10 Reasons You Should Be Using Home Assistant

home assistant has been my smartphone platform of choice for many years and recently we've seen more and more people switching over to home assistant for their smart home needs but we've never sat down and talked about the reasons that i personally think makes home assistant the best smartphone platform out there so here are 10 reasons why home assistant might just be for you reason number one that i personally think gives home assistant the edge over other smartphone platforms is first and foremost it's local control now i did a video a couple of weeks back discussing why local control is important which you can check out up here so i won't go into too much detail but essentially the gist of it is that local control is better for speed reliability longevity privacy and a bunch of other reasons and i personally think that wherever possible you should make your smartphone devices and platform locally controlled particularly for critical and essential devices that you can't live without home assistant fills that position by being completely local itself meaning that it will work without internet so that you can control your smartphone devices if your internet did ever go offline assuming that you pick local devices too i think a local smart home platform is a must and so that is my first reason reason number two is that home assistant works with an insane amount of devices and services at the time of filming there is almost 2 000 integrations listed on the home assistant website with hundreds and hundreds more being developed by the community through the community store and even posted on github this doesn't even take into consideration individual z-wave and zigbee devices for example zigbee is listed as one integration on the home assistant website but that doesn't account for the hundreds or even thousands of individual zigbee devices that will also work with it if you're looking at purchasing a particular smart home device chances are that it probably works with home assistant either with official support or through community support and if it doesn't then there may just be a good reason for that speaking of community home assistance incredibly strong community is reason number three from the community members who contribute code to home assistant updates every month to developers who make integrations for new devices new dashboards themes and also the members who are there to offer support and assistance through the official forum discord facebook groups reddit and so many other places the home assistant community is stronger than it's ever been i've used and been around quite a lot of software and open source projects in my time and the home assistant community never fails to amaze me at what it is capable of and every time i get to interact with someone from it i always get a sense of a truly special community building something together no matter who you are and what you are trying and hoping to achieve with your smart home and home assistant there is always someone there willing to help or point you in the right direction reason number four is that it gives you so many options and flexibility want to have zigbee z-wave bluetooth wi-fi and ethernet devices all connected together you can do that with home assistant want to build your smart home server that also doubles as your media server cctv recorder and password manager you can do that with home assistant want to turn on a light open your blind and start playing goat noises on a speaker every time someone rings your doorbell not sure why you'd want to do that but you can do that with home assistant the level of options and flexibility available to you not only in terms of software but also hardware is really mind-blowing with more and more functionality continuously being added if you can dream of doing it chances are you can probably achieve it reason number five is centralization of all of your smartphone devices under one single app no one wants to have 20 different apps to control all of their various different devices from different companies see many brands would much rather try and lock you into using their ecosystem with their devices so that they can sell you more and more hardware in the hopes that you will just keep buying it out of convenience but with home assistant all of your devices and sensors can be centralized under one roof meaning that you only have one place to go to control everything regardless of who makes it want to pair a motion sensor from acara with a light from philips hue a curtain from switchbot and a plug from sewn off no problem home assistant makes that entirely possible allowing you to mix and match different devices from whoever you want automations are reason number six i talked before that automations are what truly makes a smart home smart and home assistant's ability to automate is so insanely more powerful than any of the off-the-shelf solutions like amazon google home home kit and smart things that it's not even funny you can do basic things like run on a time schedule or when the sun sets to more advanced things like when a device changes state or value web hooks and even geo location and zone control you can even decide between different styles of automations from the more procedural step-by-step drop down method of home assistant automations to the more visual flow style provided by node-red for those of you who prefer to learn visually users of off-the-shelf solutions can only dream of creating the automations that home assistant users can google home still can't even trigger automations based on sensors yet a very basic feature that has supposedly been coming for years the power of home assistant automations is reason enough alone to consider switching reason number seven is that it's open source now we talked about the community aspect which allows anyone to contribute code for integrations features and dashboards to home assistant which is all a benefit of being open source but it also allows for anyone to view and audit the code for security purposes as well as contribute in other ways like writing documentation all of these things together allow for features and functions to be developed at a much faster pace than traditional closed source software would typically allow for which is why home assistant is so powerful that does mean that you do need to be a bit more careful when installing updates than you would otherwise need to be but i personally think that is a trade-off worth making and that also leads me into my eighth reason because home assistant is open source it also means that it is free to use from a software perspective for everyone and anyone and it means that you can use whatever hardware you would like with it pretty much everyone has a computer or a laptop even if it's one that you use every day you can install home assistant on it and give it a spin to see if it's something you actually like before committing to going all in and spending money on dedicated hardware you can pay for nabucasa which gives you easy remote access as well as some other features that will make your life easier and also helps support the project which i would encourage you to do so but if you are on a tight budget there is zero features that are locked behind a subscription or paywall and everything is 100 free to use every user gets access to all of the same abilities features and automations no matter who they are reason number nine is for privacy and security reasons we've talked about home assistant being local control how it works without any internet and how it's open source meaning anyone can view and audit code well all of these things go hand in hand with privacy and security none of your data is being sent out to the cloud meaning that your personal information isn't being sold to third parties with the potential for it to be leaked in a data breach further down the line and it also means that if you are very security conscious you can completely isolate and cut off internet access to your smart home to help minimize any potential attacks since there is no dependence and reliance on the internet my tenth and final reason is customizability with platforms like al exa and google home what you see is what you get a pretty much standard way of using it that everyone else is also using now that may be okay with you if you like the way that amazon has laid their dashboard out for you but if you don't then you're kind of out of luck home assistant by contrast is super customizable everything from the way things are laid out to the types of information and controls that are displayed and even the styling of how everything looks the choice is completely yours i've seen everything from fairly modest takes on the standard home assistant dashboard to some heavily modified dashboards that completely change the look and feel to even just straight up complete replacements if you just want things to be done for you automatically then home assistant will do that for you but the customizability is there should you want it allowing you to create some truly stunning dashboards that will work for your needs and your tastes there we go that is 10 reasons i absolutely love home assistant and why i think it's the best smart phone platform out there for us regular people now i'm not saying it's perfect no platform is but these are just a handful of reasons i think it is the best smartphone platform out there for us consumers without paying thousands and thousands or even tens of thousands for a total custom system but these are just some of my reasons if you have some others that i missed then please drop them in a comment down below and hopefully we can encourage some others to join the dark side and come over and start using home assistant i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 73,043

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, home automation, best smart home, best smart home platforms, best smart home platform, home assistant pros and cons, home assistant pros, switch to home assistant, best home automation platform, smart home platforms

Id: eSjGyE8HCfk

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022