Smart home ecosystems such as Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home can be very frustrating. They’re not always compatible with smart home devices, you’re limited in what you can do, and they may not be hugely respectful of your privacy. There’s a free and open-source alternative that’s gaining ground fast.
Home Assistant Is the Answer to Your Smart Home’s Biggest Issues
Command a vast range of devices, with or without an internet connection.
Home Assistant is growing fast
The numbers don’t lie
Home Assistant started life as a small project for Paulus Schoutsen, who wanted to see if he could control his Philips Hue bulbs locally using the Hue API and some Python code. This small project grew and grew into the popular open-source smart home software that exists today.
Home Assistant may have started small, but it’s now bigger than ever. Home Assistant hit an estimated one million installations in 2024, and that number had grown to two million by 2025. The 2025 Octoverse report also showed that Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open-source projects by contributors.
Home Assistant is still a long way behind closed-source systems such as Alexa, which has tens of millions of users. However, Home Assistant is currently growing much faster than the major smart home ecosystems.
What Home Assistant can offer that Alexa and Google Home can’t
Privacy, compatibility, and no subscriptions
Why is Home Assistant so popular? There are several reasons, but one of the biggest is privacy. The Open Home Foundation, of which Home Assistant is a part, is built around the three central tenets of privacy, choice, and sustainability. Home Assistant was built with privacy in mind.
The key to Home Assistant’s privacy is local control. Smart home systems such as Alexa and Google Home send commands and other smart home information to cloud servers to be processed. It means information about you and your home ends up on the servers of major corporations, many of which don’t have the best records when it comes to privacy.
Home Assistant is intended to make it possible to run your smart home locally. With the right integrations and smart home devices, you can run your smart home without any data having to leave your home, which means nothing ends up on third-party servers. In practice, some devices may need to use cloud services to work, but it is possible to set up a smart home that can run completely locally.
Another reason why Home Assistant is popular is that it doesn’t have the same compatibility issues that some other platforms have. For example, if you buy a smart home device, it may say on the box that it’s compatible with Alexa and Google Home, but not mention Apple Home. A device that works with Apple Home may not work with Alexa or Google Home.
Home Assistant doesn’t care what brand your device is or which major smart home systems it’s compatible with. You can connect a huge number of devices from a wide range of brands, and they will all work together.
You can also use Home Assistant for free and without advertising. While you can pay for a Home Assistant Cloud subscription to access some useful features, such as secure remote access, you don’t need this subscription to use Home Assistant.
Getting started with Home Assistant has never been easier
Be up and running in minutes
Home Assistant has been around for many years, but its popularity has really grown in the last few years. This is partly because it’s becoming increasingly accessible.
In the past, one of the biggest issues with Home Assistant was that it came with a steep learning curve. A lot of the configuration and automation had to be written in YAML notation, which was off-putting to general users.
In recent years, there have been vast improvements to the automation editor, which makes it much easier to build automations using a visual UI rather than having to write any YAML. You can now do a lot without ever seeing a line of YAML at all.
Another issue was that Home Assistant is self-hosted, so the setup was much more complex than just buying an Echo smart speaker and connecting it to your Amazon account. The release of the Home Assistant Green has made things much simpler. This is a dedicated smart home hub that comes with Home Assistant pre-installed, so you can just plug it in, connect an Ethernet cable, and you’re ready to get started.
- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
You don’t need to start from scratch
Home Assistant will work with what you already own
If you’re getting fed up with all the unwanted ads on your Echo Show or your smart home devices not being compatible with Apple Home, you might be tempted to give Home Assistant a try. You may also have concerns about having to build a new smart home from the ground up.
The reality is that if you already own smart home devices, you’ll almost certainly be able to add them to Home Assistant. In fact, when you first launch Home Assistant, it may automatically discover many of your smart home devices and ask you if you want to connect them.
The best part is that if you have any devices that aren’t compatible with your current smart home system, you should be able to add those to Home Assistant, too. You can even integrate Home Assistant with your current smart home, using your Echo smart speakers to trigger Home Assistant automations, or control devices connected to Home Assistant via the Apple Home app.
Give Home Assistant a try
I’ve been using Home Assistant for many years, and it’s honestly my favorite piece of software. If you’re tired of handing all of your data over to major corporations just to be able to turn on your lights, then it’s definitely worth checking it out.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
