Home Assistant

What hackers pick instead

• Apple HomeViewA smart home control screen with multi-user Face ID, suited to kitchens and older relatives; critics say it duplicates a phone, and Siri and the Home app are weak.95recommend
• Zigbee2MQTTPeople recommend it as an open-source bridge that connects many Zigbee devices to MQTT and Home Assistant, often more reliably than alternatives. One critic notes it can use several hundred MB of RAM.16recommend
• HomebridgeLets non-HomeKit smart devices work in Apple Home, and people find it solid and handy for remote access without port forwarding.13recommend
• Home Assistant GreenPeople recommend it as a smooth, easy default for running Home Assistant at home, with few issues reported afterward. One commenter reported storage problems.6recommend
• Samsung SmartThingsRecommended as the best off-the-shelf smart home platform, especially inside its own ecosystem. Critics mainly object to new API fees and missing local control.5recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 494 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “"I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"”

2. 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.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)”

3. 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.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days”

4. Now anyone can put together complex self-hosted home automation with inexpensive Zigbee/ZWave devices and a Raspberry Pi hosting Home Assistant.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore”

5. they keep an open ecosystem with support for plugins, and for example for Zigbee, they implement the 'quirks' of your device into the framework

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products”

6. 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!

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?”

7. 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

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard”

8. HA is pretty clunky and there's a lot of manual setup. But I have a voice assistant contained entirely within my local infrastructure.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time”

9. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price”

10. 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.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

11. Nowadays, you can buy a local Home Assistant hub (or make one using a Pi) and have all your stuff only connect to a local server.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “AI's Dial-Up Era”

12. the fundamental value proposition of a local home assistant which over and over again preaches keeping things local and private

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

13. connect your Apple calendar or Google calendar to Home Assistant directly and just set up an automation there no script needed

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office”

14. Use home assistant, and program in a second stealth thermostat controlled by the first, that allows you to 'nudge' the values.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware”

15. I have more than 50 entities in HA, there isn't a company in the world that could make a single one of them stop working.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion”

16. Everything is now in a neat, cron-triggered Home Assistant automation with events instead of questionable 'sleep' lines.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Termux”

17. the Home Assistant integration (currently in beta) would cover most of them since HA supports pretty much everything

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN: Itsyhome – Control HomeKit from your Mac menu bar (open source)”

18. I set up HA from scratch on a new mini PC with Proxmox and HAOS in about 30 mins having never touched either before.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

19. Home Assistant is FOSS, integrates with every device you own, and much more advanced than any proprietary platform.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Samsung Family Hub for 2025 Update Elevates the Smart Home Ecosystem”

20. I was and am and avid Home Assistant fan but the number of automations/scripts I now have is higher by a magnitude

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Making”

21. Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant is really fun, especially if you try to create your own self-hosted voice assistant

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?”

22. gives you full control of your devices, you don't need internet access or any cloud subscription to control them

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products”

23. I just take random cheap Matter devices out of the box, scan the QR code with HA, power them up, and they work.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why the Smart Home Bubble Popped”

24. Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Why the Smart Home Bubble Popped”

25. if you're not the kind to be entertained by debugging your home's operation then it can feel like a chore

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

26. 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

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

27. It should be off by default, just look at the replies you're getting by people that are seriously considering not using HA

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

28. I’ve deliberately avoided home-assistant since this kerfuffle where frenck was quite rude to the NixOS maintainers.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

29. Things like this is a huge surprise that gives me pause to wonder what else it's doing that I wouldn't approve of.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

30. His judgement is so poor we simply can't trust him to make correct decisions about the software he is building

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets”

31. The releases over the past year have reworked a lot of things to be more intuitive for casual users while also being more flexible for power users, but there is still a lot of ground left to cover.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours”

32. I've been helping my non-tech father with Home Assistant. I've honestly been shocked with how far "community extensions" + "user configuration" can take you.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: Declarative vs. Imperative”

33. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers instead of bricking them”

34. I have had the opposite experience; I have an old trash intel NUC with a decent SSD and a moderate amount of RAM and it runs several services

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

35. HA doesn't actually have any major dependencies outside of what pip installs, so setup wasn't any more annoying than via container.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

36. Not the best solution, but certainly an alternative from messing around with trying to get the phone to work without a battery.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “My server is a phone now”

37. it's a hell of a lot easier to get started with Home Assistant than it is to get started with something like KNX or Crestron

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why the Smart Home Bubble Popped”

38. being able to set the house for "away" mode or make sure you shut off all the lights when you are all in bed is really nice

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard”

39. there's just so much weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products”

40. I tried home assistant years ago, but aside from the wealth of plugins I didn't find its approach particularly convincing.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Google has officially turned these Nest thermostats back into dumb thermostats”