Home Assistant is arguably the best choice for anyone looking to start a smart home, but this is especially true for power users. If you want unhindered freedom to decide how your smart home functions and you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, there’s no better choice.
Home Assistant is as complex as you need it to be
I sometimes worry that my constant evangelizing of Home Assistant could lead some people down the wrong path. I am very aware that Home Assistant can seem quite intimidating to a newcomer. This is especially true when contrasted with closed ecosystems from the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Amazon.
First, you’ve got to install an operating system on a dedicated bit of hardware (or figure out virtual machines or Docker containers). You’ve then got to set everything up, master an at-times overwhelming interface, and figure out how to integrate your various devices into your new smart home platform. Along the way, you’ll encounter new terms like “integrations” and “entities.”
For some, mastering Home Assistant is easy. For others, it’s bordering on too much work. The good news is that, once you’ve reached this stage, Home Assistant can be whatever you want it to be. There’s no need to interact with it on more than a surface level from here on out; things don’t need to get any more complex until you want to take the next step.
Many of us stay at that point for a while, happy designing scenes and simple automations that turn lights on and off or trigger alerts. As you discover more features, the vast amount of potential begins to dawn on you. Your smart home grows over time as you invest more time and money, and so too does your understanding of the system.
Before you know it, you’re what many would consider a power user, and if you’re anything like me, you’re incredibly glad that you gave Home Assistant a shot and persevered in the first place.
Near limitless potential for automations
One area where Home Assistant truly shines is in its ability to design automations. When you first start out, you’re using simple triggers like a door sensor to trigger individual devices, like a light turning on. As you learn the ropes, you’ll discover the potential of conditional elements and other tricks like binary sensors.
You don’t have to use the included interface to design your automations, either. Home Assistant supports YAML markup throughout the OS, allowing you to write your own automations from scratch using your own code. YAML is designed to be human-readable, making it one of the more approachable ways to create something from scratch.
Blueprints also make it easy to implement complex automations without having to design them entirely by yourself. They can also help you learn more about creating your own automations by exporting the results to YAML in order to learn how things are made.
Lastly, C.A.F.E. (Complex Automation Flow Editor) offers a visual means of designing automations as if they were flowcharts. Not all power users are natural-born programmers, after all. This lets anyone produce complex automations that use compliant YAML that Home Assistant can interpret like any other automation.
Integrations for almost anything if you look hard enough
One of the main reasons to choose Home Assistant is its broad compatibility with a huge number of devices, ecosystems, and online services. Many of these have core integrations that can be added via the Settings menu in just a few clicks and configured using a straightforward user interface.
But not everything is included here. Sometimes you might need to look a little further afield if you want to add something that isn’t supported by the main release. This could be a weird line of smart home products, or a public transport timetable, or maybe a particular way of displaying data that Home Assistant lacks in its default state.
For this, we have the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS). As the name suggests, this is a third-party marketplace of sorts that gathers all manner of niche integrations in one place. The add-on includes a few thousand missing pieces out of the box, and you can add many more by adding GitHub repositories.
As an example, I’m installing a new air conditioning controller next week, and the product line is new. The manufacturer has yet to release an API, which means that Home Assistant integration is a little thin on the ground. Even so, one community member is already on the case with a makeshift integration, so I’ve added the repository to HACS in anticipation of the install.
It’s hacky and requires a somewhat convoluted setup procedure, but it’s a great example of the community in action.
Even if you don’t currently consider yourself a power user, Home Assistant gets under your skin. While you might find yourself quickly running into dead ends in terms of what can be achieved with a proprietary smart home platform, you’re far more likely to be able to find a path through with Home Assistant.
This alone is one of the best reasons you should give Home Assistant a try in 2026.
