Home Assistant Hardware: What to Run It On

Home Assistant does not need much computer. What it needs is a computer that will still be running, unattended, in three years, with a radio dongle hanging off it and a database being written to constantly. That reframes the hardware question into three smaller ones: how much assembly are you willing to do, which radios are you going to add, and what is the recorder database going to be written to.

Answer those and the shortlist picks itself.

What the docs actually require

The installation documentation sets a low bar. The Raspberry Pi route lists a Pi 4 or 5 with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM. The x86-64 route is described as repurposing workstation hardware. Nothing here is demanding by 2026 standards.

The bar rises when you add the things people actually run alongside Home Assistant: a MariaDB instance instead of SQLite, a network video recorder doing object detection, a local voice pipeline. Those are the workloads that make a mini PC worth the extra money, not Home Assistant itself.

One structural point decides a lot of the rest. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation type and the only one that supports apps (the standalone add-on packages that the docs used to call add-ons). Home Assistant Container has no app support, and the docs are explicit that Thread and Z-Wave are controlled by apps, so there is no out-of-the-box support for them on a Container install. If Z-Wave is in your plan, that is a hardware-shaped decision disguised as a software one. The install method comparison works through that trade in full.

Home Assistant Green: the appliance

Green is the buy-nothing-else option. Per the product specifications, it is a Rockchip RK3566 with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 at 1.8 GHz, 4 GB of LPDDR4X, and 32 GB of eMMC flash, in a passively cooled polycarbonate case. Recommended MSRP is $199 / 179 EUR. Idle draw is listed at roughly 1.7 W at 12 V, rising to about 3 W under load.

Two spec-sheet details matter more than the CPU:

• Storage is eMMC, not microSD. The microSD slot exists for recovery only, and HDMI is for diagnostics only. That removes the single most common Home Assistant hardware failure mode before you start.
• Both USB ports are USB 2.0. That reads like a limitation and is the opposite. USB 3.x ports are a documented source of 2.4 GHz interference, which is exactly the band a Zigbee or Thread coordinator lives in.

Green ships with no smart home radio. Zigbee or Thread means adding a Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, listed at $49 / 45 EUR, and per the ZBT-2 page you dedicate it to one protocol or the other rather than running both. Budget the radio at the same time as the box.

Green suits the person who wants a hub. It does not suit someone who also wants that machine running a media server.

Home Assistant Yellow: radio and NVMe in one box

Yellow is the interesting middle. The Yellow specifications describe a carrier board for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with an M.2 M-key slot that supports direct NVMe boot, gigabit Ethernet, PoE+ (IEEE 802.3at Class 3 or 4), and an integrated Silicon Labs MGM210P radio supporting Zigbee 3.0, OpenThread and Matter, shipping pre-flashed with Zigbee firmware. Power draw is listed at roughly 1.5 W idle, about 2.5 W idle with an NVMe drive, and 5 to 9 W under load.

The catch is availability. The Yellow product page now states that the product is no longer in production, though it continues to receive software updates. The pre-assembled Yellow Standard was ended first, with the line refocused on the Kit versions and Green positioned as the beginner option in its place. Treat Yellow as a remaining-stock or second-hand proposition rather than something you can reliably order new, and check current stock before you plan around it.

The other catches are technical. A Kit means sourcing your own CM4 (the docs recommend a minimum of 2 GB RAM and 16 GB eMMC, or an NVMe SSD if you use the CM4 Lite) and assembling it yourself. And an internal radio sits inside a metal-heatsinked enclosure next to a running SBC, which is the placement the interference guidance tells you to avoid.

Yellow earns its place when you want PoE, one cable, NVMe storage and a radio in a single unit, you enjoy the build, and you can actually find one. For anyone buying new today, Green plus a ZBT-2 gets you to a similar place with less work and without the sourcing problem.

Raspberry Pi: cheapest, with one condition

A Pi you already own is the cheapest credible option and the docs support it directly. The condition is storage.

