Home Assistant

Home Assistant is the world's most popular open-source home automation platform. It runs locally on your own hardware (a Raspberry Pi, old PC, or NAS) and lets you control, automate, and monitor thousands of smart home devices from a single, unified dashboard.

Home Assistant integrates with over 3,000 different brands and services — smart lights, thermostats, security cameras, door locks, vacuum robots, media players, weather services, and much more. Automations can be created using a visual editor or YAML, allowing everything from simple schedules to complex conditional logic.

The key advantage of Home Assistant over cloud-based smart home platforms like Google Home or Amazon Alexa is that it operates entirely locally. Your smart home data never leaves your network, automations work even without internet, and you control when and if devices get updated. The active community and rich plugin ecosystem (HACS) make it endlessly extensible.