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The Neighbours

Scope: the other ways a house gets smart, and how Home Assistant sits among them — as replacement, as neighbour, or as the thing quietly running the others' devices. All of this chapter is documented from the projects' own materials; none of these systems was installed in the lab, and the chapter doesn't pretend otherwise.

The platform apps: Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung

The big four — Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings — are the default hubs most houses start with, because they arrive free with a phone or a speaker. Their strengths are real: voice control that works, polished apps, and Matter — the newer shared standard — making devices increasingly interchangeable between them.

Where households outgrow them is automation depth and locality. Their routines are simpler than chapter 5's rules, and most of their thinking happens in their clouds; an internet outage can leave a very expensive light switch unresponsive. Home Assistant commonly meets them in one of two arrangements:

  • Alongside: HA runs the serious automations and exposes entities to Apple/Google/Amazon for voice and for the family's familiar app. The platforms become microphones and windows; the hub stays the brain.
  • Instead: the platforms retire to speaker duty or leave entirely, and HA's own apps and voice machinery take the front of house.

Neither is a moral position. The alongside arrangement is where most mixed houses — which is to say, most houses — settle.

The other open hubs

  • Hubitat — a commercial box whose pitch rhymes with HA's: local execution, no cloud dependence. It differs in being an appliance with a vendor, a price, and a smaller, curated device world. Houses choose it for the same reason others choose HA OS over Core: somebody else maintains the platform.
  • openHAB — the elder open-source hub, Java-based, with deep roots in the European market and a rules engine from an earlier era of the craft. Respectable, overlapping, and mostly a matter of which ecosystem's documentation you prefer reading.
  • Domoticz and friends — lighter, older hubs that taught a generation the shape of this software. Named here because a house you inherit may run one.

The narrow tools that aren't hubs

  • Node-RED — flow-based automation ("wire the boxes together") that many HA households add beside the hub for logic that reads better as a diagram than as YAML. A complement, not a rival.
  • ESPHome (a sibling project in the same ecosystem) — builds firmware for ESP microcontrollers from YAML, so a five-dollar board becomes a temperature sensor, a blind controller, a presence detector that reports to HA natively. If chapter 4's coordinators are how devices arrive from shops, ESPHome is how they arrive from your workbench.
  • Zigbee2MQTT — an alternative border between Zigbee devices and the hub, speaking MQTT instead of HA's built-in ZHA. Some households prefer its device support and its independence (the mesh survives HA restarts). Two good answers to the same border crossing.
  • The vendors' own hubs — the Hue bridge and its kin don't become useless when HA arrives; HA integrates with them happily, and a bridge often keeps doing firmware updates and its own scenes. Coexistence is the norm, not the exception.

The pattern underneath

Every system in this chapter makes the same three choices — where the thinking lives (cloud or house), how devices arrive (which radios and standards), and who maintains the platform (a vendor, a project, or you). Home Assistant's particular answers — house, nearly all of them, and a project with a company behind it — are why this guide exists, but the questions are the portable part. Ask them of any box a shop tries to sell you, and the answers will sort it into this chapter's map faster than any review.

Check: given a gadget that "works with Alexa," you should now be able to say what that does and doesn't settle — voice window, yes; where the automations live and whether they survive the internet dying, still to ask.