Executive Summary of my post: Save your money for now.
The more verbose version of my post...
Since you term yourself a "noob", for that reason, I would avoid buying ANY controller at this point. Don't get me wrong... they are absolutely fabulous pieces of equipment. I have an Apex and wrestled with myself for a year before I bought it. I'm kicking myself for waiting so long. BUT... as with anything, the more complexity you add to things, the more chances for things to fail. Any controller, from any vendor, is a complex piece of electronics, put in close proximity to salt water, that is waaaay more than just a timer circuit. Lots of different ways for things to go wrong. Not saying they're not reliable... it's just that when you add a controller you kind of up the odds that something might go wrong over your basic setup.
When you're just starting out, you have a bunch of things to wrap your arms around. It's best to figure out how things can go wrong with the most basic set up before moving on to even more ways to screw things up! Put your lights on a mechanical timer, and your pumps/powerheads on a switchable powerstrip to enable you to initiate your own "feed cycle" buy turning everything off with the flip of a switch. If you want to get fancy, you can buy a controller for your heaters for less than $100.
But in my opinion, you really need to get the basics down before you move on to a controller. Read through some of the threads on that link I provided... there are a few folks going absolutely ballistic because their controller fritzed out and now "...my tank is sitting here dieing before my eyes. I can't believe they don't make these more reliable..." blah blah blah. Well guess what... great tanks were kept before controllers existed and if you don't know what to fall back to, then yeah... I guess it's going to be rough. But if you have those basics under your belt, it's no big deal to revert back to the "old fashioned way" until you can get things fixed.
As far as monitoring things to replace the test kits... like above, it's best to understand things at a basic (and cheaper) level before relying on electronics. (Again... just my opinion.) In addition, many of the things you're going to want to test for are not available on a controller for constant monitoring. Salinity and pH... yes. Alkalinity and calcium... no. Nitrates... no. Phosphates... no. They definitely *do* make digital meters that measure those things, but at this point they don't make them for the controllers I'm familiar with. So if you're looking at a controller to replace test kits... it's not going to happen.
I'm not against controllers by any means. They really do allow you to simplify your wiring around a tank, more easily control things the way you want to (turning powerheads on/off, feed cycles, automating top offs and dosing, etc), initiate certain actions if a power outage occurs, and keep tabs on your tank from across the world. Great units. And I love the Apex. I just wouldn't recommend it to someone that is just starting up a tank. Give yourself a year or two, then give it some thoughts.
Then again... that's just my 2cents worth!