I have been an Ecobee user for years, and one of the main things that sold me on that is the room sensors.
In my house, there's large south-facing windows that let in a lot of sun, and for a lot of the year the north side of the house will be several degrees cooler than the south. I was constantly battling how to set the thermostat, especially to keep the upstairs a decent temperature at night.
The Ecobee 100% solved that: at night the upstairs room sensors control temp, while during the day mostly the main floor does. No guessing: it just works regardless of how sunny it was that day. It would be hard to give that feature up.
Another handy feature which I didn't realize until owning it is the "min fan runtime per hour". Even set to 20 mins, this helped drastically with evening out the temperatures throughout the house.
There's already a thread about an open, local API, and I'd mirror that here. The Ecobee isn't open+local, but if they were to go under (or do something stupid like block HomeAssistant), it's $$$ to rip it out and switch to something else. When we're talking about a $$,$$$ system I wouldn't even consider it without a company committed to providing a proper local API -- including that it won't disappear in an over-the-air firmware update.
In my house, there's large south-facing windows that let in a lot of sun, and for a lot of the year the north side of the house will be several degrees cooler than the south. I was constantly battling how to set the thermostat, especially to keep the upstairs a decent temperature at night.
The Ecobee 100% solved that: at night the upstairs room sensors control temp, while during the day mostly the main floor does. No guessing: it just works regardless of how sunny it was that day. It would be hard to give that feature up.
Another handy feature which I didn't realize until owning it is the "min fan runtime per hour". Even set to 20 mins, this helped drastically with evening out the temperatures throughout the house.
There's already a thread about an open, local API, and I'd mirror that here. The Ecobee isn't open+local, but if they were to go under (or do something stupid like block HomeAssistant), it's $$$ to rip it out and switch to something else. When we're talking about a $$,$$$ system I wouldn't even consider it without a company committed to providing a proper local API -- including that it won't disappear in an over-the-air firmware update.