Home Assistant and (Tasmota vs ESPHome)

Hi All

I have HA and Tasmota running very successfully BUT HA seems to prefer ESPHome as this is a project they are involved in as well (sister project).

Your thoughts on the choice ESPHome vs Tasmota would be appreciated.

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I am running Tasmota on over 20 devices (simple switches as well as various sensors, etc) with 0 problems.

Which problem are you trying to solve?

No problems with Tasmota. I have 10 or so devices but want to streamline the HA integration and before I really get started want to choose Tasmota/ESP - for ever :wink:

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Hmm, I chose Tasmota from the moment I started with HA (4 or so years ago).
Don’t take me wrong, I am not saying that is better then ESP as I never did any ESP so wouldn’t really know :slight_smile:

I use Tasmota has its all that was available when I started. But if I had to do it again, i would do ESPHome, due to the HA direct connection.
But realistically, either will work fine.

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Really, both work.

ESPHome is great because you do updates to it from HA. So nice. I don’t run it yet though.
As for Tasmota, thats what I also use. Most importantly, I find tasmota works best when it comes to power monitoring devices, because its just so easy to calibrate the power monitoring with Tasmota. With ESPHome…you need to make an update for each adjustment you want to test. I just dont see how you can get it as accurately calibrated as tasmota doing it that way. (Using a greasemonkey script to do the calibration on tasmota).

So for me, going forward it will depend on the device,
Power monitoring and needs calibration? Tasmota.
Generic switch? Probably ESPHome
LED strip? WLED

Essentially, use whatever is the strongest/best for the use-case of the device.

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I’ve had problems with reliability of ESP devices - where they would go offline. In the end I had to restart the whole of Home Assistant - probably due to something in the API connection gone wrong.

It was enough to figure out how to reflash the device with Tasmota – then it is pretty much set-and-forget.

Furthermore, I’ve had weird instances where I can’t recompile something in ESPHome because it claims it can’t locate a library from the internet. I should add - this is all using the ESPHome add-on for Home Assistant. I’m also not sure how to decouple something from Home Assistant – and then later re-add it (although I don’t let it bother me too much - I’m sure there are ways).

I dunno - in the end it seems TOO integrated for my liking. I have exactly one device left, but that’s only because I calibrated the NTC temperature sensor in my geyser using ESPHome and I don’t want to re-do it.

I find Tasmota to be extremely stable, so I don’t really see why I’d want to try anything else. At some point I had the idea to integrate with my alarm system and recall that ESPHome would have been necessary. Never got around to it though.

It would be convenient to update all Tasmota devices’ firmware with a single click somewhere, but you never really need to, so not a major issue.

@jykenmynie - there is a project called TasmoAdmin - Tasmota that does allow you to maintain all you devices. That being said. I have couple of SonOffs that has been running for five years without being updated (If it is not broken type of thing for me.)

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You only need to update tasmota, if you use the tasmota integration.

If you use mqtt…eh no point, they just keep on working.

@mmaritz I have never used Tasmota, only ESPHome. All my devices (mostly based on ESP32 Boards) have been working perfectly for many months. Note that the ESPHome platform is maturing nicely - and the HA integration works really well.

The only difficulty I had was caused by trying to follow out-of-date documentation, as well as using an unsupported browser for the initial serial programming (the browser must support the “Web Serial API”). All further updates are easily done wirelessly.

For power monitor tasmota is much easier, everything else while you can do is tasmota however esphome is much nicer. Just integrates better. I have a few esp32 boards that i run many many sensors and the code is so easy to edit as needed.

Tasmota is a flash once and you can adjust via the command line the settings. Been rock solid, just works. It is like linux for the esp processor. The setup to auto-discover in home assistant is not as idiot proof as esphome.
Esphome you need to reflash it every time you change a parameter. My esphome sometimes become unavailable. Sometimes disconnects. And wants to be reflashed every time they update the version. The flash to auto-discover in home-assistant works great.

I have a geyser element driven by a 40A relay + NTC for temp (analog) on esphome.
Then I have a sonoff POW for the heatpump on Tasmota. I also have my gate on Tasmota.

I have limited exposure but for me tasmota seems very polished where esphome is still under constant development.
There are some projects that fetch inverter values implemented in esphome, for those it makes sense to stick with esphome. For something generic (which is most use cases) I would recommend tasmota

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White both have pros and cons, id rather stick to one instead of using both.

I’ve actually reflashed my Shelly products to use Tasmota too - found the consistency (and reliability) of Tasmota still a little bit better (even though Shelly products have MQTT support and integration with HA out of the box).