hardly ever works and a huge pain to setup devices over and over again. Then it all just stops working again a few days later.

Software broke itself multiple times over the course of three months. Ended up switching to standard Homebridge which has been much more stable.
Also, come on, the "HOOBS Box" is just a Raspberry Pi, stuffed into a custom case with half the ports blocked off, and they're selling it for $300.
Just buy a Raspberry Pi, nice case, and MicroSD card & load up Homebridge yourself. It's really not that hard - HOOBS aims to solve a problem that does not exist.

Eventually got it working after reflashing the sd card. When it’s working it’s great but it’s not plug and play.

Do not buy anything they sell. They are a total farce. I bought a HOOBS box because it was supposed to provide easy use for the average smart home consumer. However, there is nothing easy or reliable about it. First, assuming you can get it to work without a computer degree, don’t expect it to keep working. It constantly goes offline, looses contact with the smart devices it’s supposed to be linking, or simply stops working. I have messed with this thing for well over a year. Tonight all $200 of it went in the trash. It is totally worthless and very likely a scam.

DO NOT GIVE HOOBS YOUR MONEY!
I did and I am now stuck with on an expensive paperweight.
In my opinion, they falsely advertised their hub has easy to install and use with Isteon devices. That was not my experience. And when I tried to return it, I was told--sorry, no.
If you look at their joke for a "policy", you'll see that even if you buy the hub and they "permit" your return, you'll still have to spend a ton of money for the privilege of having them receive and process the return.
So, my advise is to keep your distance form this ripoff.

Ok Lets start off that yes this is a high price than what you can build yourself with Raspberry Pi & Homebridge. That being said, The simplicity of this does not even compare. I literally had my non HomeKit devices up and running in literal minutes. I now have my Simplisafe system set up on HomeKit and its sweet!

Thank you to the Developers and Hoobs Staff for a great little device!

Cannot get Nest Cam plug in to work and support is very slow often taking 24-48 hours before asking me for one bit of information at a time. Then asking me to do things I've already done or provided them with.
Now the box has packed up completely and once again I am left with slow email tech support.

Can't recommend the box or the company in terms of support at all.

***THEY FLAGGED MY PREVIOUS HONEST REVIEW AND GOT IT REMOVED FROM TRUSTPILOT***

Okay, let me be very specific to this matter. I was not too fond of the way you behaved with me.
Do you believe that a person who lives in an apple ecosystem will blabber just for a discount? Stop justifying your unprofessionalism. I’d loved this product more than anything else. Being an Apple fanboy and home kit enthusiastic I’d always praised the possibility the device had offered. 
The reason for negotiating the price is that $219.99 does not justify its cost for international customers who will have to bear the shipping cost and a customs duty fee. 
You said, how can I write a review without having its hands? Let me tell you that I have already used it using a raspberry pi setup with hoobs iso. This product is too complicated to integrate even standard smart home features such as Nest home thermostat. I can see that it requires deep technical or programming knowledge and colossal time to search for a related plugin that works. Your owner is so rude that he treats the customers like beggars.  What's funny is that you guys are so insecure that you even removed me from your official Facebook group. Isn’t that so insane?

I distinctly mention that the piece of the plastic box called hoobs box is overpriced for many and can be considered offering in a discount for someone who is genuinely devoted to homekit automation. It's not just me who is disappointed by the team sitting behind your brand, lack of support, no proper answer to any question, filthy and unprofessional treatment to some specific customers is reason enough to not spend for your product. I am glad I decided to try with hoobs image using raspberry PI.
Regardless of the device having its potential, I find it it is a pure marketing gimmick; why are you not mentioning the truth that you wanted me to promote your product on my youtube channel to avail of the discount? Does it mean that most of the people who are praising your products are paid to do this? There is no RMA, Non-Existence of Customer Support, No refund. 
I would never recommend a company that treats its customers this way. Garbage.
Last but not least, you can remove me from your official page and flag my reviews, but you cannot stop me from speaking the truth. I am giving you an earful based on my personal experience.

You cannot treat your customers like this. As mentioned before, I have millions of subscribers on my youtube channel, and my feedback matters. 
I will not stop criticizing you unless you apologize for your behavior.

So, to start from the beginning, I first downloaded the Hoobs image and installed it on my Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. It was working fine, but then I installed the Nest plugin to connect my thermostat, and control it with Hoobs. I couldn't do that because none of the 4 browsers I've used, didn't pass the popup windows that was provided for linking the Hoobs with Google account. I contacted the Hoobs support, and waste few days for things like: they told me I'm not using the proper browser, Chrome does not work ok sometimes, and pointing me to the manual steps for install. After few days, as I've said, I've managed to connect my thermostat using a manual config with Hoob's help. After this was done, the support guy told me to install the Windows app instead of working directly into the browser. I did that and I was unable to connect my Thermostat again... I've told him the issue but he never responded to me again.

