# Home Assistant 298 Hacker News commenters recommended Home Assistant and 75 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 2 years (17 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A free, open-source smart home hub that runs locally without cloud subscriptions and integrates almost any device, though setup takes real tinkering and technical skill. ## Why people recommend it - Local control, no cloud needed (7 comments): "Not only does everything still work in an internet outage, mine actively detects and heals most internet outages by power cycling the modem with a smart plug." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171075)) "Whereas really need more like the Home Assistant model, where peripheral devices may communicate over the network, but it's only ever over the local network." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012769)) "HA is pretty clunky and there's a lot of manual setup. But I have a voice assistant contained entirely within my local infrastructure." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545795)) - Integrates nearly every device (5 comments): "they keep an open ecosystem with support for plugins, and for example for Zigbee, they implement the 'quirks' of your device into the framework" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845942)) "Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867635)) "the Home Assistant integration (currently in beta) would cover most of them since HA supports pretty much everything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974889)) - Flexible, powerful automations (6 comments): "I then drafted an automation with hysteresis and damping that tries to aim for Net-Zero export/import (pv surplus/grid). It appears to work!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628338)) "adding an automation into HA for notifying me about forgetting to setup the dishwasher took a few minutes max and I only had to do it once" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121161)) "connect your Apple calendar or Google calendar to Home Assistant directly and just set up an automation there no script needed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542101)) - Easy install on Pi or mini PC (4 comments): "Now anyone can put together complex self-hosted home automation with inexpensive Zigbee/ZWave devices and a Raspberry Pi hosting Home Assistant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347630)) "Didn't have to mess around with anything, just ran the "vm appliance" or whatever it's called for hass and I was off to the races." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398173)) "I set up HA from scratch on a new mini PC with Proxmox and HAOS in about 30 mins having never touched either before." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400062)) ## What people warn about - Requires lots of tinkering and setup (4 comments): "I love Home Assistant for all of the reasons you list but I wouldn't say it "just works". It's the kind of thing that requires a lot of research and tinkering to get right." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966463)) "HA is pretty clunky and there's a lot of manual setup. But I have a voice assistant contained entirely within my local infrastructure." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545795)) "Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275560)) - Unrequested integrations eroded privacy trust (4 comments): "free (as in freedom) software should not betray the trust of its users by adding connected integrations that they haven't asked for or consented to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127761)) "the fundamental value proposition of a local home assistant which over and over again preaches keeping things local and private" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127954)) "It should be off by default, just look at the replies you're getting by people that are seriously considering not using HA" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50129402)) - Distrust of maintainers' judgement (2 comments): "I’ve deliberately avoided home-assistant since this kerfuffle where frenck was quite rude to the NixOS maintainers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50126316)) "His judgement is so poor we simply can't trust him to make correct decisions about the software he is building" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130921)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Apple HomeView](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-homeview.md): 95 recommend - [Zigbee2MQTT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zigbee2mqtt.md): 16 recommend - [Homebridge](https://hackerapproved.com/p/homebridge.md): 13 recommend - [Home Assistant Green](https://hackerapproved.com/p/home-assistant-green.md): 6 recommend - [Samsung SmartThings](https://hackerapproved.com/p/smartthings.md): 5 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Home Assistant", https://hackerapproved.com/p/home-assistant/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).