Are there any decent open source alternatives or should I be looking to go down the building route?
I am a coding newbie so would be a bit daunting!
Node-Red is probably your best bet
it’s functional with a lot of plugins available as well as relatively easy due to the “flow” workflowone other command mentioned Home Assistant but even among the Home Assistant community there are quite some people using Node-Red together with Home Assistant to achieve their goals
I’m actually migrating away from Node-Red in HomeAssistant.
Don’t get me wrong i love Node Red, but HomeAssistant’s automations are now capable enough to do about 90% of what I need around the house.
Now, if you’re automating like a large growroom and you have hundreds of lights and sprinkler valves to automate against temp and soil sensors…
https://github.com/huginn/huginn
Are a few that I saw on the Awesome Self-hosted list
What are you using IFTTT for?