The sheer number of applications at your disposal is one of the best aspects of the self-hosted ecosystem, and each utility has its own rivals that bring cool features to the table. For private collaboration platforms, you can choose between Nextcloud, ownCloud, and SeaFile, while the password management space is split between Bitwarden and (my personal favorite) Vaultwarden. And I don’t even need to go over the Jellyfin-Plex (and Emby as well, I suppose) debate that’s been raging on for years.

However, Home Assistant is an outlier. While there are other applications designed to help you manage your smart home devices and IoT paraphernalia, Home Assistant is easily the crème de la crème for tinkerers with multiple smart gizmos in their living space.

Compatible with most smart home devices

Even more once you start using HACS

With smart devices becoming more affordable each passing day, you’re bound to come across seemingly obscure gadgets from no-name brands that require their own applications. Unfortunately, managing a battalion of smart devices from their own apps can get rather annoying, especially when the applications in question have terrible, poorly laid out interfaces.

Luckily, Home Assistant is compatible with multiple smart device manufacturers, ranging from premium brands to their budget-friendly counterparts. And that’s just the bare-bones version of the service. The Home Assistant Community Store adds even more integrations to the mix, and it’s precisely what helped me add some weirdly named smart lights I bought during a sale to my HASS setup.

Terrific automation provisions

Including community-made blueprints

Managing smart devices manually can get rather tiresome after a while. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend all day toggling your smart devices and configuring their settings. That’s where automations come in handy, as they allow you to modify the behavior of your smart home gadgets using pre-configured rules – and it’s an area where Home Assistant excels at.

The trigger-action automations inside Home Assistant make it easy for beginners to create complex workflows, though you also have the option to create YAML config files to automate your smart gadgets and IoT products. If you’re still intimidated by automations, Home Assistant also includes several blueprints created by its talented community, and these nifty scripts are tailor-made to help you deploy robust automations.

Customizable dashboards

To showcase (and manage) your arsenal of devices

When you log into Home Assistant for the first time, you’ll be greeted by an empty dashboard. But as you add your smart devices to Home Assistant, you’ll notice that it starts to fill up with a bunch of metrics, and you’ll be able to fine-tune its design to your heart’s content. However, it’s not the only dashboard at your disposal, as Home Assistant lets you create multiple pages where you can organize your smart devices, and this facility is especially useful when you’ve got multiple E-ink screens or LED displays to display your HASS setup.

Heck, you don't even have to create these dashboards yourself. The Home Assistant Community Store includes tons of cool dashboards you can arm your HASS setup with – and not just minor theme swaps either. From Floor Plan’s slick UI to the Weather dashboard’s heavy use of graphs, these dashboards can take your Home Assistant’s aesthetics to the next level.

Supports self-hosted LLMs

You can even add voice assistants to the mix

On its own, Home Assistant has a somewhat decent helper agent built into it. But if you’ve got a spare PC with a somewhat decent graphics card, you can put together a self-hosted LLM and pair it with HASS to get a private AI assistant that can respond to your smart home queries.

If you’re willing to go even further, you can throw in a microphone, a text-to-voice generator, and a voice-to-text model to build a voice-controlled AI assistant that can not only accept your vocal commands, but also respond to them. Having created this project sometime ago, I can confirm that the add-ons on HAOS (not to be confused with the containerized Home Assistant Core) make this process a cinch. While we’re on the subject of add-ons…

Add-ons for other services

Run your smart home stack directly from HAOS

Besides integrations and blueprints, add-ons are another aspect that makes Home Assistant the king of smart home services, which is kind of ironic, because they let you bring other useful apps to your HASS setup. Frigate is indispensable for surveillance systems, while an MQTT broker like Mosquitto is perfect for controlling IoT devices that use this lightweight protocol to communicate with each other. There’s also Node-RED, which is amazing for tinkering veterans who want a flow-based interface to create complex automations.

Thanks to the add-on store, you can deploy these services directly on your Home Assistant host instead of running them on a separate node and pairing them with your HASS setup.

There’s nothing quite like Home Assistant

This post may sound like me gushing about Home Assistant, but the platform deserves all the love. I recently tried using some Home Assistant alternatives to see how they fare against everybody’s favorite smart home management utility. But given their lack of compatibility with obscure smart devices, limited dashboard customization options, and cumbersome automation provisions, I found myself heading back to Home Assistant in less than a week.