I wanted a solution like Hobbs so I've decided to purchase the Hoobs kit thinking that the software will probably work better on their systems due to optimizations and other things they probably did with the raspberry pi.

I've received the package, I started the Hobbs and the nightmare began. Everything had a few seconds lag. I managed to install all the plugins I needed but every response to a request was delayed a few seconds. My Unifi Protect cameras were set to refresh at 10 seconds but there was no refresh. When I clicked on the image it took about 30 seconds for the stream to load.

In conclusion, it was a bad experience, I've lost 50 Euros because shipping to you and back to them is your problem and I've lost hours of trying to work this thing out.

In the end, I've used my Raspberry Pi 4 with the HomeBridge app and it works like a charm.

The incredible part is that all the reviews of this product are perfect... I wonder how much are they paying people to tell this product is good.

Bought this product and it’s far more technical than they let on.

Contact customer service and they are really helpful but still does not work. Very responsive and even when I said I want to return it for refund.

Sent it back to Europe and had proof of delivery and then silence!!!!!

No email was answered. Chased and chased and chased still no response.

Thank god I paid with PayPal and got a refund through their resolution centre if not would have lost all the money for sure!!

Way too complicated for anyone but an IT expert to configure. Plug and play is a joke. This is a complete waste of money for me. I through it out on day 3 of trying to configure it for even basic services. For Nest you have to get special keys which I could not find an easy way to do it. Imagine what you have to do for the others.

**Update**

Since my initial first review I have had a lot of interesting things happen the hubs was refunded and sent back I updated to a home bridge and the HomeBridge might have been the problem but I still receive very minimal support one contact offered and the president Bobby was not very nice, but a long time after that I reached out to the technician that was helping me because he was very knowledgeable and offered help but then this time around I was told well you can buy it and then we’d like you to rip retractors your statement about the product honestly the product is probably really good had I’ve been shown how to use it or had any kind of advanced skills in the coding we wouldn’t of had problems but the customer service I received was last in par I’ll give that I have to stick with that I requested they help me install their product on my new raspberry pie and was denied accept if I offered to pay $50 per plug-in configuration. See I may have jumped the gun with hoobs but no one attempted to call me and offer me the ability to diagnose and resolve the problem I just demanded my refund and instead of when we start let’s try to fix it all right we don’t wanna be we don’t wanna deal with you here’s your money back on top of that it cost me $50 to ship it to Canada from the United States, now that I have reached back out to them and offered to donate to purchase the image that is free, and asked for assistance in programming I was basically left in the dark. Except if I was the whip out my credit card I was willing to pay the technician directly to do this off-line not in benefit of his company but that didn’t happen I would remove all of the negativity and all of the bad reviews if hi we showed any kind of empathy or understanding of maybe what I’ve been going on for me and my family over the last six months I believe it’s stemmed from home bridge running on a raspberry pi, I have since disconnected that home bridge and I was hoping that hoops was going to want to win back a customer by offered me a little bit of customer service, like I said I will remove and delete my review and give you five stars it is a pretty decent project gentleman but you got to know what you’re doing if not customer service can be difficult technical support is amazing so it’s kind of iffy.

I told you Ovi, that I would remove and write a decent review but I can’t because my experience and memories of the event were not pleasurable and this current attempt to rectify the situation by demanding more money is not the way to get me to change my position, your company reached out to me one time via phone and one time via email then the time they offered phone support it was from Sweden or something like that the car cost me over $10, I get that it’s not a lot but never billing me like $.90 a minute my phone company song plus the $50 I have to spend in shipping etc. etc. and I I was asking was get on the phone help me program this thing teach me some stuff and I’ll donate to your company again I was kind of spit in the face when I said well we’ll do it for 4999 and one pluck at a time blah blah blah,

So this time I would get it 3 1/2 stars I would like to change my entire review to something measurable and outstanding, because what I would’ve done if I knew the knowledge and had knowledge to fix it I would’ve said hey coach on sure call me back give me like five bucks from you no more minutes and you know what I’m a deck you out, because honestly I would like to put a lot of my equipment on my hoobs, but I have no idea how to run it, and I have no idea how to set it up, and I’m sorry I’m not computer savvy with that.
So if you want to try to rebuild a business relationship here I’m more than willing to but honestly that’s 169 bucks I got 100 of it back, Lost 59.99 for shipping, and the moral of my story was to get a reaction out of the company to try to see if they can fix it that’s what these reviews are for let me know what you think?

I use Hoobs to run Nest and SmartThings through homebridge. It works great for both and is easy to use and stable.

Easy setup and install. Loving it so far.

I was running the standard Homebridge on a raspberry pi, but kept having issues and it was difficult to maintain and configure. But since I started fresh with hoobs I couldn’t be happier. It has worked flawlessly and is so easy to configure. A+ to all the people who made this possible.