June 26, 2020
by Ezlo Admin

Ezlo vs Smartthings Speed Test

If you are looking to replace your existing slow and frustrating hub or want to start your first smart home project, there are more than enough options for you to choose from, but we’ll make it A LOT easier for you. Smart Home hubs these days need to be more than always online and offer the ability to control your devices. They also need to be affordable, powerful enough to allow expansion, and more than that, be secure and offer local where possible.

The Idea

Since we’re getting the new Ezlo Hubs ready for production later this year, we’ve figured it’d be a good idea to see how they stack up against the competition with a fun little experiment.

Although we don’t intend this to be scientifically accurate, we wanted to make it as balanced and as accurate as we could possibly be. We wanted to play the role of any regular smart home customer who would buy these controllers and wanted to automate the most basic things he can—the lights in his home. To demonstrate the power of EzloCast™, together with the ability of local control, we’ve hooked up a few dozen multichannel Z-Wave relays and dimmers on a rig that contained 50 regular non-smart LED Bulbs paired with each controller—No other tweaks or settings required.

We wanted to see how much time it would take for each controller to turn on each bulb connected to the rig. The results were astounding, as watching all your lights turn ON or OFF in sync ALL at the same, is quite a spectacle when you don’t have offset time between them.

What is EzloCast™?

For everyone who is familiar with how Z-Wave works, you may have noticed that when you execute a command to your Z-Wave devices, they will not trigger at the same time but one by one. This was nice 10 years ago but fast forward to 2022 and every second count—EzloCast™* is making good use of the newest Z-Wave multi-cast capability and makes the control of up to 232 devices blazing fast. In simple words, the reason it works the way it does is that we send one command to 50 bulbs, while our competitors are sending 50 commands to 50 bulbs. The results speak for themselves.

The Setup

The process started by creating manually activated “Lights On” scenes on both platforms. Then we connected off-the-shelf, non-smart LED bulbs to over 20 types of Z-Wave switches and dimmers that are well supported by both platforms for a total of 50 bulbs for each hub. Here’s the full list of devices and brands we’ve used with each controller:

It’s important to remind you that no tweaks were made to alter the user experience in any way, however, new technologies like EzloCast™ and full local support make all the difference in the world and prove the power of the upcoming Ezlo hardware. The ultimate winner, of course, is our customers.

Behind the Scenes

Here are a few photos, to give you a peek behind the scenes. No bells and whistles here, just plain electrical wiring work. But instead of having them spread all over your home, we’ve put them in these small cabinets, in the form of a house.