Home Assistant apps elevate your Home Assistant by adding features and capabilities that truly make a functional smart home. With Home Assistant apps, you can automate your home with drag-and-drop automation flows, connect more devices using protocols such as Z-Wave and Matter, enable remote access, AI pipelines, and more!
This is our list of the top 15 must-have Home Assistant apps.
Home Assistant Apps vs. Add-ons
FYI, Home Assistant apps and add-ons are the same thing!
In the February 2026 release, Home Assistant renamed add-ons to apps to better distinguish them from integrations. There are many Exisign add-ons, so it will take time for them to update their terminology. If you see Home Assistant add-ons, know they’re the same as Home Assistant apps.
Home Assistant Community Store
One of the most important Home Assistant apps is HACS, also known as the Home Assistant Community Store. HACS is where you find most of the smaller features and add-on projects for Home Assistance. This app has over 5,000 stars on GitHub and is basically a marketplace for Home Assistant features like:
- Custom Integrations
- Dashboard Cards
- Home Assistant Themes
If you’re looking to add a custom theme to your Home Assistant, this is the place. You can find thousands of pre-made themes in HACS, most of which you can continue to customize to your liking.
HACS is also the home of advanced Home Assistant integrations that aren’t included in the built-in integrations. Popular examples of custom integrations in HACS include Google Nest, Xiaomi Home, Midea AC LAN, LLM Vision, Anker Solix, WebRTC Camera, and more.
HACS also offers numerous ways to build advanced Home Assistant dashboards. An example is the WebRTC Camera, which lets you add a dashboard card with a live camera stream directly to your Home Assistant dashboard.
Homeway
Homeway.io is a Home Assistant community project that enhances your Home Assistant with powerful smart home tools. The Homeway app for Home Assistant creates a secure connection to enable remote access and other features. There’s so much you can do with Homeway, it enables free features like:
- Secure Home Assistant Remote Access
- Alexa & Google Home Integration
- WebRTC Camera Streaming
- Home Assistant Assist AI Pipeline
- Home Assistant iOS & Android App Support
Homeway focuses on delivering these powerful features through an easy-to-set-up, no-maintenance-required Home Assistant app. The Homeway remote access system uses a worldwide server network to provide fast remote access without exposing your Home Assistant to the public internet. Alexa and Google Home integrations are one-click installs from the Alexa or Google Home app.
Sage AI is Homeway’s Home Assistant Assist AI pipeline that works with Home Assistant Voice devices or from your dashboard, and it’s just as easy to set up. It offers free, low-latency, multilingual speech-to-text; over 50 lifelike text-to-speech voices; and a powerful ChatGPT- or Gemini-based LLM chat brain that can fully control your home and is fully customizable.
AdGuard Home
AdGuard Home is a free, open-source, network-wide ad & tracking blocker DNS server. AdGuard is an alternative to popular local DNS servers like Pi-Hole. AdGuard runs as a Home Assistant app, but will provide DNS protection for all devices on your local LAN from:
- Website Ads
- Website Tracking Technologies
- Malicious Websites
The Home Assistant AdGuard app is extremely easy to set up and provides a full, intuitive WebUI to configure and manage your local DNS server. Having a local DNS server can also speed up your internet browsing, since common DNS lookups are cached locally and resolved quickly.
Local DNS servers like AdGuard not only protect you online; they also block tracking and telemetry from smart home devices such as TVs, washing machines, 3D printers, cameras, and more.
Node-RED
Node-RED is a visual coding platform that enables powerful Home Assistant automations using an easy-to-understand event flow. In a nutshell, you can use just about anything in Home Assistant to trigger a Node-RED event flow, and the event flow can provide advanced processing, flow control, and multiple output results.
To illustrate, let’s use an example. Say you want to unlock the door and turn on the lights when your family members get home, but you want the lights to turn on dynamically based on who is arriving. In Node-Red, you can set up a flow that triggers when a geofence is crossed from the Home Assistant app on your family member’s phone. The flow could always unlock the door and then, conditionally, turn on a set of predefined lights depending on who had just arrived.
Node-RED is highly powerful, and the possibilities are nearly endless. It integrates deeply with Home Assistant to enable just about anything you can imagine.
Music Assistant
Think Spotify, but open-source, local, and running in Home Assistant! The Music Assistant app for Home Assistant is a new initiative from the Home Assistant team.
Music Assistant features:
- Multiple music sources include local files, linked services such as Spotify, and more.
- One library to organize all of our music from different sources, de-duped, and with internet-provided metadata.
- Gapless, crossfade music playback with volume normalization.
- Synchronous playback across different device types.
- Hassle-free streaming of your music, even remotely when you’re on the go!
If you’re a big music fan and want your local music files synced into a shared library with your favorite music sources like Spotify, you should check this out. You can set up any speaker device in your home for playback, including Sonos, Home Assistant Voice Devices, ESPDevice, Google Home devices, and Alexa speakers.
Music Assistant has standalone iOS and Android apps that enable you to access, manage, and stream your entire library from anywhere, even when you’re not at home.
Studio Code Server
Studio Code Server is a Visual Studio Code text editor instance running on your Home Assistant. It’s an essential tool for Home Assistant users, providing:
- The ability to easily edit and change the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file.
- Managing, browsing, moving, and deleting Home Assistant system files.