The recorder integration writes every state change to a database, SQLite in the config folder by default, keeping 10 days of history and purging nightly. A house full of power monitors and motion sensors turns that into a continuous write stream, and a consumer microSD card is the worst possible medium to absorb it. The install guide lists a microSD card as a required tool because it is how you flash the image, not because it is where the database should live.

Treat SSD boot as mandatory, not an upgrade. Everything else about the Pi route is fine.

x86-64 mini PC: the one with headroom

The docs cover installing Home Assistant OS on generic x86-64 hardware, which in practice means an N100-class mini PC or a retired desktop. This is the option that stops being a compromise the moment you add a second workload: a proper database engine, object detection on a camera feed, a local speech-to-text pipeline.

The trade is that Home Assistant OS expects to own the machine. If the same box is also meant to run other services, run Home Assistant OS as a virtual machine on it instead. That keeps app support while letting the hardware do other jobs, and it is the configuration most people with capable hardware should land on.

NAS or hypervisor: reuse what is already running

If a NAS or a hypervisor is already powered on 24/7, adding a Home Assistant OS virtual machine costs you almost nothing in electricity and nothing in new hardware. The docs cover this under installing on other systems.

The friction is physical. A USB radio has to be passed through to the guest explicitly, and the device path can move between reboots, so pin the radio by its stable /dev/serial/by-id/ path. A NAS is also usually in the worst possible place for a 2.4 GHz mesh radio: a metal chassis, in a cupboard, surrounded by drives and power supplies. A long shielded USB extension cable is not optional in that configuration, and even then the coordinator will not reach the range on its datasheet. When devices start dropping, that placement is the first thing to check.

Budget the radios with the box

The hub is only part of the spend. Official radios are listed at $49 / 45 EUR for the Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee or Thread) and $69 / 59 EUR for the Connect ZWA-2, an 800-series Z-Wave adapter that supports Z-Wave Long Range alongside a classic mesh. Third-party coordinators based on current Silicon Labs or Texas Instruments chips are supported too.

Which radio you buy is a bigger decision than which hub you buy, because the hub is replaceable in an afternoon and the devices bonded to a mesh are not. Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread compared covers that side of it.

If you plan to build your own sensors rather than buy them, ESPHome nodes are a fourth hardware category with their own constraints, mostly around power. The ESPHome multi-sensor power and battery sizer will estimate peak current draw and deep-sleep battery life before you commit to a board.

Quick reference

	Green	Yellow (kit)	Raspberry Pi	Mini PC	NAS or hypervisor VM
Assembly	None	CM4 plus enclosure	Minimal	BIOS setup	VM setup
Radio included	No	Zigbee / Thread (MGM210P)	No	No	No
Storage	32 GB eMMC	NVMe via M.2	SSD strongly advised	SSD or NVMe	Host storage
Room for other workloads	No	No	Limited	Yes	Yes
Typical idle power	~1.7 W	~1.5 to 2.5 W	Low	Higher	Already running
Radio placement	Good (USB 2.0 ports)	Internal, enclosed	Good with extension	Watch USB 3.x ports	Usually the worst

So which one

Buy a Green and a ZBT-2 if you want the smart home and not the project. Use a Raspberry Pi you already own, on SSD, if the budget is the point. Buy a mini PC and run Home Assistant OS as a virtual machine if you already know you want cameras, a real database, or local voice. Add a Home Assistant OS VM to an existing NAS or hypervisor only if you can get the radio out of the rack on an extension cable.

Yellow remains the right answer for exactly one shape of person: PoE, one cable, NVMe, integrated radio, happy to assemble it, and able to find one now that it is out of production.

Whichever you pick, the recurring costs are the same twelve times a year, because Home Assistant ships a release every month. Choose for month nine, not week one.

See also

• Home Assistant OS vs Container for what the install method changes once the hardware is chosen.
• Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Thread for the radio decision that outlives the hub.
• Zigbee devices going unavailable for what poor coordinator placement looks like in practice.

Related on this site

• ZHA vs Zigbee2MQTT Explained: Same Radios, Different Software, and Which One to Run