During my early tinkering days, I got into Home Assistant simply because it supported most of the smart home devices in my arsenal. But what really made me stay in the HASS ecosystem was the sheer level of customization in Home Assistant. And I don’t just mean the trigger-action automations, useful add-ons, and powerful community-created blueprints that I could deploy on this smart home management platform, either.

Home Assistant also lets me create dozens of dashboards, which I can customize to my heart’s content using multiple built-in and HACS cards. But considering all the cool HASS cards out there, choosing between them can get tricky, especially since many of them share the same functionality and offer slightly different UI elements. So, here’s a quick collection of all the cards I use to make my Home Assistant dashboards more functional.

Bubble Card

It works exceedingly well on mobile UIs

Most of the Home Assistant cards with interactive elements tend to have big, bulky layouts that, despite looking fairly decent on the web UI, can seem somewhat convoluted on the mobile app. Worse still, when you stack too many of these cards, they can make your HASS dashboards look like a disorganized mess of icons, menus, and toggles. Bubble Card solves this by letting you create minimalist-looking header cards that can be expanded to display entire stacks of toggles and buttons vertically as pop-ups.

Since these pop-up elements are typically hidden, you get a clean-looking interface that looks especially gorgeous on a smartphone. The cards also span different categories, ranging from simple switches and sliders to calendars and media players. You can even enable different interactions for the bubble cards by setting tap, double-tap, and hold actions. It may seem somewhat difficult to configure with all the extra settings, but Bubble Card’s neat elements make it worth installing, especially if your dashboards need some tidying up.

Ultra Card

With a shout-out to Mushroom Cards

Home Assistant, like many self-hosted services, involves quite a bit of YAML coding. Although YAML is really easy to pick up, it can get rather aggravating when you’re writing paragraph-long code just to create a dashboard. That’s where Ultra Card comes in handy, as it lets you create highly-detailed HASS dashboards using a simple drag-and-drop menu containing different modules.

Each card includes different rows you can stack under it, and you can stack up to two containers, which, in turn, house a bunch of modules ranging from images, text, and graphs to camera feeds, Markdown content, and sensor gauges. Better yet, Ultra Card is compatible with common HASS entities and different card types, including Bubble Card elements. It also includes a plethora of pre-defined templates, so you don’t have to spend too much time with the layout editor.

The Mushroom Cards package also deserves a mention, as it provides an equally simple means to create beautiful dashboards using a collection of pre-existing UI elements. Ultra Card is slightly more detailed for my tinkering needs, otherwise, I would’ve used Mushroom Cards as my go-to package for customizing dashboards. That said, it’s possible to add Mushroom Cards within Ultra Card’s modular rows and columns if you want the best of both worlds.

Compact Power Card

It convinced me to buy more smart plugs

Monitoring the power consumption metrics of typical home appliances is one of the most effective ways to use Home Assistant – and I say that as someone who only recently started tracking the energy drawn by my server nodes. And I must admit, watching the wattage numbers shoot up in real-time on my Home Assistant dashboard is what made me modify the power settings on my computing hardware.

The Compact Power Card kicks this notion up a notch. Rather than simply aggregating the power consumption recorded by my smart switches, it can also pull the grid voltage, battery capacity, and PV energy info from your HASS sensors. Then, it uses them to generate power flow diagrams and displays everything in a color-coded card.

RSS Accordion and HA Price Timeline cards

To view RSS feeds and price statistics on my dashboards

If you’re as much of a tinkering nutcase as I am, you’ve probably added self-hosted tools and smart home equipment to your HASS dashboards. That said, Home Assistant is versatile enough to accommodate plenty of other statistics – including data that has nothing to do with your home.

For example, you can configure the Feedreader integration to add RSS/Atom stories to your Home Assistant as entities. Then, you can grab the RSS Accordion integration from HACS to add them as cards to your dashboards. Likewise, you can set up Tibber, Nord Pool, easyEnergy, or other price-tracking integrations, and use the entities generated by them as sources for HA Price Timeline cards.

Some other Home Assistant cards to level up your dashboards

If you’re still on the prowl for more HASS cards, I’ve got a couple of suggestions. For example, when you've got a Mealie instance connected to HASS, you can download its card from HACS to pull individual recipes into your Home Assistant dashboard. For Plex lovers, you can add the Upcoming Media Card to get interactive widgets for your recently added movies and soon-to-be-released media. The Animated Weather Card also deserves a special mention, as it turns static weather cards into cool widgets that change animations depending on the data from your temperature and humidity sensor entities.