ecobee SmartBuildings

It’s 2025 with AI practically wiping my butt for me. I have 9 buildings with 15 thermostats each. They require onsite management to control grouped areas or entire areas from an app, not a desktop. Ecobee removed grouped functionality from standard app to upsell ($2 per month per stat) the building system. Luckily I tested this subscription on my personal home first. The App was made by an intern. No functionality, no group control, no building one set control. This saved me $3,500 a year in subsriptions by NOT moving forward with Building Systems.

It always has issues loading, it is very slow, you can’t select multiple thermostats at the same and turn them on or off, you can’t schedule what time the thermostats turn on and or off. This app needs a massive update to get any better.

Unfortunately the entire Smartbuiding app and web portal fail to deliver on the basic promise of group scheduling of multiple thermostats. First, the mobile app lacks any scheduling or device setting features at all. It’s almost useless. The portal, which is designed to do the heavy lifting and which touts group scheduling as it’s main feature, does not allow you to set schedules across multiple thermostats by group, unless you limit your comfort settings to the default “Home, Away or Sleep.” These setting do not make sense for a commercial building, nor are they adequate for a Commerical location. Forgot trying to setup an “Occupied, holiday or unoccupied” comfort setting, because you cannot copy any of it over to your other thermostats. Sadly, ecobee’s Smartbuilding platform fails to deliver on the most basics promises.

The app seems to be fast and works fine but lacking features. Would like to see it on par with the website features. Edit push multiple thermostates, edit more settings like energy settings, comfort settings, temp range, alert settings, passcode settings. Ability to see the reports!

This App — along with Ecobee Smart Buildings in general — has virtually non-existent tech support, which is shocking because their residential free support is outstanding but their paid subscription based Smart Buildings doesn’t even allow you to directly reach SB support. Instead you have to go through residential then they forward your request to SB and then you wait and hope anyone ever gets back to you. If they even ever do, even when you report issues and bugs with the platform and apps, which they are very reluctant to ever admit, they never fix them. —— Update: I wrote that review almost two years ago. Never published it because why bother. Checked the app again to see if they’d finally updated it to fix that you can’t pair sensors, you have to disconnect from this app and install the residential app, pair the sensor, disconnect from residential app and then come back to this app. Again— this is a paid subscription business product. Have they updated the app and fixed that and many other bugs? TWO YEARS LATER, NO.

I was forced to switch from the ecobee app to the SmartBuildings app. And I loss so much control of this stat. Hopefully, they will correct this quickly. Or I will have to buy something else. This app does nor allow me to control most of what they said it would do.

This app won’t even log in anymore because it’s years out of date

It doesn’t list my company thermostats on the app. I’m able to view them from the web portal so they exist. Just seems to be with the app. I’ve reinstalled several times but no change. You can access the web portal via Safari. I would just recommend doing that instead of installing this app.

Great service for me. And support from my local installer was also helpful. I was Abel to eliminate thousands of dollars to pull wires for traditional out of date thermostats. Now it’s simple zoned and controlled. App works great on my Mac and windows. The phone app is ok. For best results use a computer or laptop. Then the phone app is for basic notification. Computer app is far more detailed

So we have used the app for a month now. It’s bare bones. It doesn’t do half of what the ER app does. It needs a serious upgrade the consumer app has more functionality. Tech support is slow to respond, love the concept but the whole thing needs work.