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comparison-with-diyhue.md

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Comparison with DiyHue

You might already be familiar with DiyHue, an existing project that aims to emulate a Philips Hue Bridge.

DiyHue is a well-established project, that integrates with countless servers/services/light systems, and emulates many Hue Bridge features.

However, I have been frustrated with DiyHue's MQTT integration, and its fairly poor performance when operating more than a handful of lights at a time. Since DiyHue always sends individual messages to each light in a group, large rooms can get quite slow (multiple seconds for every adjustment, no matter how minor).

As far as I know, DiyHue does not support Zigbee groups (or MQTT groups) at all, whereas Bifrost is written specifically to present zigbee2mqtt groups as Hue Bridge "rooms". For zigbee/mqtt use cases, this massively increases performance and reliability.

Another thing about DiyHue that frustrates me to no end, is the lack of (working) support for push notifications. If you use the Hue App to control a DiyHue bridge, you will notice that it does not react to any changes from other phones, home automation, etc. Also, the reported light states (on/off, color, temperature, etc) are sometimes just wrong.

Overall, DieHue can do an impressive number of things, but it seems to have some pretty rough edges.

Just to clarify, I've enjoyed using DiyHue, and I wish them all the best. It's also very useful, both as a home automation service, and a reverse engineering resource.

However, if you're also using one or more zigbee2mqtt servers to control Zigbee devices, feel free to give Bifrost a try. It might be a better fit for your use case.

In any case, feedback always welcome.

Feature DiyHue Bifrost
Language Python Rust
Project scope Broad (supports countless integrations) Narrow (specifically targets zigbee2mqtt)
Use Hue Bridge as backend ✅ ❌
Usable from Homeassistant ✅ (as a Hue Bridge) ✅ (more testing needed)
Control individual lights ✅ ✅
Good performance for groups of light ❌ ✅
Connect to zigbee2mqtt (✅) (but only one server) ✅ (multiple servers supported)
Auto-detection of color features ❌ (needs manual configuration) ✅
Create zigbee2mqtt scenes ❌ ✅
Recall zigbee2mqtt scenes ❌ ✅
Learn zigbee2mqtt scenes ❌ ✅
Delete zigbee2mqtt scenes ❌ ✅
Join new zigbee lights ✅ ❌
Live state of lights in Hue app ❌ 1 ✅
Multiple type of backends ✅ ❌ (only zigbee2mqtt)
Entertainment zones ✅ ❌ (planned)
Routines / Wake up / Go to sleep ✅ ❌ (planned)
Remote services ✅ (only with Hue essentials) ❌
Add custom lights and switches ✅ ❌

Footnotes

  1. Light state synchronization (i.e. consistency between hue emulator, hue app and reality) seems to be, unfortunately, somewhat brittle in DiyHue. See for example:

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