Home Assistant add ons I actually use

If you’re building a local-first smart home with Home Assistant, the add-on store is one of the best things going for it. Add-ons are pre-packaged applications (Docker containers under the hood) that you install and manage right from Settings > Add-ons, with their configuration, networking, and updates handled for you.

One important caveat up front: add-ons require Home Assistant OS or a Supervised install. If you’re running Home Assistant Container or Core, you won’t see the add-on store, and you’ll need to run the equivalent software as separate Docker containers (most of them still integrate with HA over standard protocols like MQTT or the Wyoming protocol). Everything below assumes you’re on HA OS or Supervised.

Here are the add-ons I keep coming back to.

The foundation: MQTT and Zigbee

Mosquitto broker is the official MQTT broker add-on, and for a lot of setups it’s the first thing to install. MQTT is the messaging backbone that many devices and other add-ons talk over, so if you plan to use Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota-flashed devices, or various other integrations, you’ll want a broker running locally.

Zigbee2MQTT lets you run your Zigbee network through MQTT instead of a vendor hub or the built-in ZHA integration. It supports a wide range of Zigbee devices and keeps everything local. It pairs with a Zigbee coordinator radio plugged into your machine and publishes device state to your MQTT broker.

Building and managing devices

ESPHome Device Builder is how you flash and manage ESP32/ESP8266 microcontrollers using simple YAML, no Arduino coding required. It’s great for custom sensors, LED controllers, Bluetooth proxies, and DIY voice satellites.

Z-Wave JS UI provides a full management interface for a Z-Wave network driven by a Z-Wave controller stick. It exposes a control panel for including/excluding devices and tweaking parameters, and works alongside Home Assistant’s Z-Wave integration.

Editing config and getting under the hood

A few add-ons make day-to-day tinkering far easier:

• File editor is a lightweight in-browser editor for your YAML files. Simple and good enough for quick edits.
• Studio Code Server runs VS Code in the browser, with Home Assistant YAML autocompletion and validation. This is what I reach for when doing anything substantial.
• Terminal & SSH gives you shell access to the host so you can poke around, run commands, and SSH in remotely.
• Samba share exposes your config directory over SMB/CIFS so you can edit files from your desktop’s file explorer.

Automations beyond YAML

Node-RED is a visual, flow-based automation editor. Instead of writing YAML, you drag nodes onto a canvas and wire them together. For complex, branching automations it’s much easier to reason about than YAML alone, though plenty of people happily stick with HA’s native automations.

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.

Networking, data, and monitoring

• 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.
• Glances gives you a system-monitoring view of the host (CPU, memory, disk, network).

Related products

Local-first picks from our catalog that fit this topic:

• Amazon Echo Show 8 (3rd Gen) - speaker
• Amcrest SmartHome AD-110 Video Doorbell - doorbell
• Aqara Scene Panel S1 - control-panel
• GE Profile 30in Smart Slide-In Induction Range (PHS930) - appliance
• Inovelli Blue Series 2-1 - switch

Quick verdict

If I had to pick a starter set, it’d be Mosquitto broker, Studio Code Server (or File editor), and Terminal & SSH, then add Zigbee2MQTT or Z-Wave JS UI depending on your radios. From there, ESPHome Device Builder for DIY hardware, the Whisper / Piper / openWakeWord trio for local voice, and InfluxDB + Grafana for long-term data round things out nicely. Just remember: all of this lives behind the add-on store, which means HA OS or Supervised.