- Easy file uploading and downloading to your Home Assistant server.
Its primary use is editing the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file, which almost every user needs to do at some point. Rather than editing the configuration file via a command-line editor over SSH, Studio Code Servers provides a rich web text editor with syntax highlighting and YAML linting to ensure the format is correct.
Valutwarden- Bitwarden
Bitwarden is an open-source, self-hostable password manager. The Vaultwarden app for Home Assistant enables easy Bitwarden self-hosting in your Home Assistant server. The Valutwarden app enables a one-click install for self-hosting and setting up Bitwarden, making it a standout Home Assistant app.
Using a password manager is essential for internet security in 2026. There are many strong options, such as 1Password and Bitwarden. You can either pay a low monthly fee to the Bitwarden team to use cloud-hosted Bitwarden, or you can self-host your own Bitwarden server for free.
Bitwarden synchronizes your passwords across nearly every platform, including iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, and popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge. The Valutwarden app for Home Assistant keeps your passwords secure, and with Home Assistant remote access via Homeway, you can access your Bitwarden vault from anywhere.
Terminal & SSH
The Terminal & SSH app for Home Assistant does what it says: it provides a full web-based terminal for your Home Assistant server and SSH access. Having access to a web-based terminal for your Home Assistant server enables:
- Home Assistant system file editing
- Server process management
- Server performance and health monitoring
The Terminal & SSH app lets you enable the terminal and SSH independently, so you don’t need to expose an SSH server in Home Assistant to get terminal access. The SSH server enables other devices on your home network to connect to your Home Assistant terminal, which is useful, but you must ensure you set up appropriate security measures to keep it secure. Getting terminal access to your Home Assistant server is giving a device the keys to your kingdom.
Duck DNS
Quack quack! The DuckDNS app for Home Assistant makes it easy to update IP addresses with the free DuckDNS service. The DuckDNS app supports Let’s Encrypt and automatically creates and renews an SSL certificate for your custom domain name.
The DuckDNS app is one way to set up remote access for Home Assistant, but it requires some knowledge and ongoing maintenance to ensure your Home Assistant server remains secure. There are other alternatives you can explore, like Homeway, Nabu Casa, Cloudflare Tunnels, or Tailscale.
Samba Share
The Samba Share app for Home Assistant is the easiest way to share files across your network with Windows, Mac, or Linux computers. It can be configured with a secure password and made accessible to the network, exposing the files on your Home Assistant server.
Using Samba Share, you can easily view, upload, download, edit, and manage all files on your Home Assistant server directly from Windows File Explorer. This is another great way to make Home Assistant backups or to edit the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file.
ESPHome Device Builder
ESPHome (now called ESPHome Device Builder) is an essential central dashboard for ESPHome microcontroller users. It enables easy overviews and management of all the ESPHome devices on your network. The ESPHome microcontroller is a common, low-power device core used for projects such as simple temperature sensors, presence sensors, light controllers, and more.
From the ESPHome Device Builder web UI, you can track, update, edit, view logs, and jump directly to ESPHome devices on your home network.
Matter Server
The Matter Server app for Home Assistant is now the default way to connect Home Assistant to your at-home Matter Network. Matter is an emerging smart home protocol backed by major players such as Google, Apple, and others. Matter-enabled devices can easily connect to a secure home mesh network, enabling low-power control of smart home devices.
The Matter Server app for Home Assistant is the bridge that allows Home Assistant to join your home Matter network as a Matter Hub. After joining, Home Assistant will be able to see and control all your Matter smart home devices, including lights, thermostats, blinds, door locks, sensors, and more.
The Home Assistant Matter app runs as docker conntainer add-on. It was previously implemented using a Python Matter library but is now being ported to a Matter-certified Node.js Matter library.
Zigbee2MQTT
The Zigbee2MQTT is a powerful Home Assistant app that bridges Zigbee protocol devices with an MQTT server. MQTT is a simple, widely used message-based protocol that enables any device to subscribe to and receive messages from other MQTT devices on the network.
The Zigbee2MQTT app bridges Zigbee devices to an MQTT server, enabling MQTT clients to receive messages from Zigbee devices and send messages to them. Since Zigbee and MQTT are two very popular smart home protocols, this server connects the massive echosystems allowign them to work together.
Z-Wave JS UI
The Z-Wave JS UI app for Home Assistant is a powerful Z-Wave UI that lets you view and control your Z-Wave devices from a single web UI. Home Assistant has a built-in Z-Wave integration, but it doesn’t provide an easy way to view and manage Z-Wave devices, which is where the Z-Wave JS UI app comes in.
Backup To Google Drive
Backup to Google Drive is a retired Home Assistant add-on; it’s now supported directly as a Home Assistant integration.
Conclusion
Part of Home Assistant’s power lies in its incredible extensibility, evidenced by the vast array of Home Assistant apps, add-ons, and integrations. These are our top Home Assistant apps, but there are so many to pick from that it’s hard to choose.
There are many other Home Assistant apps, such as DuckDNS, Let’s Encrypt, Tailscale, and WireGuard, that enable remote access. UniFi Network Application, Grafana, Git, Nginx Proxy Manager, and Log Viewer, which allow you to view and control your dashboards directly from Home Assistant.
Join our Discord community to give us feedback on our picks and tell us what your top Home Assistant apps are!
