Ask any smart home enthusiast about their platform of choice, and you’re bound to hear great things about Home Assistant. After all, it’s compatible with most of the popular smart devices, and the ones that don’t outright work with HASS tend to have a community-created integration or two. You’ve got easy-to-create dashboards to organize your collection of gizmos, alongside a dedicated logbook for keeping track of the status changes in your smart home.

However, it’s the customizable nature of Home Assistant that earns it the affection of the entire self-hosted community, with HACS integrations and custom blueprints making smart home management significantly easier. I, for one, also use the Add-ons Store to self-host neat services directly on my HASS instance, and some of these are so useful that I tend to rely on them more than any integration.

ESPHome

For some ESP32 shenanigans

Unlike SBCs, microcontrollers like the ESP32 may not have enough firepower to host Home Assistant. However, they can double as amazing IoT devices once you pair them with the right sensor modules, screens, and additional peripherals. Of course, you’ll have to program them with the right scripts, and that’s where ESPHome comes into the picture.

Rather than forcing me to create complex C++ code, ESPHome lets me flash simple YAML files onto ESP32, RP2040, and ESP8266 devices. It’s compatible with tons of sensor modules as well, so I can build anything from simple temperature sensors and vibration recorders to custom smart speakers and sleek ePaper displays. Plus, it links directly with Home Assistant, which makes automating ESP32 projects fairly straightforward – and that’s a godsend when you have many smart devices you want to link together with your RP2040 and ESP32 boards. ESPHome also supports OTA updates, and with most ESP32 microcontrollers supporting Wi-Fi connectivity, upgrading the firmware on these tiny boards is a cakewalk.

Mosquitto Broker

A lightweight yet powerful MQTT broker

MQTT is a low-power protocol supported by most smart home gizmos for exchanging messages, though you’ll need a broker device to establish communication lines between client devices. Available as one of the default add-ons for Home Assistant, Mosquitto Broker acts as the intermediary between MQTT devices by reading messages from publishers (senders) and routing them to the right subscribers (receivers).

By adding MQTT devices – including those designed with microcontrollers using ESPHome – as entities to HASS, Mosquitto Broker opens doors to some truly wacky automation workflows. For example, if my smart plug gets turned off, Mosquitto Broker reports the state change to my Home Assistant node before sending alerts to my mobile app. Likewise, when my temperature sensors report fluctuations in temps, the Mosquitto Broker and Home Assistant automations come into play and modify the thermostat accordingly.

NetAlertX

Control LAN devices from Home Assistant

Formerly called Pi.Alert, NetAlertX is a lightweight network scanner and intrusion detector that monitors my LAN around the clock. While its network documentation tools are fairly useful, NetAlertX’s utility jumps to the next level when it’s deployed on Home Assistant as an add-on. Technically, it relies on an MQTT broker like Mosquitto, and it's available as a third-party repo, but it’s a handy addition to any HASS user’s add-on kit.

By importing all my LAN interfaces as entities, NetAlertX lets Home Assistant access them just like any other smart device. I’ve created separate Home Assistant dashboards containing the LAN details of my servers as well as the oft-changing network stats of my disposable devices. Then there’s the automation benefits of NetAlertX, and I’ve created dedicated notification workflows to get alerted as soon as a new device attempts to connect to my LAN or a server meant to run 24/7 suddenly goes offline.

Node-RED

Perfect for complex automation flows

Although the trigger-action automation tools in Home Assistant work well when you’re a beginner, they can become annoying to configure when you need to work with multiple devices. Even with handy community blueprints, you’ll end up switching between pages and modifying larger-than-life YAML files. And don’t even get me started on the sheer pain of troubleshooting YAML configs with hundreds of lines of code just to find a single indentation error.

I tend to stick to Node-RED’s flow-based interface for automation chains involving more than three devices. Compared to unintuitive config documents, modifying the nodes and their links is fairly simple when I’ve got the entire workflow laid out on a canvas. Sure, it took me a while to get accustomed to its node-based interface, but adding nested automation chains, loops, and branching logic is a lot easier with the Node-RED add-on running on my HASS instance.

A few other add-ons to spice up your smart home game

Still on the lookout for other useful Home Assistant add-ons? The Frigate add-on lets you control IP cameras directly from Home Assistant, and I’d definitely be using it if I didn’t already have a Frigate instance deployed on my NAS and connected to my HASS server via an HACS integration. The Terminal& SSH add-on is also quite useful when I need to execute commands on my HASS server, while the File Browser is my go-to utility for modifying my Home Assistant config files for certain integrations.