Home Assistant: self-hosted smart-home control
One private app for every smart-home device. What Home Assistant is, what it is known for, and why people run their own smart-home hub.
Home Assistant is an open-source hub that brings every smart-home device into one private, local app — no cloud account required, no vendor deciding when to shut their servers down.
What it is
A home-automation platform you run yourself (on a mini-PC, a Raspberry Pi, or a VPS/NAS). It connects to thousands of device types, from smart bulbs and plugs to thermostats, cameras, and DIY sensors.
What it does
Integrates with an enormous range of devices and services — brands, protocols (Zigbee, Z-Wave via adapters, Matter, MQTT) and DIY hardware.
Automates — "if motion after sunset and nobody home, turn on the porch light and send a notification," expressed visually or in YAML.
Dashboards — build a control panel for your home, on the web and on mobile.
Add-ons — run related services (MQTT broker, recorder database, voice assistants) alongside it.
Voice control — with add-ons, local voice assistants so your home works without phoning a cloud.
What it is known for
Local control — your automations run on your hardware, so lights and heating work even if the internet, or the vendor's cloud, is down.
Breadth of support — the largest integration ecosystem of any smart-home platform.
Privacy — your behaviour and device data stay on your own server.
Why use it
Your home keeps working when a vendor's cloud does, and when you switch brands.
Everything in one place instead of five separate apps per device brand.
No subscription, and no data mining of your household patterns.
Powerful automations that vendor apps simply cannot express.
Where and how
Most people run Home Assistant on a device inside the home (a mini-PC or Pi) so it can reach Zigbee/Z-Wave radios and local devices — a VPS is great for the always-on network services and remote access, less so for radio devices in your house. Deploy with Docker, or the Home Assistant OS image. Back up the configuration and database, and expose it remotely only over TLS (or via a VPN) — a smart-home hub tied to your locks and cameras must not be open to the internet.