Home Assistant
What is Home Assistant?
Home Assistant is an open-source platform for controlling smart home devices from a single dashboard, regardless of which brand made them. It supports thousands of integrations, from smart plugs and thermostats to presence detection and energy monitoring.
Why people choose it
- Works with almost every smart home brand, avoiding lock-in to one ecosystem
- Runs locally – automations keep working even if a manufacturer’s cloud service goes down
- A genuinely flexible automation engine, not just “if this then that”
Where to run it
Home Assistant is normally run at home, close to the devices it controls, rather than on a remote VPS – most smart home protocols (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth) need to be on the same local network. The VPS’s role is not to run Home Assistant itself, but to provide secure remote access to it.
Security considerations
Home Assistant should never be exposed directly to the internet through port forwarding. Use a VPN tunnel back to it instead, so the only thing reachable from outside is the VPN endpoint, not the dashboard itself.
Backup considerations
Home Assistant’s built-in backup feature snapshots the full configuration, including automations and add-ons. Schedule it to run automatically and copy the resulting file off the device it runs on – a snapshot stored on the same SD card it protects against is not a backup.