What is Home Assistant? The Smart Home That Doesn't Spy on You

Every major smart home platform has the same pitch: convenience. And they deliver on it — right up until they raise the subscription price, kill the product, or have an outage that leaves your lights stuck on at 2am.

I learned this the hard way with Samsung SmartThings.

Why I Left SmartThings

SmartThings was my first real smart home platform, and honestly, it was a solid starting point. It got me hooked on the idea of automating my home. But the longer I used it, the more I ran into walls.

The automations were limited. I'd have an idea for how something should work — a specific trigger, a conditional action, a sequence of events — and SmartThings just couldn't do it. The options were too rigid. You could do the basics, but anything beyond that meant working around the system instead of with it.

Then there was the cloud dependency. Everything ran through Samsung's servers. If my internet went down, my "smart" home became a dumb home. Lights, automations, routines — all of it dead until the connection came back. For a system that's supposed to make your home more reliable, depending on an internet connection and someone else's servers felt backwards.

I didn't migrate gradually. I ripped SmartThings out and started fresh with Home Assistant. And the difference was immediate.

So What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that runs locally — on hardware sitting in your house, on your network, under your control. No cloud required.

It supports thousands of devices and integrations. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, thread — if it's a smart device, Home Assistant probably talks to it. And because it's open source with a massive community behind it, support for new devices and protocols shows up fast.

But the real difference isn't the device list. It's the philosophy. Home Assistant is built around the idea that your smart home should work for you, not for a company's data collection pipeline. Everything processes locally. Your automations don't depend on an internet connection. Your data stays in your house.

Why Local Matters

This isn't just a privacy talking point. Running locally has real, practical benefits:

It works without internet. I run my entire smart home off-grid on solar. Even though I have reliable internet, nothing in my setup depends on it. If my ISP goes down tomorrow, every light, automation, and camera keeps running like nothing happened. That's the difference between local and cloud — your smart home shouldn't stop working because someone tripped over a cable at your ISP's data center.

No subscriptions. There's no monthly fee to use Home Assistant. No premium tier to unlock advanced automations. No surprise pricing changes. You install it, you use it, you own it.

No one else sees your data. Your camera feeds, your motion sensor logs, your routines and schedules — none of it leaves your network. That's not a feature you have to enable. It's just how it works.

It doesn't disappear. Cloud services get shut down, acquired, or pivoted all the time. Home Assistant is open source. Even if the company behind it vanished tomorrow, the software and community would keep going.

What Can It Actually Do?

It's easy to talk about philosophy. Here's what it looks like in practice. This is the stuff I'm running on my setup right now:

Lighting and scenes. I have full scene control throughout my house — morning, evening, calming, lights out. A single button press on my nightstand can trigger different scenes depending on whether I click once, twice, or three times. Try doing that with SmartThings.

Local voice control. I say "Hey Jarvis" and control my home with voice commands — no Alexa, no Google, no audio leaving my network. It runs through an ESP32-based device and processes speech locally using open-source models. It's not quite as polished as Alexa, but it's mine, and it's private.

Security cameras with local AI. I run Frigate NVR with a Coral TPU for object detection. It can tell the difference between a person, a car, and a raccoon — all processed locally. No cloud camera subscriptions, no footage sitting on someone else's server.

Automations that actually make sense. Motion-triggered lights that behave differently depending on the time of day. Automations that chain together based on conditions. If you can think of it, you can probably build it. The automation engine in Home Assistant is leagues beyond what SmartThings offered.

Energy and solar monitoring. I monitor my entire off-grid solar system through Home Assistant — charge state, power generation, consumption. It's all visible on a custom dashboard I built myself.

And that's just what I've set up so far. The platform supports everything from irrigation systems to 3D printer monitoring. The ceiling is as high as you want to make it.

What You Need to Get Started

Here's the good news: getting started is simpler than you'd think.

A mini PC. This is what I run Home Assistant on and what I'd recommend for most people. They're small, quiet, power-efficient, and way more capable than a Raspberry Pi. You can pick one up used for well under $200, and it'll handle Home Assistant and then some. Look for something with at least 8GB of RAM and an N95 or N100 processor.

Home Assistant OS. For beginners, install Home Assistant Operating System directly onto the mini PC's internal drive. You can run it off a USB stick, but installing to the internal drive gives you better performance and long-term reliability. The install process requires pulling the drive from the mini PC and flashing the HA image to it from another computer, then putting it back. It's not complicated, but there are a few steps — I'll have a dedicated walkthrough guide for that soon.

A few smart devices. You don't need to buy everything at once. Start with a couple of smart bulbs or plugs. Zigbee devices are my preference — they're local by default and don't need internet. Grab a Zigbee coordinator (like a Sonoff Zigbee dongle) and you're set.

That's it. A mini PC, a USB stick, and a Zigbee dongle. You can be running a fully local smart home for under $250.

Where to Go From Here

This post is the starting point. I've got guides planned for installing Home Assistant on a mini PC step by step, setting up Frigate with local AI detection, replacing Alexa with a local voice assistant, building custom dashboards, and a lot more.

If you came from SmartThings, Google Home, Alexa, or any other cloud-dependent platform and you're wondering if there's something better — there is. And it's not even close.