We install one system. That’s a bias worth stating before you read any further, so you can weigh what follows accordingly. What we can offer honestly is the comparison we give people at site visits, including the cases where we tell them not to buy from us.
The short version
| System | Typical whole-house cost | Subscription | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer kit (Hue, Nest, Ring) | £500 – £3,000 | Often, per camera | One or two rooms, renters, small budgets |
| Home Assistant | £300 – £2,000 + your time | None | Technical owners who enjoy the tinkering |
| Loxone | £15,000 – £45,000 | None | Whole-house automation, energy, reliability |
| KNX | £20,000 – £60,000 | None | Large projects, multi-vendor, specifier-led |
| Control4 | £20,000 – £60,000 | Some services | AV-led installations, wide device support |
| Crestron | £40,000 – £150,000+ | Some services | Very large or commercial-grade projects |
Where each one genuinely wins
Consumer ecosystems are far better than snobbery about them suggests. If you want app control of a few lights and a thermostat, £600 of Hue and Nest does that today with no installer. The limits are real but only appear at scale: separate apps, cloud dependency, batteries, and no meaningful logic between systems. Buy it knowing it’s remote control, not automation.
Home Assistant is the enthusiast’s answer and it is genuinely impressive — it integrates with almost anything and costs almost nothing. The honest caveat is that you become the integrator. Updates occasionally break integrations, and the person fixing the hall lights at 11pm is you. For the right owner that’s a hobby; for the wrong one it’s a house that fails in ways nobody else can repair.
KNX is an open international standard rather than a brand, so you can mix manufacturers and you’re not tied to any one company’s future. That’s a genuine strength on large or specifier-led projects. The trade-off is that configuration is more labour-intensive, and the multi-vendor flexibility means integration quality depends heavily on the specifier.
Control4 and Crestron come from professional AV, and it shows — device support is broad and the AV handling is excellent. Both are dealer-locked, which cuts both ways: you get a professional accountable for the system, but changing dealer is harder than changing platform.
Loxone, which is what we fit, is strongest on automation logic, energy management and cost per automated room. Everything runs locally on one Miniserver with no licensing. Its weakness relative to Control4 is a narrower third-party AV ecosystem — if you want a specific high-end AV chain integrated, check compatibility before committing.
The questions that actually decide it
Will it work when the internet is down? Ask this first. Any wired professional system should keep working entirely without broadband. Most consumer kit will not.
What does it cost over ten years, not on day one? A £15/month camera subscription is £1,800 over a decade. Two of those outweigh a lot of hardware. Add up the recurring costs across every device before comparing headline prices.
Who fixes it in five years? Consumer products get discontinued and cloud services get switched off — this has happened repeatedly across the industry. Ask what happens to your house if the manufacturer exits, and whether anyone other than the original installer can work on the system.
Is the wiring right? The single biggest predictor of whether a smart home is satisfying is whether the lighting circuits were designed for it. That’s a wiring decision, not a platform decision, and it’s the one thing that’s genuinely expensive to change later.
Our honest recommendation
If your budget is under about £5,000, don’t buy a professional system. Buy good consumer kit, or spend the money on getting your lighting circuits designed and cabled properly during other work, and add the intelligence later. We’d rather tell you that than sell you a compromised version of something that only makes sense at scale.
If you’re building or renovating, run the cable now regardless of which platform you eventually choose. It’s the cheapest decision in the entire process and it keeps every option open.
If you want a whole house that runs itself, with no subscription and no cloud dependency, that’s the case where what we install is genuinely the right answer — and we’ll show you the numbers at a free site visit rather than asking you to take our word for it.
See what we install → · Compare Loxone and Control4 in detail →
Jack Jones
Director, Westgate Property Solutions · Loxone Silver Partner