The Home Assistant ecosystem has matured. In 2025, official hardware like the Green and Yellow makes local-first smart home control accessible to everyone. We compare the best hubs — from the beginner-friendly Aqara Hub M1S to the powerhouse Homey Pro — so you can find the right brain for your smart home.
The smart home world is finally growing up. After years of cloud-dependent gadgets that stop working when the Wi-Fi goes out, more people are turning to local-first control — and Home Assistant is leading the charge.2
With the adoption of Matter and Thread, 2025 is the year the ecosystem finally clicks. You don't need to be a developer to run a Home Assistant setup anymore. The hardware has caught up, and the options are better than ever.1
Here's our pick of the best smart home hubs for Home Assistant users this year.
We looked at three strong options that integrate well with Home Assistant, each suited to a different kind of user.
If you're just getting started with Zigbee sensors — temperature, motion, door contacts — the Aqara Hub M1S is the most affordable way in. It plugs directly into Home Assistant via the Aqara integration, giving you local control over a huge ecosystem of reliable, cheap sensors.
What it does well: rock-solid Zigbee 3.0 connectivity, a built-in speaker for alarms and chimes, and a sleek design that doesn't look out of place on a nightstand. It's the ideal companion if you're running Home Assistant on a MiniPC or an old laptop and just need a dedicated Zigbee bridge.
Trade-off: it's Aqara-only out of the box. You can flash it for Zigbee2MQTT, but that's an extra step. For most people, the stock firmware plus the Home Assistant integration is enough.
The Aeotec SmartThings Hub is the hardware that Samsung handed off to Aeotec, and it's become a surprisingly good Home Assistant companion. It supports Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Wi-Fi out of the box, and the SmartThings integration in Home Assistant is mature and well-maintained.
What it does well: if you have a mix of older Z-Wave locks and newer Zigbee sensors, this hub bridges both worlds. It also works as a standalone SmartThings hub if you ever want to hand the keys to someone less technical.
Trade-off: some routines still process in the cloud unless you route everything through Home Assistant. It's not fully local by default, but paired with HA it becomes a powerful radio bridge.
The Homey Pro (early 2023 model) is the Swiss Army knife of smart home hubs. It supports Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi, Infrared, and 433 MHz — basically everything. For Home Assistant users, it acts as a universal radio bridge that can talk to devices no other hub can reach.
What it does well: the infrared blaster alone is worth it for controlling old AC units and TVs. The Homey Pro also has a local processing mode that works well with Home Assistant's local control philosophy.
Trade-off: it's expensive, and the Homey app ecosystem is separate from Home Assistant's. You're buying this for the radio coverage, not the software.
| Spec | Aqara Hub M1S | Aeotec SmartThings Hub | Athom Homey Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | NXP JN5169 | NXP i.MX 6 | Quad-core Cortex-A53 |
| RAM | 128 KB | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| Built-in Radios | Zigbee 3.0 | Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi | Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, IR, 433 MHz |
| Best For | Budget Zigbee starter | Mainstream flexibility | Multi-protocol power user |
You might be wondering: why not just use a Raspberry Pi? It's a fair question. For years, a Pi 4 with a Zigbee dongle was the default Home Assistant setup.
But in 2025, the official Home Assistant hardware — the Green and Yellow — solves real problems that DIY Pi setups don't:1
The Home Assistant Green is the gold standard for beginners — it's plug-and-play, costs $99, and just works.2 The Home Assistant Yellow adds NVMe storage, more RAM, and built-in Zigbee/Thread for power users who want maximum local control.1
And if you're running Frigate for AI-powered camera detection or heavy automation, a MiniPC like the MLLSE G2 Pro (with an Intel N100 or better) is the right choice — it gives you the CPU and RAM for video processing that a hub alone can't handle.1
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. This doesn't affect our recommendations — we only recommend what we'd use ourselves.
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