Home Assistant is the only self-hosted app I'd never give up, and here's why

Published Jul 30, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Richard is the PC Hardware Lead at XDA and has been covering the technology industry for almost two decades. He's been building PCs since young, and when not creating content, you can often find him inside a chassis somewhere. It's always possible for a single, well-chosen application to completely change the way you manage and enjoy using your smart home and wider home lab stacks. For me, it's Home Assistant. This single platform transformed my smart home into something less painful to oversee and make changes to. It's also expanded into other areas of the home, some I didn't even know I would have wanted automated and tracked. Namely, electricity consumption and generation. Life before Home Assistant I never liked smart home tech before Home Assistant I was wrapped up in a few ecosystems for our smart home solutions, but I write that lightly. We maybe had a smart bulb or two, maybe an LED strip, and a Philips Hue Bridge to bring it all together. It was cool enough as a gimmick at first but quickly vanished once Prime Day was over and the novelty wore off. Still, I tried my best to incorporate these new technologies into our way of life, largely through the resident home assistant at the time, Amazon's Alexa. That's a perfect combination for creating the ultimate recipe for disaster. Alexa would decide some days it simply didn't want to parse through our commands and carry out the basic tasks through Philips' integration. Likewise, the Philips Bridge was fine for the most part, but it was limiting in a sense that not much could be added to it other than more Philips lighting. That's when I started to look beyond the more obvious additions to the home to see what really could be done within a smart home setting. The same went for our alarm system. I wanted something that could be easily controlled through our smartphones and other tech, which led me to Ring. We already had the doorbell, so why not go all-out and set up the full alarm system? Turns out, while it's pretty robust as a DIY solution for safeguarding your property, it's also not very open to others. There's very little you can do with Ring through Home Assistant and other services. Again, it's all largely locked down. There are hundreds of brands all making smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) hardware. Some of these are terrible and shouldn't see the light of day, but many of them are great, and that's where things can start to break down when you're locked into a single platform without room to grow. Enter Home Assistant, which completely changed the smart home game for me and actually made it something I didn't just set and forget but actually allowed me to better understand how everything within my home works. Bringing all the ecosystems together Integrations for days, automations limited by imagination Installing Home Assistant for the first time can be daunting due to just how capable it is as the foundation for a smart home. There's a lot to get through. Apps, automations, integrations, entities, sensors, and everything in between. If you're unfamiliar with coding, there's support for YAML and the like, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish outside of Home Assistant. Getting started with just a few devices is the way to go. I added a few smart plugs, but eventually I had my Philips bulbs—which luckily could be transferred over to self-hosted Zigbee (more on that later)—appliances, solar PV and battery storage system, and more all connected to Home Assistant. It's interesting how one can go from almost nothing with only basic automation and functionality, resembling that of a proprietary hub, to then flesh everything out and create the ultimate smart home solution tailored to an individual property. And that's the power of Home Assistant. It has the ability to bring all different brands and ecosystems together. Some more so than others, but there's a good chance the brand you purchase smart home products from will be supported in some way. There's even the potential for adding robot vacuum cleaners through the platform with full mapping, routines, and other elements all pushed through the integration. It all boils down to how deep the automation rabbit hole is traversed. Creating the ultimate Home Assistant It's all in the name which makes this the best self-hosted app Credit: Home Assistant really is the best assistant for the home. Having used it for a couple of years now, there's no returning to anything that came before it. Other self-hosted apps and services have most definitely had their uses, but there's something about firing up an app that can bring together various elements of the home. I've automated a few things to make it easier to get up at the crack of dawn. As soon as 06:00 hits, lights start to come on, and we're able to make a fresh start. Smart plugs inform us precisely how much electricity is being pulled by various devices, including PCs, parts of the home lab, and everything else that connects to an outlet. Then there's the solar PV integration, which is what I feel most accomplished configuring. If you have a solar PV system with an accompanying app, you're likely in the same position as I, where it's not really that much of a smart app, limited by a clunky UI and even worse UX at times. That's where Home Assistant can step in and take control of collating data and presenting it in notably easier formats. Instead of attempting to guess how the day has gone by moving between graphs and trying to look at all the numbers, Home Assistant's redesigned energy dashboard is amazing. The dashboard shows glanceable info on battery storage, solar PV generation, and consumption for the entire home. I can then choose to break all this down. Electricity consumption can be split into rooms and areas and by device. A chart clearly shows how demand is met by or surpassed local supply, and there's even a way to estimate the daily cost of grid import, which eliminates the need for me to log into my utility supplier's app to check usage. It seemed a bit much at first, to have this one app do everything (and then some), but I have been able to make full use of it, and I couldn't imagine not having Home Assistant as part of my self-hosted stack. Freeing up the Wi-Fi This is probably one of the coolest things about configuring a smart home, and that is Zigbee. Home wireless networks can quickly become congested when hundreds of clients are all competing for bandwidth. Your PC will be using the same airwaves as a laptop, appliance, phone, sensor, and light bulbs if they're all on the same Wi-Fi hardware. That's where other protocols such as Zigbee come into play. I love Zigbee, and all it requires is a broadcast USB dongle and a few minutes to set it up in Home Assistant. It does mean you will require specific Zigbee hardware to take advantage of this new segmented network, but it's well worth it. Separating smart home stuff from the wider LAN is a great idea, and it's just as seamless, if not more so. Each Zigbee device will also act as a repeater, allowing one to create a mesh network throughout the home without realizing. I have the primary broadcaster dongle connected to my server in the garage, yet all the devices around the home ensure I have Zigbee coverage pretty much property-wide. It's powerful enough for any smart home Regardless of whether you're rocking a few smart bulbs and plugs or have an expansive layout with Zigbee, vacuums, smart appliances, and SBC sensors, Home Assistant is what I'd always recommend to bring it all together. It's impressive, feature-rich, easy to use (once you've learned the ropes a little), and can be as powerful as desired, depending on how much free time is available to create all the various automations and scripts. This is a self-hosting must-have.