What is Home Assistant

Part 2 of 6 of my Smart Home Series.

Home Assistant works as a hub and is a free and open-source home automation software, powered by a large community that is constantly working on improving the platform. It boasts a wide array of functionalities and capabilities. Another of its calling card is its vast interoperability, which allows users to add and manage practically almost all smart home devices, regardless of brand or make.​

Another one of the great benefits of Home Assistant is that it does not rely on connecting to an external cloud to work, unlike many other similar platforms. Hence, it will not fail without an internet connection. More importantly, it is built with security and privacy in mind, as almost everything can be done locally. Data is not sent to the cloud, unless you specify it to, and whatever you set up on your system is for your eyes only.​

The downside of Cloud based options​

A lot of smart devices are built around their brand’s cloud-based infrastructure, which means the device’s settings and configurations are controlled by the brand. While this usually means easier setup for consumers, it also means handling almost full control of the system over to the brand. This allows all sorts of data from the consumer to be read by the brand, which is usually used to adjust their sales or strategy. If data is leaked and falls into the wrong hands, it could even be used for malicious intents. Indeed. we live in a world where data is prevalent in many parts of our lives, for better or for worse.​

Besides putting your data in the hands of a brand, whether your devices continue to work is also at the mercy them. If a certain brand decides to call it quits, your device from that brand will lose its smart capabilities. We have seen this happen before when the American brand, Best Buy, decided to leave the smart home business.​

Conclusion​

In my opinion, Home Assistant capabilities far exceed even other big name brands like Google or Ikea. It also has a relatively lower cost compared to the other brands as it is an open source platform. But why is Home Assistant not popular in today’s market, you might ask? Well, for a simple fact that it has a steep learning curve and not something that an average consumer would like to tackle. It is, however, not surprisingly very popular among the tech community.

End of Part 2 of my Smart Home Series.