Home Assistant Green alternatives

Buy an N100 or N150 mini PC instead of the Green if you plan to run cameras, local voice, or anything else alongside Home Assistant. If you only want automations and dashboards, the Home Assistant Green is still the easier purchase, and most of this page will talk you back into it.

I haven’t run the Green or any of the machines below. The picks come from the manufacturers’ spec sheets, Home Assistant’s own installation documentation, and what other Home Assistant users report.

Quick verdict

What the Green is, and where it runs out

The Green is a $199 appliance with Home Assistant OS preinstalled: a quad-core ARM processor (Rockchip RK3566), 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of built-in eMMC storage. You plug in power and Ethernet and follow the wizard. The Amazon buy box read $219 the day I checked the $199 list price on home-assistant.io, so compare sellers.

Three limits push people to look elsewhere:

• No radios. The Green has no Zigbee, Thread or Z-Wave built in. You add a USB dongle either way, so a mini PC costs you nothing extra on that front.
• Fixed memory and storage. 4 GB and 32 GB are fine for automations. Camera recording, a long recorder history or a local voice model will fill them.
• ARM, not x86. Most add-ons ship for both. Frigate with hardware video decoding and detection is far better served on an Intel box.

Green vs Yellow, and why the Yellow is out

Home Assistant Yellow was discontinued in October 2025. Nabu Casa is no longer manufacturing it. The real decision in 2026 is the Green vs a mini PC.

The Yellow ran on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module (a CM4 or CM5, sold separately) and had a built-in Zigbee/Thread radio (Silicon Labs chip soldered on the board), NVMe expansion, and, on the separate Kit with Power-over-Ethernet only, PoE. The standard Yellow and the standard kit are barrel-jack powered. It was the enthusiast’s choice before Nabu Casa discontinued it. The discontinuation was not a verdict on the hardware: Nabu Casa said sales had slowed to the point where another production run no longer made sense, and that more people are gravitating toward mini PCs for this job.

Two limits of that built-in radio matter if you already own one. It speaks Zigbee or Thread, one firmware at a time: you pick a protocol and reflash the radio to switch, and running both means adding a second radio such as a ZBT-2 (Home Assistant’s experimental multiprotocol mode that ran the two at once is deprecated and slated for removal). And Z-Wave was never built in, so a Z-Wave house adds a USB stick on a Yellow just as it would on a Green.

If you already have a Yellow, it still works and the software will keep getting updates. If you’re buying, don’t go hunting for one and don’t pay a premium for old stock: a mini PC with a USB coordinator gives you more power for less money.

N100 and N150 mini PCs: the default alternative

For about $150 more than the Green’s list price you get 8 to 16 GB of RAM, an internal SSD and an Intel processor with hardware video decoding. You install Home Assistant OS yourself using the generic x86-64 guide, which needs UEFI boot with Secure Boot turned off. That install is the whole cost of choosing this route: about half an hour, once.

• The Beelink Mini S13 is the one I would buy now. The listing describes an N150 with 16 GB of RAM, a 500 GB SSD and two 2.5GbE ports, and it was $349 and in stock on Amazon on October 26, 2026. It ships with Windows 11, which installing Home Assistant OS erases, and it uses an external power adapter. Amazon groups several Mini S models on related listings, and earlier S13 units had a single Gigabit port, so confirm the dual-2.5GbE N150 version in the selector.
• The Beelink Mini S12 Pro is the N100 fallback: 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD and one 2.5GbE port, also $349 on Amazon on October 26, 2026. At the same price I would take the S13 for its second Ethernet port and newer chip.
• The Beelink EQ14 was the one on my shortlist. It’s an N150 with the power supply inside the case, and it replaces the EQ13, which Beelink has discontinued. Its Amazon listing has read Currently unavailable since late September, and Beelink’s store offered it as a pre-order with no ship date on October 16, 2026.
• The GMKtec G3 was the cheap N100 reference point. On October 16, 2026 every G3 configuration was sold out at GMKtec, and so were the US-plug versions of the N150 G3 Plus that replaced it.

My mini PC guide covers how to size one around cameras and voice.

Home Assistant and a NAS in one box

If the plan is “one quiet box that does everything”, look at boards built for drives.

