Control4 vs Crestron vs Savant in a Mission Hills house

The short answer

IntegrateIT is a Control4 Platinum Dealer, a Crestron Elite Partner and a Lutron Certified Dealer in Overland Park, KS, and for a Mission Hills house we recommend Control4 in most of them, Crestron when someone else is already specifying commercial-grade subsystems, and Savant only if you already own one. Savant is not among our authorizations, and we do not sell, install, service or take over Savant systems. But the platform is the second decision. In a 1920s Mission Hills estate, plaster over lath, masonry exterior walls, no conduit, switch boxes with no neutral, the decision that comes first is how lighting control gets into the walls, and that constraint outranks the badge.

This is the Mission Hills version of the question. If you want the platform framework on its own — programming models, ecosystem depth, where Lutron HomeWorks sits — that is in our head-to-head on Lutron vs Control4 vs Crestron. What follows is what changes when the house was finished in the 1920s instead of 1997.

Why the house decides before the brand does

A 1997 build in the Blue Valley district is a straightforward job. Poured-wall basement, nine-foot ceilings, open joist bays over an unfinished half, drywall on stick framing, a mechanical room with wall for a rack. A crew can get a wire almost anywhere in it quickly, and every platform on this page behaves much the same way once the wire is there.

Mission Hills is the other end of that. Much of the housing stock dates to the 1920s and 1930s — J.C. Nichols-era Tudors and Colonials on deep lots, with the original construction still doing structural work. That is not a cosmetic difference. It changes what is deliverable, what a retrofit costs, and which platform you can actually support ten years from now.

Six things a 1920s Mission Hills house does to a control system

1. Plaster over lath, not drywall. It cracks in sheets rather than crumbling into a neat cut, and a patch that disappears takes a plasterer, not a drywall crew. Every device location is a real repair, so you place fewer of them and place them correctly the first time. Where the plaster went over metal lath rather than wood, wireless range degrades sharply room to room — which is why we survey it before anyone commits to a wireless-only design.
2. Masonry exterior walls. Brick and stone furred out to very little cavity depth. No standard back box, no in-wall speaker, no recessed keypad on an exterior wall without furring it out and losing floor depth. Devices go on interior partitions. Plan the keypad layout around that before anyone falls in love with a wall.
3. No conduit anywhere. Nothing was left for you. Every new run is fished, and the honest estimate accounts for the runs that will fail and get rerouted.
4. Often no neutral at the switch. This is the one that decides the lighting system. Pre-modern switch legs frequently carry hot and switched-hot only, and most wired dimmers want a neutral. Your options are pulling new switch legs — a real electrical project across a whole house — or a lighting system designed to work without one.
5. Balloon framing, sometimes. Where it exists it is the single best gift an old house gives an integrator: continuous vertical cavities from basement to attic. The catch is that fire-blocking added during decades of undocumented remodels is invisible until you fish it, so nobody can promise you a path from a photograph.
6. The heat may have no ducts to borrow. Houses still on hot-water radiators give you no chases and often a two-wire thermostat run. Climate control becomes its own wiring scope rather than a checkbox on the automation quote.

The three platforms, judged against that house

Control4 vs Crestron, head to head

Most people who search this question are not choosing three ways. They are choosing between Control4 and Crestron, with Savant as the system somebody already owns. So here is the two-way answer from a Control4 Platinum Dealer and Crestron Elite Partner that installs both.

• How they are built. Control4 is configured: the dealer composes the system from drivers and settings, and a change is an afternoon’s work. Crestron is programmed: the behaviour is written and compiled onto the processor, which is how it follows an architect’s drawings exactly, and also why a change is a programmer’s job. IntegrateIT programs Crestron in house.
• Who can service it later. A Control4 project transfers to any Control4 dealer. A Crestron system needs a programmer and the source files, so who holds those files matters as much as the hardware does.
• The interfaces. Control4 pairs its own touch panels, Halo remotes and app with Control4 or Lutron keypads. Crestron makes its own panels, keypads and remotes end to end, in more finishes, which is part of why it costs more.
• Where each wins. Control4 is the better value in most Kansas City homes, and it talks to more of the equipment people already own at a sensible cost. Crestron earns its cost at estate scale, when someone else is already specifying commercial-grade subsystems, or when the interface itself is part of the architecture.
• Cost. The gap is programming hours and hardware, not markup. What drives each number is on the cost pages: what a Control4 system costs in Kansas City and what a Crestron system costs in Kansas City.

In an older house neither platform spares you the wiring questions above. The platform choice comes after the neutrals and the pathways are known, which is why the calls below go in this order.

The order to make the calls in

1. Find the neutrals first. Have someone pull three or four switch plates in different parts of the house — a 1920s original, a 1970s remodel, a recent one. Whether there is a neutral behind them decides more of your budget than the platform choice does.
2. Decide wired or wireless lighting. If the neutrals are there and walls are already open for other work, wire it. If they are not and you are not opening plaster, Lutron’s wireless line is how you get real lighting control without a gut. That decision is worked through in RadioRA 3 vs HomeWorks.
3. Count the subsystems that must talk. Lighting and shades only? You do not need any of these three — you need a lighting system. Lighting plus audio plus video plus climate plus entry? Now you need a control platform.
4. Ask who else is specifying. If an architect has already put commercial-grade HVAC controls, an enterprise NVR or badge access on the drawings, Crestron is the more common native path for that class of gear. If nobody else is specifying, Control4 is the better value in almost every case — a Control4 system typically costs well below a comparable Crestron build for the same scope.
5. Then pick the platform — and pick the company that will still be answering the phone in year eight, because in an old house the second and third phases are where the value is.

Where Savant actually fits here

Plainly: if you are starting from scratch in Mission Hills, we will not recommend Savant, because we cannot support it at the platform level and recommending something we cannot stand behind is worth nothing to you. Its reputation for presentation is real and we are not talking you out of it on the merits.

If you already own one, Savant can point you to an installer who supports it. IntegrateIT does not sell, install, service or take over Savant systems, and we would rather say so here than after a site visit.

The migration question usually answers itself. Keep the system if it does what you want and the failures are infrastructure-level — a system misbehaving because the network was sized for a decade-old device count is a switch problem, not a platform problem, and replacing the brain is an expensive way to fix a switch. Move if you keep hitting changes you cannot get made.

What survives a remodel

The reason this matters more in Mission Hills than in a newer build: these houses get renovated in phases, over decades, one wing or one kitchen at a time. So the useful test of a platform here is not what it does on install day. It is what stays when the third-floor bath gets opened in 2031.

What survives is the wire and the backbone: the cable pulled while a wall was open, the rack location, the switch and the pathways. What gets replaced is the control layer — touchscreens, app, processor. Design so those two live on different timelines and every future phase is cheap. Design them as one and every remodel becomes a re-integration.

We are a Control4, Crestron and Lutron shop in Overland Park, founded in 2021 by Daniel and Moran Alon. Every install carries our 5-year workmanship warranty; equipment carries its manufacturer warranty. If you want this walked in person, that is a site visit and a fixed number after it — not a range over email. Neighborhood context is on our Mission Hills page; call (913) 804-7575 or email office@integrateit.tech.

— Daniel Alon, founder, IntegrateIT. Overland Park, KS. Updated September 2026.