The Best Home Assistant Hub
The Best Home Assistant Hub
Smart home power users, tinkerers or security conscious people choose home assistant as the control center for their smart home. We'll go through all the options and help you find the best home assistant hub to get you started in your smart home. Keep reading to find the best stand alone home assistant hub, the best tinkerer home assistant hub and the best multi feature home assistant hub.
The Best Stand Alone Home Assistant Hub
Hubitat Elevation
The Hubitat Elevation is our choice for the best home assistant hub that strictly does home assistant. The current c-7 model is the latest offering from hubitat and will connect with your z-wave, zigbee and wifi smart devices. All data you send to this devices stays on the device unlike other stand alone hubs that rely on cloud servers from third parties. This will help prevent a smart home failure like what Insteon users recently experienced. Furthermore you'll know your data will be secure on your own device that you control.
The Elevation c-7 is small and can be stored out of sight with your router since you will control it with a smart home app and the each of your zwave and zigbee devices act as an antenna repeater for the rest of the devices on your network. If you use Lutron devices for lighting you'll need to purchase a Lutron Smart Bridge to interact with your lighting. All other zwave, zigbee and wifi devices will work right out of the box allowing you to have total control of your smart home.
You can purchase the c-7 for around $99 at the time of writing but it's been seen as low as $88 at times. Given the current supply chain issues with microchips I wouldn't expect the price to drop anytime soon.
A Challenger Appears
Home Assistant Yellow
Home Assistant and Nabu Casa have finally teamed up to release the Home Assistant Yellow hub. The team is currently crowdfunding the development of the hub. Yellow has multiple configurations including allowing for POE power source and additional storage for user data. Given the support from the home assistant team this could be a great alternative to the hubitat c7 for use as a stand alone home assistant hub. We're very excited to eventually get our hands on one and do a review.
The Best Home Assistant Hub for Tinkerers
Getting started in smart home as a techie gives you many options to create a system just for you. You can expand the device beyond home assistant and also utilize it as a web server, an ad blocker, or a media server.
Single Board Computers
Single board computers or SBCs make the ultimate, highly configurable home assistant machine. SBCs are an entire computer on a circuit board around the size of a credit card. Despite the small size they pack a lot of power in a small package.
Raspberry Pi 4
The raspberry pi 4 is the latest version of the first popular single board computer. Raspberry Pi is backed by the raspberry pi foundation with a large community providing support. Users can quickly change versions of operating systems by writing images to the device memory to make changing the devices purpose a snap.
First, purchase a raspberry pi and the required accessories to get started:
Once you have the raspberry pi and install home assistant on it you'll then need to add a zwave and zigbee radio receiver to communicate with all of your smart devices. To communicate with zwave devices we recommend the zooz 700 series zwave stick. It's important to get a zwave stick that supports the seventh generation zwave protocol to future proof your system. Other usb sticks on the market usually only support up to generation 5 zwave. To connect to zigbee devices you should purchase the SONOFF zigbee 3.0 dongle. You are able to aim the external antenna to improve your zigbee network performance.
Best Home Assistant Hub For Multiple Uses
Synology DS220+ NAS
The Synology Disk Station DS220+ is a perfect consumer grade NAS that can also double as a home assistant hub and media server. This expandability allows it to become the center of a connected home without a large amount of technical knowledge to get up and running. First, purchase a Synology DS220+ NAS and one internal hard drive for network storage to get started. Then follow the easy Synology setup guide to get your device setup as a NAS. Finally, install home assistant on your server with a docker image. Then, just like the raspberry Pi, add a zwave and zigbee receiver to allow your server to connect with your devices.
Get Started
Pick out your hub you're ready to get started into home automation. Keep it simple with a stand alone hub like the hubitat. Create a complete home automation system with a raspberry pi. Or combine off the shelf components with some extra processing power by using a NAS to host your home assistant. Either way you will have a great entry into home automation.