• The ZimaBoard 2 is about $339 for the 8 GB model: a fanless N150 board with dual 2.5GbE and an open PCIe x4 slot. The RAM is soldered, and it’s pricey for its class. You’re paying for silence and the slot.
• The ODROID-H4+ is the one to know about rather than the one to buy now. It listed at about $159 for an Intel N97, four SATA ports and dual 2.5GbE, but Hardkernel has discontinued it and its shop now marks the board obsoleted and out of stock, pointing buyers at the ODROID-H5. Treat any listing as remaining stock. It also needs its own power brick, RAM and storage.

Both run Home Assistant OS directly or as a VM beside your storage. Neither has a radio, so budget for a dongle.

More headroom: Ryzen mini PCs and used NUCs

These are overkill for Home Assistant alone. They earn their price when the same machine runs Frigate on several cameras, a media server and a dozen containers.

• Beelink SER6 MAX: a Ryzen 7 that sits between the N100 boxes and the expensive Ryzen 9 machines. It has a fan, and you’ll hear it under load. Beelink no longer sells the SER6 new (its own store search returns no SER6 product) and the one Amazon listing for the Ryzen 7 7735HS model read Currently unavailable on October 22, 2026, so this is a used-market buy now.
• Minisforum UM790 Pro: a Ryzen 9 with a capable integrated GPU. The 32 GB / 1 TB build read $859 on Amazon on September 9, 2026.
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5: business-class build, with a base warranty term that varies by SKU, so check the term on the exact configuration. Buy direct or refurbished; the same configuration read $989.99 at Best Buy and $1,699.99 on Amazon the day I compared them.
• Used Intel NUC 12 Pro: well understood and easy to find secondhand, but discontinued. ASUS, which now owns the NUC line, ended software support in October 2025 and lists security updates through April 2027. Price it with that date in mind, or look at the current ASUS NUC 15 Pro.

A server you already own

If there’s an always-on machine in the house, the cheapest Green alternative is a virtual machine on it. Run Home Assistant OS as the VM so you keep add-ons and one-click backups, and pass the USB radio through to it. I compare the common hosts in Home Assistant on Synology vs Unraid vs TrueNAS, and there’s a separate walkthrough for Proxmox.

A Raspberry Pi 5 is the other hardware people already own. Home Assistant publishes an image for it, and it is still the fastest of the small boards: its PCIe 2.0 interface takes an NVMe HAT, so put it on an SSD, not an SD card. What changed is the price. Repeated memory-driven increases between December 2025 and April 2026 took the board from $60 (4 GB) and $80 (8 GB) at launch to $110 and $175, with the 16 GB model at $305 (Raspberry Pi list prices, checked 2026-09-06). Price the Pi, case, power supply and SSD together before deciding it’s cheaper than an N100 box. It often isn’t. Pick a Pi 5 if you specifically want a Pi - the GPIO, the form factor, one already in a drawer - and don’t mind assembling the pieces.

If you don’t want to run a server at all

The Hubitat Elevation C-8 Pro is the alternative to Home Assistant itself. It’s $184.95, runs everything locally with no subscription, and has Zigbee 3.0, Z-Wave 800 Long Range, Matter and Bluetooth radios built in. You get far fewer integrations and weaker dashboards than Home Assistant. Skip the $249.95 Thread Special Edition unless you’re choosing Thread on purpose: Hubitat’s listing says the Thread radio replaces the Zigbee one. Home Assistant vs Hubitat goes through the tradeoff.

Whatever you pick, budget for a radio

None of the Home Assistant machines above, the Green included, talks Zigbee or Thread on its own, and Z-Wave needs a separate stick regardless. Wi-Fi and Matter-over-Wi-Fi devices work with no dongle at all. Only the Hubitat has its radios built in.

• I run the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2. It does Zigbee or Thread depending on the firmware you choose, I’ve had no complaints, and I’d buy it again. It succeeds the discontinued ZBT-1, which still works if you already own one.
• The SONOFF ZBDongle-P is the cheap classic at $19.90 direct from SONOFF. The Amazon buy box for the same stick has run $30-35 through October.

Best Zigbee coordinators for Home Assistant covers the rest, including PoE coordinators for when the server lives in a bad spot for radio.

When the Green is still the right call

Buy the Green if you want Home Assistant running tonight, you have no plans for cameras or local voice, and you’d rather not install an operating system. Its 4 GB is plenty for dozens of devices, complex automations and most integrations. It draws little power, it’s supported by the people who write Home Assistant, and you can move to a bigger box later by restoring a backup. The hub roundup explains why it’s still my starting recommendation for most people.