The Duopoly Is Cracking
For about two decades, if you were building a serious whole-home automation system — one where the lights, shades, HVAC, security, and AV all talked to each other through a single interface — you were essentially choosing between Crestron and Savant. Maybe Control4 if you were watching the budget. These were the platforms serious integrators built on, and they worked, mostly because nothing else could do what they did.
That's changing. Not slowly, either.
The combination of Matter (the smart home interoperability standard backed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung), genuinely capable consumer-grade hardware, and a new wave of mid-market platforms has started to erode the case for legacy control systems in a meaningful percentage of homes. Not all homes. But enough that every conversation I have with a client about automation now includes a more complicated version of a question that used to be simple: what platform are we building this on, and why?
What Matter Actually Changed
Matter launched in late 2022 with enormous fanfare and, initially, modest results. The early device ecosystem was thin, the Thread network behavior was inconsistent, and the multi-admin functionality — which was supposed to let your Apple Home and your Google Home both control the same light switch — worked badly in practice.
But the 2024 version of Matter is a different story. The device catalog has grown substantially. Lutron Caséta, one of the most reliable lighting platforms ever made, added Matter support. So did a meaningful slice of the Yale, Schlage, and Aqara lock lineups. HVAC integration is improving. And the networking behavior has stabilized enough that Thread mesh performance in a well-built home is genuinely solid.
This matters because it changes the cost equation. A Crestron deployment requires Crestron-certified programming, Crestron hardware, and an integrator who carries the line and knows how to write the code. That expertise is real and it costs real money — often $30,000 to $80,000 or more for a full home, before you touch the AV. Matter-compatible systems built around platforms like Apple Home, Home Assistant, or Josh.ai can achieve a meaningful percentage of that functionality at a fraction of the price.
Where the Legacy Platforms Still Win
Here is where I want to be careful, because this is not an argument that Crestron is dead or that Savant has lost the plot. They haven't. There are use cases where a properly designed Crestron or Savant system is still the right answer, and I'll tell you what they are.
Large, complex homes — say, 8,000 square feet and up — with dedicated home theaters, multi-zone distributed audio, motorized shading on dozens of windows, and genuine whole-property integration still benefit from a unified, professionally programmed control system. The reliability ceiling is higher. The customization is deeper. When something goes wrong at 11pm on a Saturday before a dinner party, a good integrator with a Crestron system can remote in and fix it. That is worth something.
The Savant platform in particular has made a strong push into the premium AV space, with their own amplifiers, streaming hardware, and a UI that remains among the most polished in the industry. If you want one app that controls everything and looks beautiful doing it, Savant is still a legitimate answer.
What's Actually Winning the Middle
The interesting action right now is in the $15,000 to $40,000 automation budget — homes that are serious but not compound-scale. Josh.ai has emerged as a genuinely impressive voice control platform with a privacy-first architecture and deep AV integration. It works on-device, doesn't send your voice to a cloud server, and integrates cleanly with Lutron, Sonos, and most major AV control layers. For a client who wants real voice control without handing Amazon a transcript of every conversation in their house, it's become my first recommendation.
Home Assistant, if you're willing to accept that it requires a technically engaged owner or an integrator who will maintain it, has become remarkably capable. The local processing, the device support breadth, and the absence of subscription fees make it worth considering in the right situation.
What This Means If You're Building in Austin Right Now
Austin's new construction market — especially in the Hill Country, Westlake, and the 78746 zip code corridor — tends to attract buyers who have strong opinions about technology and reasonable skepticism about being locked into expensive proprietary systems. That's a healthy instinct. Platform lock-in is real, and the company whose hardware is in your walls matters when it comes time to update, expand, or sell.
My current practice is to have an honest conversation about what a client actually needs before recommending a platform. Whole-home Crestron for a 5,000-square-foot house with two kids and a preference for things that just work? Probably not the right fit. Josh.ai with Lutron RadioRA 3 lighting and a well-integrated AV control layer for a similar home? Worth a serious look.
The point is that the answer is less obvious than it was five years ago, and any integrator who tells you otherwise is either not paying attention or selling you something.
If you're trying to sort out what makes sense for your home, reach out — this is exactly the kind of conversation worth having before any hardware gets ordered.