Home Assistant is the open-source platform with thousands of integrations, for people who enjoy building their setup. The trade gethome makes is breadth for less to do: gethome studio installs the hub with no terminal, Zigbee2MQTT and its broker come with it, updates come from the iPhone app and roll back by themselves if a build won’t start, and an agent writes automations from a sentence. It is younger, iPhone-only, and on your own Wi-Fi only, for now.
Both run your home on a computer you own, on your own network. Home Assistant is a toolkit you can build almost anything with. The shorter way there is gethome: a hub set up with no terminal, a native iPhone app, and AI that writes your rules from a sentence.
Compared with Home Assistant 2026.10, on 9 October 2026.
Setting up, updating and adding devices are a step each, and none of them needs a terminal.
A native iPhone app that already knows what every device is — there is no dashboard to build first.
Say what you want the house to do. An agent writes the rule — and saves it switched off until you say.
How each one does the same job, as of Home Assistant 2026.10.
| What | gethome | Home Assistant |
|---|---|---|
| Setting up | On a Mac, gethome studio prepares the card or finds a Pi on your network, then installs and claims the hub. Without a Mac, one command over SSH. | Buy a Home Assistant Green with it installed, or flash Home Assistant OS onto hardware you own; then finish in a browser. |
| Updating | From the iPhone app, Studio or a shell. A new build takes over only once it answers; one that doesn’t is rolled back by itself. | A release every month and fixes in between, with a backup taken before each update and breaking changes in the release notes. |
| Add-ons | Nothing to install: Zigbee2MQTT and the MQTT broker come with the hub. | Apps (formerly add-ons) and the community’s HACS add Zigbee2MQTT, a broker and much more — chosen and set up by you. |
| Zigbee | Through Zigbee2MQTT and a USB stick, found and started by itself. | Built in, or Zigbee2MQTT as an app — with a USB stick or Home Assistant’s own Connect hardware. |
| Matter and Thread | A Matter controller that pairs a factory-new Wi-Fi accessory itself. Thread devices work behind a border router you already own. | A Matter controller, adding devices through its phone app. With its Connect stick it can be a Thread border router too. |
| Other devices | No Z-Wave and no Bluetooth devices. Anything that can publish JSON joins over MQTT, by a documented convention. | Z-Wave, Bluetooth, ESPHome and thousands of integrations with local and cloud services. |
| A device it doesn’t know | An agent maps a Zigbee model the hub hasn’t met, on your own AI key. Without a key it still appears, flagged needs review. | It waits for support in its Zigbee integration, or for a converter or quirk written by hand. |
| Automations | Describe one in a sentence. An agent writes it, shows it as a flow and saves it switched off. Writing needs an AI key; running needs none. | A visual editor, YAML with Jinja templates, and blueprints others have shared. |
| Assistant and voice | Typed, or spoken through OpenAI’s live voice: it answers about the home and works devices and scenes, on your own key. | Assist, typed or spoken — with its own voice hardware and wake words, a fully local option, or an AI model you connect. |
| Apps | A native iPhone app, with widgets, and gethome studio on the Mac. No Android or web app. | Apps for iPhone and Android, and the whole interface in any browser. |
| Design | Every device gets controls that fit it, from one typed schema. Nothing to lay out. | An overview built for you, and dashboards you arrange card by card — as far as you want to take them. |
| Away from home | On your own Wi-Fi only, for now; rules keep running while you’re out. Remote access is planned as an authenticated relay. (soon) | Through Home Assistant Cloud, a paid subscription being renamed Home Assistant Link, or a setup of your own. |
| Notifications | None. A rule can write a line into the home’s history, and nothing more. | Push notifications to its phone apps, and to many other services. |
| Hardware | A Raspberry Pi or any 64-bit Linux machine. 2 GB of memory or more runs Matter and Zigbee together. | Home Assistant Green or Yellow, a Raspberry Pi, an Odroid, an x86-64 machine or a virtual machine. |
| Account and privacy | No account and no cloud of ours. AI goes to your own provider, and only after your phone has asked. | No account needed, and local first; its cloud is optional. |
| Licence and price | Free. The hub is source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial; AI costs what your provider charges. | Free and open source under Apache 2.0; the cloud subscription is optional. |
| Maturity | Young: first released in August 2026, and every release since is on the changelog. | More than a decade old, with one of the largest open-source communities there is. |
Home Assistant, as its own site describes it:
Home Assistant is a trademark of the Open Home Foundation; gethome is independent of it, and of Nabu Casa.
Here is what it does that gethome doesn’t — and which of it we’re building.
Nothing has to move all at once.
15 releases since August 2026, across the app, the hub and Studio — every one on the changelog.
Home Assistant is the open-source platform with thousands of integrations, for people who enjoy building their setup. The trade gethome makes is breadth for less to do: gethome studio installs the hub with no terminal, Zigbee2MQTT and its broker come with it, updates come from the iPhone app and roll back by themselves if a build won’t start, and an agent writes automations from a sentence. It is younger, iPhone-only, and on your own Wi-Fi only, for now.
For a home of Matter, Zigbee and MQTT devices run from an iPhone, yes. If you rely on Z-Wave, cameras, remote access, notifications or an integration only Home Assistant has, not yet — and the two can run side by side.
No. Rules are written by an agent from a sentence and shown back to you as a flow, and setting a hub up has no file to edit. Writing a rule needs an Anthropic or OpenAI key on the hub; running one needs none.
Yes. A Matter device in Home Assistant can be shared to the hub with a pairing code, so both control it. A Zigbee stick works for one of them at a time.
It is source-available: the hub’s code is public under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for homes, hobby projects and evaluation; commercial deployments need a license. Home Assistant is open source under Apache 2.0.
Not yet. Your phone and the hub talk over your own Wi-Fi, and rules keep running while you’re out. Remote access is planned as an authenticated relay that never needs a port opened.
No. The everyday app is gethome for iPhone, and gethome studio runs on a Mac; the hub itself runs on Linux.
Nothing, and there is no subscription: the app is free on the App Store and the hub is free for homes. AI runs on your own key, and costs what your provider charges.
Free on the App Store, for iPhone. Start with a demo home or your Apple Home, and add a hub when you’re ready.