Google Home, Alexa, and HomeKit are the most common options when building smart home setups, and for good reason. Their plug-and-play nature, low reliance on local systems, and cheap maintenance costs make them perfect for beginners, especially folks who have never tinkered with smart appliances and IoT gizmos. Me? I prefer Home Assistant over its cloud-based rivals, as it’s extremely customizable, supports practically every device in my household, and lets me create complex automations – all without exposing personal data to external servers.

I don’t need to hunt for devices from specific brands with Home Assistant

Even discontinued products and ESP32 projects are fair game on HASS

One of the biggest issues with typical smart home hubs is their limited compatibility with IoT products. You’ll probably have better luck with popular brands, but once you go down to the budget-friendly end of the spectrum, you’ll have a hard time finding stuff that works with your specific platform. And that’s before you include outdated smart home appliances that essentially turn into paper weights once the manufacturer drops all support for them (I’m looking at you, Belkin and your Wemo products).

Meanwhile, Home Assistant works with practically most smart gizmos right off the bat, including ones from seemingly obscure brands. Sure, you might occasionally run into unsupported devices, but one quick detour into the Home Assistant Community Store is all you need to get it up and running on HASS. Likewise, you’ll almost always find some talented tinkerer on GitHub restoring discontinued gizmos to their former glory by adding local controls for them on Home Assistant. And that’s before you include the custom devices you can build with ESP32 boards for HASS.

Home Assistant has better automation tools

Its rivals can't compete with multi-device trigger-action chains built with Node-RED

As if Home Assistant’s massive support for smart devices of all shapes and sizes isn’t enough, it also has killer automation tools under the hood. Rather than just controlling lights and smart devices using a mobile app or my voice (which I’ll get to in a minute), Home Assistant lets me create triggers from sensor entities and use them to force the IoT paraphernalia to perform specific operations. There are even community-created automation blueprints on the Home Assistant Community Store. That’s pretty much how I was able to get automated Frigate notifications working with my smart home hub.

Of course, designing automation chains on Home Assistant requires a little bit of elbow grease. But its simple UI is more than enough for beginners to get accustomed to designing trigger-action rules, and you don’t really need to learn YAML scripting to build functioning automation chains. Heck, I even use the Node-RED app (or add-on, if you’re a Home Assistant veteran) for my automations, and its node-based workflow is perfect for workflows spanning multiple gizmos. Sure, it’s technically possible to design routines with Alexa and Google Home, but they can’t hold a candle to the sheer number of automation provisions on HASS.

Home Assistant’s voice control provisions are just as amazing

My custom AI pipeline works well on my outdated hardware

Had I written this article last year, I would’ve conceded that Google Home and Alexa have better voice control provisions than Home Assistant. However, things are vastly different now that HASS supports voice satellite functionality on its Android companion app, which lets me trigger my entire voice assistant pipeline using hot words from an old phone instead of a wake-word detection channel involving microcontrollers and external microphones.

Of course, I still have to process everything on local hardware with Home Assistant, but I keep a spare rig for hosting LLMs, anyway – one that harnesses a mere GTX 1080 to run Qwen3 (8B) via Ollama. Likewise, I run faster-whisper (speech-to-text) and Piper (text-to-speech) on the same mini-PC housing my HASS instance, and this combo provides near-instantaneous responses to my queries. Since I can also use my LLM-powered setup to control smart devices and trigger automations, it brings Home Assistant to an even footing with its rivals as far as AI assistants are concerned.

Home Assistant may be difficult to set up, but it’s worth the extra effort

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: Configuring Home Assistant can be a challenge when you’re a beginner – to the point where your first week with this platform can feel like a nightmare. Even with all the QoL features (or perhaps, because of them), it’s easy to get overwhelmed by Home Assistant. But once you get accustomed to its quirks, you’ll realize that it can do a lot more than Google Home, Alexa, or HomeKit ever could.