Advice for those starting out or who haven’t used Home Assistant before:
If you have Apple devices or want a clean easy start with automations and hubs, either just use Aqara (their devices are great plus can do Matter support in app) or embrace Apple Home. Apple Home still remains the easy access point for my family, talking to Siri to quickly turn something on/off etc, and potentially ties in with their new movements towards smart home integrations and SiriAI.
If Apple Home is too simple or runs out of features for you, you’ve made it to the big leagues of smart home automation then don’t look anywhere else but Home Assistant. HA can do it ALL! I had played around with several other systems and Homey came close in a nice packaged interface but it still fell short. HA is becoming easier to use all the time with monthly updates, you can ask AI to build you dashboard cards/automations and you can just copy paste the code etc.
Then if it’s too complicated for family members, they can stick with Apple Home - keep it simple and do your fancy complicated stuff behind the scenes in Home Assistant.
Start with Apple Home, end with Home Assistant. No reason to look elsewhere.
But apple is easier for the family to use from their phone. Thinking specifically on controlling lights which is a simple but critical use case
Yes, that’s what I mean, keep Apple Home around for the family or simple stuff, but if you need deeper automations then go with Home Assistant to run behind the scenes.
I like also the approach to use both worlds in combination.
Can set up a lot with Aqara and have the benefit to the easy use from Apple.
Think of it as front-end and back-end. Apple Home/Siri are your front-end interfaces, while Home Assistant (or Homey as an alternative) runs your backend connectivity, device management, complex automations etc…
Wanted to say exactly the same! @coletti.robert
Seeing Apple Home as front end and Home Assistant as a back end makes totally sense. Having all or most automations set up and organizing all the devices in Home Assistant but having Apple Home for my wife and me as the main user interface is our way to go
We use Apple Home mainly for Siri commands. I have build a for us better to use interface for controlling our home in Home Assistant, less clutter, one view shows al you need.
As someone who has played with both HA and Homey and HomeKit - I moved over to Homey, mainly for the ease of writing automations. I also still have HA in the background, which does some of the interfacing between Homey and some devices that aren’t natively supported. OP why did you think Homey came up short?
I am currently using Home Assistant and Apple Home together because I found Apple Home to be too limited in what could be automated. I also like the way it makes it possible to use much wider range of devices that are not Apple HomeKit compatible. Though, Matter is starting to make this moot. Home Assistant has a fairly steep learning curve depending on how you are using it. I’m using Home Bridge to make non-HomeKit devices available to Apple Home. It works, but, took awhile to get the hang of, for example, it took a bit to figure out how to make filters for selecting the devices to include in the bridge. So, I don’t recommend wading into Home Assistant lightly with big expectations. The biggest mistake I made was that I failed to backup my Home Assistant configuration and then the SD card in my Raspberry Pi died and I had to start over completely. Sad. Now I’m running on an old-ish MacBook air. I do like Home Assistant, overall.
Do you add matter devices to Apple home kit first then home assistant? Or do you just add to home assistant and expose to home kit via the home bridge?
I use both. The wife has tried home assistant and she doesn’t like it. I love the powerful automations I can create.
For me it has worked best to add Matter devices to Home Assistant first, and then create a sharing code for Apple Home. Some of the brand specific apps (e.g. Tapo, I think) will then recognize their product is available on Matter when I next open the app, and I add it with a click. And at the same time, some of those apps don’t have a properly functioning Matter code sharing function, which is another reason to add them to Home Assistant first. I’m running apps on iPhone by the way. Sometimes it feels more like a magic home than a smart home. i.e., it’s magic when it finally works, or it’s magic when it works on the first try. Either way.
I have a Homey Pro Mini. Ran out of storage/ram. Sure the full Pro has more but it’s a lot more expensive too where HA was essentially free for what I had already.
HA can integrate with almost anything, Homey has reduced connectivity. It’s super easy to ask AI to write some YAML for custom cards and automations that I’m finding way more customizable and powerful than Homey.
Which is why I found that if I were to do it over again (point of the post) I would go to Home Assistant after Apple Home, as the money/time/effort to invest into Homey or other ecosystems, just wasn’t worth it.
