Best Tools for Home Assistant: Addons, Integrations, and Gear Worth Installing

Home Assistant is the open-source smart home platform that puts you in control of your own house. No cloud dependency, no vendor lock-in, just your devices, your rules. But getting the most out of it means knowing which tools, addons, and integrations are actually worth your time.

Whether you're just setting up your first instance or you've been running Home Assistant for years, here's what belongs in your toolkit.

Hardware: Where to Run Home Assistant

Before diving into software, let's talk about what to run it on. You have options.

The Home Assistant Green and Home Assistant Yellow are purpose-built boxes from Nabu Casa. They're designed specifically for Home Assistant and require minimal setup. If you want something that just works out of the box, these are the move.

Running it on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 5 is still popular, though SD card reliability is a concern for long-term use. If you go this route, boot from an SSD via USB. It's faster and far more reliable.

For power users, running Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine on a mini PC (like an Intel NUC or Beelink) gives you room to grow. You can run other services alongside HA without worrying about resources.

Zigbee and Z-Wave Coordinators

Most smart home devices talk Zigbee or Z-Wave, and Home Assistant needs a coordinator (sometimes called a stick or dongle) to communicate with them. The Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus and the SkyConnect from Nabu Casa are the most recommended Zigbee coordinators right now.

For Z-Wave, the Zooz 800 series or Aeotec Z-Stick 7 are the current favorites. Zigbee tends to be cheaper for devices, but Z-Wave has better range and less interference since it operates on a different frequency.

ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) is the built-in Zigbee integration, but Zigbee2MQTT is the community favorite for its flexibility and broader device support.

MQTT (with Mosquitto)

Speaking of MQTT, it's the backbone of many Home Assistant setups. The Mosquitto MQTT broker addon installs in one click and gives your DIY devices (ESP boards, Tasmota devices, Zigbee2MQTT) a reliable way to communicate.

MQTT is lightweight, fast, and works perfectly for the kind of small messages smart home devices send. If you're building any custom devices, you'll want this running.

Node-RED

Home Assistant's built-in automations are good, and the visual automation editor keeps improving. But for complex logic, conditional flows, and multi-step automations, Node-RED remains king.

It gives you a visual flow-based programming interface where you wire together nodes to create automation logic. Things like "if the washing machine power drops below 5 watts for 10 minutes, send a notification but only between 8 AM and 10 PM and not if we're away" are much easier to build and debug visually.

The Node-RED addon integrates tightly with Home Assistant through the companion nodes.

ESPHome

ESPHome turns ESP32 and ESP8266 boards into Home Assistant-ready devices using simple YAML configuration. It's an addon you can install directly in Home Assistant, and it handles firmware building, flashing, and OTA updates.

If you want a custom temperature sensor, a presence detector, an LED controller, or any DIY device, ESPHome is the fastest path from idea to working device. Devices show up automatically in Home Assistant once they're on your network, no extra configuration needed.

HACS (Home Assistant Community Store)

HACS opens up a massive library of community-built integrations, custom cards, and themes that aren't in the official integration list. Some of the most popular tools in the HA community started as HACS integrations before becoming official.

Custom cards like Mushroom, Button Card, and Mini Graph Card let you build dashboards that look incredible. Integrations for things like local Spotify control, advanced weather services, and appliance monitoring often live here first.

File Editor and Terminal Addons

Sometimes you need to edit a YAML file or check a log directly. The File Editor addon gives you a browser-based text editor for your Home Assistant configuration files. The Terminal & SSH addon lets you get a command line into your system when you need it.

These are basic tools, but you'll reach for them regularly when troubleshooting or making quick config changes.

InfluxDB and Grafana

Home Assistant records history, but its built-in graphs are limited. For serious data visualization and long-term data storage, the InfluxDB and Grafana combo is the standard approach.

InfluxDB stores your sensor data in a time-series database, and Grafana gives you beautiful, customizable dashboards. Want to see your home's energy usage trends over the past year? Temperature patterns by room? This is how you do it.

Companion App (Mobile)

The Home Assistant Companion App for iOS and Android is more than just a remote control. It turns your phone into a sensor, reporting location, battery level, WiFi connection, steps, and more back to Home Assistant. This enables presence detection, automatic routines based on whether you're home, and all kinds of location-based automations.

Backup Tools

The built-in backup system in Home Assistant works, but relying on it alone is risky. The Google Drive Backup or Samba Backup addons automatically copy your backups to a separate location. If your SD card or SSD dies, you can restore everything in minutes instead of rebuilding from scratch.

Voice Control (Local)

With the Year of the Voice initiative, Home Assistant now supports local voice control through devices like the M5Stack Atom Echo or custom ESP32 builds running the openWakeWord and Whisper speech pipeline. It's still evolving, but being able to control your home by voice without sending anything to the cloud is a compelling feature.

Final Thoughts

Home Assistant's greatest strength is flexibility, and that means there's no single "right" toolset. But the tools listed here form a solid foundation that covers most setups. Start with the basics, add complexity as your needs grow, and don't try to automate everything on day one.

The community around Home Assistant is one of the best in the maker world. When you get stuck, chances are someone else already solved the exact problem you're facing.