If you're the proud owner of IoT paraphernalia, Home Assistant is an incredible platform that reduces the complexity of managing all your smart appliances. From remote monitoring features to its compatibility with most smart gadgets and IoT devices, Home Assistant can turn any dull living space into an automated fortress.

What’s more, it has a robust list of integrations and add-ons, and you can even add more plugin repositories to take your smart home setup to the next level. But since it can get tough to sift through the barrage of integrations on the web, we’ve compiled a list of the best HASS plugins you can add to your Home Assistant server.

10 Studio Code Server

Especially useful for editing the configuration.yaml file

If you’ve ever dabbled in Kubernetes or other containerization platforms, you may be familiar with YAML scripting. Home Assistant also uses .yaml files for most operations, including automation and entity/device management. While you can technically use the File Editor add-on, the VS Studio Code provides more programming-oriented features and is quite useful when you need to type multiple lines of code to get a particular config file working.

9 Mosquitto broker

To establish communication lines with your IoT devices

For those with a plethora of IoT products in their smart home setup, the MQTT protocol can be a godsend when you want to receive sensor data from all your devices. The Mosquitto broker (yes, it’s spelled incorrectly) is a fantastic plugin that facilitates the sending and receiving of messages between your Home Assistant device and all IoT gadgets connected to your home network.

8 Frigate

Though motionEye is a decent alternative

While you’ll need to add an extra repo before installing Frigate on Home Assistant, the plugin is worth using if you want to bring NVR capabilities to your smart home. Compatible with a host of different surveillance cameras and IP webcams, Frigate lets you set up remote monitoring, email alerts, motion detection, and a variety of other services to monitor your automated living space 24/7.

7 Samba share

NAS enthusiasts will love this one

If your Home Assistant setup involves capturing footage from surveillance cameras, there may come a time when you'll want to transfer the video files to your PC. That’s where the Samba share add-on comes in handy by allowing you to transfer files to and from your Home Assistant node via CIFS and SMB protocols, and you can even use it to turn your HA setup into a makeshift NAS!

6 Google Drive Backup

Backup everything

Like other computing devices, your Home Assistant node isn’t infallible, making backups just as important for your smart home hub as they are for your NAS and PC. True to its name, the Google Drive Backup add-on lets you save snapshots of your Home Assistant setup to your Google Drive. Sure, you’ll need to add a new repository for this plugin, but its rock-solid auto-backup provisions make it essential for any Home Assistant user.

5 ESPHome

For the microcontroller lovers out there

IoT devices and smart home peripherals have plenty of perks, but there’s nothing more fun than building your own smart projects using microcontrollers. Best of all, the ESPHome plugin for Home Assistant lets DIY tinkerers integrate any ESP32 and ESP8266 projects into their smart computing environment. Heck, if you’ve got the grit, you can go through the procedures to connect certain Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, and RP2040 microcontrollers to your ESPHome!

4 InfluxDB + Grafana

To see what's going on in your smart home

From network bandwidth to device temps, there are a bunch of metrics that you might want to monitor inside your smart home setup. InfluxDB is an application that aggregates important sensor data in a more complex, database-like format. Thankfully, it’s compatible with Grafana, which lets you display the statistics gathered by InfluxDB as graphs. Setting up InfluxDB and Grafana is also fairly painless, and so is linking the plugins together!

3 AdGuard Home

Pi-Hole on steroids

If you don’t wish to relegate a Docker container or a small SBC to a 24/7 PiHole server, you can set up AdGuard Home on top of your Home Assistant device to block ads on your local network. While certain users might prefer PiHole over AdGuard, I’m fond of the sleek UI and built-in DNS-over-HTTPS provisions offered by the latter. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use and doesn’t take up a lot of computing resources either.

2 Node-RED

Who says automation has to be difficult?

Although the UI mode in the Developer tools menu provides a somewhat straightforward means to automate your smart devices, you’ll need to learn YAML programming to create pragmatic automation scripts. The Node-RED plugin serves as a middle-ground between the two methods by allowing you to automate everything with the help of nodes. While it might seem unnecessary for smaller setups, Node-RED shines in complex setups where you may need to apply the same automation nodes to multiple devices.

1 Assist Microphone

Alongside Piper, openWakeWord, Whisper, and other complementary packages

Assistant Microphone and its associated plugins are amazing additions to your HA node, as they let you manage your smart home with just your voice. It’s by no means the easiest add-on to set up by any means, as you'll have to put on your tinkering hat and configure a host of other packages — including dynamic DNS add-ons — before you can interact with your smart home gadgets using just your voice. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you’ll be rewarded with a convenient method to control all your smart gadgets.

Making the most of your smart home with powerful Home Assistant add-ons

While these plugins are helpful for most users, there are a couple of other useful add-ons worth adding to your Home Assistant machine. For instance, you can configure Plex or Jellyfin add-ons to turn your Home Assistant node into a media streaming device. On the other hand, security enthusiasts might want to check out NGNIX Reverse Proxy and WireGuard, while RPC Shutdown is pretty useful for those who need to remotely manage their Windows devices from the Home Assistant web interface.