If you need more than Apple Home, use HA as a powerful behind the scenes machine, and you can still use Apple for the ease of use for the family.
Yeah I agree. I try to add to Home Assistant first.
Add to Home Assistant first, almost always. If it’s matter then I’ll add via Matter to Apple Home, otherwise bridge a HomeKit only device.
You still control lights from your phone? How very early 21st century of you :-o
I don’t agree with this.
I do agree that HA has a great deal of integrations and some amazing automation capabilities.
However…
I have been burnt a few times now because developers of an integration have got fed up, and so it languishes.
HA has no HA (High Availability). So if your HA server goes down… you are completely screwed. Apple Home does have HA.
I have found HA’s Matter over Thread integration to be less than perfect. e.g. devices that are working in Apple Home are marked as unavailable in HA.
Don’t get me wrong here. I do use HA. I use it for some integrations into Apple Home (AH) that I could not do any other way… my old vacuum cleaners that do not natively support Matter for example. I also use it for energy monitoring.
But would I use it to automate my home? No. It is too flakey.
I’ve recently been doing something similar with my setup! The Home Assistant app is just too complicated for my other half. I enjoy using it but it’s also frustrating for me to quickly get to things. I’ve only recently discovered the app with automatically display the top 8 entities (think that’s what they’re called) but can override that with your own personaly 8. If you do less than 8, it will automatically suggest the remaining ones to make 8. Interesting stuff but no tutorial outside of reading their community guide or watching a crazy number of YouTube videos until you get to the actually helpful video.
Lots of good points here. HA is working for me primarily because of the kindness of strangers on this forum. What @siobhanellis wrote about high availability is kinda scary - which is why backups are so important (although not a guarantee.)
I use Apple Home for Scenes because Apple scenes are easily recognized by Siri (Hey Siri, Good night). I use HA for all of my automations other than scenes and it has been reliable.
Since I’m fairly new to HA - and because the home automation industry is in transition to Matter/Thread - I read a book, “Home Assistant for Beginners - Build a Smart Home without relying on the Cloud” by Haagenrud. A very good book, but I was burned by following its directions. It had me assign fixed internet addresses to my devices and give the internet addresses assigned to them “meaningful” names. So I did all of that and it completely messed up my system. Why??? All of my devices are Matter over Thread/Wi-Fi. Thread wants to handle its own environment and really doesn’t like my fixed assignments. The book is completely right if you are all Zigbee or Z-wave - which I am not. At least not at the top level. Homey has been very tempting for me - but for the cost.
You can really build very simple dashboards. I also have a Fire tablet that my significant other can use.
Above all, the possibilities in Home Assistant are just insane…
Whether you want to know if you need to water your plants:
Or whether you still need to charge or refuel your car. You can see everything at a glance.
And all in one app, not five apps from different manufacturers.
Don’t be surprised that the screenshots look so weird, because they’ve been translated.
@siobhanellis If you only have one Apple Home Hub and it goes offline, you’re screwed just the same. Apple Home doesn’t offer true high availability in an IT sense, but rather mere redundancy or a simple failover system.
Theoretically, HA can be made highly available. Since the technology behind it can run on Docker, you can utilize Docker in Swarm mode—a true enterprise orchestration tool designed exactly for clustering and zero-downtime. However, it requires significant effort: you need multiple servers, a replicated database, and a proxy to handle seamless failovers.
Furthermore, hardware protocols dictate the limits: With Zigbee, failover is possible (e.g., via network coordinators), but true high availability isn’t, since you can’t duplicate a physical coordinator. With Matter, on the other hand, true high availability is theoretically achievable through its multi-admin feature, allowing multiple controllers parallel access.
Ultimately, it’s just too much effort considering that outages are extremely rare when using reliable hardware. True enterprise high availability—where all systems scale with load balancing and continuous replication—simply isn’t necessary for a smart home.
My HA runs on a Synology NAS and I have never experienced a single outage. And if you really want it: Even with just two Synology NAS, you could easily build a simple failover cluster that matches Apple Home’s capabilities.
Edit: Okay, I take it all back… this is crazy: Zigbee2mqtt High-Availability controller prototype … is there actually anything that doesn’t exist for HA? Oh, wait, no—it’s just a failover, not true HA.