Pentair vs. Jandy vs. Hayward: You Are Picking a Platform, Not a Brand

This is one decision wearing six hats. A new pool needs a pump, a filter, a heater, a sanitiser, lights and valves. Six line items on the bid, six places to have an opinion. In practice you make one choice — the automation platform — and it quietly makes the other five.

Here is why, and what it costs to get it wrong.

The lock-in is the RS-485 bus

All three run their equipment over RS-485, and each implements it proprietarily. What that buys you within one brand:

• variable-speed scheduling — the pump runs at the speed and hours you set, which is the entire economic case for a VS pump
• colour syncing on LED lights
• in-app diagnostics and error reporting — the pad tells you what is wrong before you walk out to it

Put another brand’s equipment on the bus and it does not join it. It falls back to a Smart Relay, which does exactly one thing: cut power on and off.

A variable-speed pump under relay control is a single-speed pump with extra steps.

That is the whole lock-in, and it is why “can I mix brands” gets the unhelpful answer yes, but don’t. The hardware plumbs together fine. The intelligence does not.

A rough order of what is safe to mix:

If you are going to mix, mix the parts with no wires.

The exit costs are not symmetrical, and only one brand tells you

This is the finding worth taking into a bid meeting.

Hayward publishes a converter board. The HLPMPCONV is listed on hayward.com as the “OmniLogic Competitive VSP Converter Board (Open Line)” — Hayward’s own name for it, and the word Competitive is doing real work. It gives Omni controllers full variable-speed control of up to three Pentair variable-speed pumps, including speed scheduling and custom speeds, not just on/off. Dealer listings note it also handles Sta-Rite signalling, which is Pentair’s family too.

Neither Pentair nor Jandy publishes an equivalent that adopts a competitor’s pump into their ecosystem.

So the asymmetry is:

Nobody quotes exit cost in a bid. But equipment outlives controllers — a controller lasts perhaps ten to twenty years, and the board inside it is the part a lightning surge kills first. When you replace it, this table decides whether your pumps come with you.

One nice detail: “Open Line” is Hayward’s online sales tier — the same designation that carries its reduced online warranty. The board that frees you from the ecosystem is itself sold on the channel with the thinner coverage. See does a pool warranty survive an online purchase.

Pick the tier by counting relays, not by reading marketing

Write down every device: main pump, spa pump, heater, pool light, spa light, cleaner, waterfall, spillway, landscape lights. That count is the specification that actually constrains you.

Two things that are not obvious from the badges:

• Jandy’s family is bigger than its name. A Polaris cleaner is inside the AquaLink ecosystem, not a third-party device.
• Capacity differs more than the marketing suggests. IntelliCenter scales to forty relays against OmniLogic’s twenty; OmniLogic handles four separate bodies of water. Those favour different pools.

Two things that decide this before the shell is poured

The plumbing order is a warranty condition

Pump → Filter → Heater → Salt chlorinator.

Reverse the last two and chlorinated water recirculates through the heat exchanger, corroding the copper. That is a four-figure part on a major-brand heater, and it will generally void the heater warranty — so an installer who plumbs the chlorinator ahead of the heater has cost you the most expensive component on the pad and its coverage at the same time.

Check it yourself when the equipment is set. It is visible, it takes ten seconds, and it is the most expensive plumbing mistake available on a residential pad. On Pentair specifically, systems above 80 GPM should also run a bypass loop around the salt cell.

One platform is end-of-life right now

Pentair’s EasyTouch and IntelliTouch are end-of-life, with limited factory chip supply for the legacy boards. A bid quoting either is quoting a platform you will be replacing, not maintaining. Pentair sells an IntelliCenter Upgrade Kit that swaps the board without replacing the enclosure — sensible if you already own one, pointless as a starting position on a new build. Jandy’s 1990s JI-series panels are in the same territory.

What we can and cannot tell you from our own data

We track 40 SKUs across these three brands — variable-speed pumps, cartridge filters, sand tanks, gas heaters, heat pumps, salt cells, chlorinators and in-ground lights. That is the basis for the warranty guide, and for the per-category rankings:

• Variable-speed pumps · in-ground cartridge filters
• Gas heaters · heat pumps by brand
• Salt chlorinators · in-ground lights

The honest gap: we card no automation controller from any of the three. This guide is the platform argument, not a ranking of OmniLogic against IntelliCenter against AquaLink — we have not put those on a test pad, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The capacity table above is compiled from published specifications and a vendor guide, cross-checked where a claim was load-bearing.

The catalogue split is itself informative, with a caveat: 22 Hayward SKUs, 12 Pentair, 6 Jandy, and Jandy has neither a variable-speed pump nor a filter tank among them. That is a statement about what reaches the retail and marketplace channels we track, not a verdict on the equipment. Jandy is the brand most aggressive about excluding internet purchases from warranty coverage — so less of it appears in a catalogue built on things you can actually buy online.

What we’d actually do

• Building new, no equipment yet: choose the controller first and buy its brand’s pump. Everything else follows cheaply. Spec the tier from the relay count, not the brochure.
• You already own Pentair pumps and want Hayward control: this is the one cross-brand path that genuinely works. Budget the HLPMPCONV into the job.
• You already own Hayward or Jandy pumps: stay on that platform, or accept that the pumps become on/off devices.
• Offered EasyTouch or IntelliTouch on a new build: decline. It is end-of-life.
• Mixing anyway: mix the filter and the tank, never the pump.

Whichever you pick, get the plumbing sequence written on the plan, and check it with your own eyes at the equipment set. And treat warranty as a channel question rather than a brand one — that guide has the verbatim terms.

The equipment pad is set during the deck-and-equipment stage of the build, but the platform decision belongs at contract, because it constrains every line item after it. See how a pool gets built.