Home Assistant add-ons worth installing

After you get Home Assistant running, these are the add-ons that make the setup more capable, and the ones worth installing first.

Short version: install Terminal & SSH, an editor (Studio Code Server or File Editor), Mosquitto, and your Zigbee or Z-Wave stack first. Add Node-RED when automations get complex, ESPHome if you build your own devices, the Whisper / Piper / openWakeWord trio for local voice, InfluxDB + Grafana for long-term data, and configure automatic backups before anything goes wrong.

One thing to get straight, because it trips people up: add-ons are software - pre-packaged applications (Docker containers under the hood) that the Supervisor installs and manages for you from Settings > Apps. Home Assistant 2026.2 renamed add-ons to “apps”, though the software and the Supervisor behind them are unchanged. They are only available on Home Assistant OS or a Supervised install - and Supervised was deprecated in May 2025 and has been unsupported since release 2025.12, so on a new build that means Home Assistant OS. If you run Home Assistant as a plain Docker container (Home Assistant Container), there is no Supervisor and no Add-on Store - you run those same tools as separate containers yourself (most of them still integrate with HA over standard protocols like MQTT or the Wyoming protocol). Also worth separating in your head: a Zigbee or Z-Wave coordinator is hardware (a USB stick), while Zigbee2MQTT, ZHA, and Z-Wave JS are the software that talks to it. You need both.

The must-haves: core infrastructure

Terminal & SSH - Command-line access. You can do a lot in the UI, but troubleshooting often means reading logs, restarting things, or editing files the UI won’t touch. Install it early. Its apks option can pull extra command-line packages into the add-on, which is how you get tools like nmap onto a Home Assistant OS box for scanning your own network for hidden cameras and other unexpected devices.

Studio Code Server (or File Editor) - A proper editor for configuration.yaml, automations.yaml, and the other YAML you’ll eventually edit. Studio Code Server gives you full VS Code in the browser with Home Assistant YAML autocompletion and validation; this is what I reach for when doing anything substantial. File Editor is the lighter option, simple and good enough for quick edits. Either beats hand-editing blind.

Samba Share - Mounts your Home Assistant config folder as a network share so you can edit from your regular computer’s file explorer. Convenient for bulk edits. Set a strong username and password - don’t leave it open to your LAN.

Zigbee and Z-Wave: the software half

If you’re adding wireless devices, you’ll pair them through one of these. Remember each one drives a hardware coordinator stick.

Zigbee2MQTT - The most flexible Zigbee option, with the broadest device support because its community writes converters quickly. It works with common coordinators like the ConBee III or the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, and publishes device state to your MQTT broker. The tradeoff is it requires an MQTT broker (Mosquitto), so it’s one more moving part. Note: you cannot run Zigbee2MQTT and ZHA on the same stick at once - pick one stack per coordinator.

ZHA - Worth mentioning even though it’s a built-in integration rather than an add-on: it’s the simplest Zigbee path (plug in a coordinator, add the integration, pair) and needs no MQTT. Good default for beginners; Z2M is the power-user upgrade.

Z-Wave JS - For Z-Wave devices. Mature, with a solid UI for managing nodes and lock user codes. You’ll need a Z-Wave coordinator stick such as a Zooz ZST39 (800-series). Z-Wave JS UI is the fuller management interface for the same network: a control panel for including/excluding devices and tweaking parameters, and it works alongside Home Assistant’s Z-Wave integration.

If you’re starting fresh, Zigbee has more cheap devices and a larger ecosystem. Mixing Zigbee and Z-Wave is fine, but it does double your troubleshooting surface.

Automation power tools

Node-RED - A visual, flow-based editor that makes complex automations far more readable than YAML: you drag nodes onto a canvas and wire them together. Great for multi-step routines and conditional logic. Real learning curve, but worth it past simple “if this then that” rules, though plenty of people happily stick with HA’s native automations.

ESPHome (listed in the store as ESPHome Device Builder) - For DIY devices, ESPHome is unmatched. Flash ESP32 or ESP8266 boards into temperature sensors, relays, displays, LED controllers, Bluetooth proxies, DIY voice satellites, and presence sensors that integrate natively and locally with Home Assistant, all from YAML config with no Arduino coding. You can also reflash some commercial hardware with ESPHome (Shelly devices, for example, can be flashed - though Shelly’s own firmware is already fully local over its REST/MQTT API, so reflashing is optional, not required).

Mosquitto - The MQTT broker, and for a lot of setups the first thing to install. MQTT is the message bus that many devices and other add-ons talk over, so if you plan to use Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota-flashed devices, or any MQTT-based hardware, you’ll want a broker running locally. Set a username and password; only enable anonymous access on a fully isolated network.

Local voice

Home Assistant’s local voice pipeline is built from a few Wyoming-protocol add-ons that run entirely on your own hardware:

• Whisper for local speech-to-text.
• Piper for local text-to-speech.
• openWakeWord for wake-word detection.

Together these let you run voice control without sending audio to a cloud service. Bear in mind that speech-to-text in particular benefits from a reasonably capable machine.

Music Assistant is also worth a mention here: it’s a media library and multi-room playback server that pulls together your streaming and local music and plays it to your existing speakers.

Monitoring and backups

Home Assistant Backups - Home Assistant has built-in backups; configure automatic backups and, ideally, a network/off-box location so an SD-card or disk failure doesn’t take your config with it. Configuring them is only half the job - read how to restore a Home Assistant backup step by step before you need it, because the restore needs an encryption key you have to already have. Community add-ons exist to push backups to cloud storage (Google Drive, Nextcloud, etc.) if you want off-site copies automated.

SQLite Web - Inspect the recorder database directly with SQL. Handy when you’re debugging why an automation isn’t firing or cleaning up bloated recorder history that the built-in tools won’t reach.

Glances - A system-monitoring view of the host (CPU, memory, disk, network).

Networking and long-term data

• AdGuard Home runs a network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server.
• Tailscale sets up an encrypted mesh VPN so you can reach your Home Assistant instance remotely without opening ports. Cloudflared is a popular alternative for exposing HA through a Cloudflare tunnel.
• InfluxDB is a time-series database that stores long-term sensor history without bloating Home Assistant’s own database, and Grafana turns that data into detailed dashboards and charts.

Worth a look

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 - The official USB radio for Zigbee and Thread. ZBT stands for Zigbee and Thread; with the Thread firmware plus the Matter integration it gives you a Thread border router for Matter-over-Thread devices. Matter device support still varies by manufacturer, so check before buying. It replaced the Connect ZBT-1 (formerly SkyConnect), which was discontinued in November 2025 - existing ZBT-1 sticks still work and receive software updates, but new buyers should get the ZBT-2.

The Add-on Store itself - Don’t stop at this list. The store has plenty of options for niche integrations and tools. Install conservatively, but explore.

And remember: an add-on is software running on HAOS (or an existing Supervised install) - if you’re on plain Docker, you run these as containers yourself. Once you’re settled, the blueprints worth installing first will save you writing automations from scratch.