Home automation has come a long way over the last 3-5 years. The term Internet of things (IoT) has become a buzz word as of late. There are many home automation systems out there including Wink, Smart things, staples connect, Revolv etc. However I have been exclusively using the Wink platform and I’m about to give you the skinny on whether your should buy or not

When looking at a product, I base it on five main criteria which include:

1) Ease of Use
2) Assortment of Products
3) Performance
4) Security
5) Customer Service

1) The Wink hub is quite easy to use when you get it to connect. They have an iOS and android platform that can be used to help pair devices to the wink hub. They have a great graphic interface however pairing devices isn’t always a walk in the park. Sometimes you have to call into their customer service who will walk you through issues and help you pair but even that could be a half a days of effort. For example my lutron light switches connected fine, but getting my schlage lock and GE bulbs were a task. Overall I would rate their ease of use a 3/5.

2) The wink hub has an impressive number of devices that it can pair to out of the box. It has several antennas built in including lutron, Leviton, Bali, schlage, and Nest to name a few. When comparing to other products on the market it has one of the best assortment of products that it supports. The one big bummer is that it does not support Wemo. I spoke to the CEO, Ben Kaufman who confirmed in an email that Wemo wasn’t coming to the Wink platform. The other thing that wink lacks is offline support. It requires you to go through their cloud which can slow down that process and in the event your internet goes down, render the hub useless. Having said all of this, I would rate their assortment a 4/5.

3) Performance over the past few months started to deteriorate in my option. Every new hub update requires some kind of compromise on performance. Sometimes my locks don’t work and other times my lights are not responsive. I’ve emailed and called Wink several times and although their best intention is to help, I often walk away a little frustrated with the time commitment to get it to work. Performance for me is a 2/5

4) Security is quite obviously important to me. I would certainly say the wink hub is fairly secure. So secure that a few months ago, Wink had an embarrassing occurrence where they pushed out a firmware update that prevented the hub from communicating with the wink server. This really irritated thousands of wink hub users who had to ship their device back to wink to “unbrick” or use a DNS solution to repair it. When the manufacturer gets locked out of the hub, you know it’s maybe too secure. To their credit they did give out $50 gift cards to their online store but that still didn’t go to well with others given their already inflated store costs and ridiculously high shipping costs. I would give security a 5, but their boob move a few months ago earn them a strong 4/5

5) Last but not least is customer service. I’ve compared customer service between that of Wink and its competitors and I have to say wink does have one of the best customer service. You can reach them on Facebook, Twitter or phone and they seem to be responsive. Email on the other hand is very slow. I genuinely felt that they wanted to help you resolve issues with your hub and connected devices and would spend hours to help you resolve the issues. Also it depends on who you talk to over at wink. I have spoken to some folks that are questionable but overall I was content. Relative to their competitors I give wink a 5/5 on customer service.

The overall tally is 18/25. So would I buy it? If you are able to get the wink hub on a deal like buy some lights and get the hub for $0.99 then it’s worth it. However for the $50 price tag, I would not buy it strictly because of the performance. They way the wink hub is trending may evidentially be a $50 paperweight in about 6 months. If they are to turn around their act, they may win back old customers that have since turned elsewhere.

The post TT 009: Home Automation – Wink Review appeared first on Tool and Tie.