What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant gives you the power of home automation without having to connect to any cloud services. So, you don’t have to expose your smart home devices to the internet and your usage won’t be tracked or sold to unknown, shady entities. Although connecting to the cloud can be useful, if your internet drops many of your devices would be rendered useless. In addition, a number of cloud services have terminated services, been bought, been hacked, changed service terms or simply just shut down the system.

Having said that, if you already have cloud-based smart home devices, such as Philips Hue, Smartthings, Amazon Echo and Google Home, these will work with Home Assistant to trigger automations or to report information back to the user.

The software is free of charge. It runs on a wide range of hardware platforms, and virtualised or container platforms such as Docker. It comes in 3 variants, Home Assistant Core, Home Assistant Operating System and Home Assistant Supervisor. Essentially, the Core is present to run Home Assistant, and the Supervisor allows you to interact with it. This is normally something for ‘power’ users and will not be covered in this article.

For many users, the Home Assistant Operating System option is by far the easiest to set up. This option contains both the Core and Supervisor, and very little experience is needed to install and run this.

The Home Assistant Core can run on a number of different platforms, including the Raspberry Pi, the Asus Tinkerboard, the ODROID and can also be installed on an x86-64 system (i.e. a PC or server). To keep things simple, articles on this site will generally tend to concentrate on the Raspberry Pi, however the vast majority of content is platform agnostic – in other words it’ll run on any hardware supported by Home Assistant. Where this is not the case we will indicate this.