HACS for Home Assistant: The 2026 Guide to the Community Store — and the Hardware That Runs It Best

Home Assistant is superb at the devices Nabu Casa has chosen to support, and silent about almost everything else. HACS — the Home Assistant Community Store — is the fix. It is a free, community-maintained package manager that adds third-party integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates to your installation, none of which ship in the core build. It explains why one person’s dashboard looks like a polished control room and another’s looks like a spreadsheet. HACS costs nothing, but the experience depends heavily on the box underneath it, so this guide covers what the store actually does in 2026, exactly how to install it on each type of installation, where the genuine risks sit, and which hardware is worth buying to run it.

Quick picks

What HACS actually is — and why it matters in 2026

HACS stands for Home Assistant Community Store. It is not a product you buy and not a service you subscribe to; it is an open-source component, published under the GitHub organisation hacs, with its canonical documentation at hacs.xyz. It was created by the developer known as Ludeeus (Tom Demeyer) — the HACS GitHub repository history is the source of record for that, rather than any second-hand claim.

The scale is the part that surprises newcomers. As of early 2026, the default store lists around 2,000+ integrations, with the live figure published and dated at hacs.xyz/docs. For a credibility anchor on how established the project is, check the current star count and release history on github.com/hacs/integration — both are public and update continuously.

Why does a catalogue that size matter? Because the official Home Assistant ecosystem is deliberately conservative. Nabu Casa ships integrations that are stable, well tested and maintainable at scale, which means niche hardware — an obscure Modbus boiler, a discontinued camera brand, a regional energy supplier’s API — frequently never makes it into core. HACS fills that gap. It is the difference between “Home Assistant supports my devices” and “Home Assistant supports any device I can find someone to write code for”.

How to install HACS: the steps split by installation type

This is where most guides blur the detail, and where the advice actually earns its keep. There is no single HACS install method. Which one applies to you depends entirely on how Home Assistant itself is installed, and using the wrong path is the most common reason people conclude HACS “doesn’t work”.

Home Assistant OS (including Green and Yellow) and Supervised

On HAOS and Supervised installations, you install HACS through the My Home Assistant button published on hacs.xyz. It is not a shell script — the button hands the job off to your running instance and performs the install for you.

If you follow the manual path instead, that is the only situation in which you need the SSH or Terminal add-on: it exists to let you place files into the correct folder by hand, not as a prerequisite for the normal method.

Container and Core

If you run Home Assistant as a Container or as Core, the My Home Assistant button is not available to you, and the shell script method is the correct route. The command is:

wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -

That script downloads HACS into your Home Assistant custom_components/ folder. Once the files are in place, you must restart Home Assistant — the component is only picked up at startup.

The steps both paths share

Whichever route you took, the finishing sequence is identical:

1. Restart Home Assistant, so it loads the new component.
2. Go to Settings → HACS.
3. Complete GitHub device-code authentication — a code-based flow, not a username-and-password login.

A GitHub account is required, not optional: HACS authenticates against the GitHub API to browse and download repositories, and authenticated requests get a dramatically higher allowance. Per GitHub’s own REST API documentation, the unauthenticated rate limit is 60 requests per hour against 5,000 requests per hour when authenticated. In practice, an unauthenticated session will simply stall part-way through browsing a catalogue of roughly 2,000+ integrations.

One more gotcha: Advanced Mode must be enabled in your Home Assistant user profile before HACS appears in some install paths. It is documented in the Home Assistant docs, and it is the reason a correctly installed HACS can seem to have vanished.

HACS 2.0 categories

The filter types in HACS 2.0 are Integrations, Frontend, Themes, Automations and Templates. If you are following an older tutorial that references separate top-level sections for each, you are reading pre-2.0 material — the current release merged them into a single filterable list. Exact labels are published at hacs.xyz, so check there before relying on any walkthrough, including this one, for menu wording.

How to choose hardware for a HACS-heavy setup

Four things decide whether a given box suits a HACS-heavy installation, and none of them is the store itself.

• Installation type, because it dictates the install method. A device that runs Home Assistant OS (the Green, or a Pi 5 you flash yourself) gets the one-click My Home Assistant route. A container deployment does not.
• CPU and memory headroom, because custom integrations run inside the Home Assistant process. Every integration you add is code executing in the same process as core, so a longer list of community components places more demand on the same processor and memory you were already using.
• A radio, because a huge share of the interesting integrations need something to talk to. Zigbee, Thread and Matter devices require a coordinator; without one, the integration is installed but idle.
• Your tolerance for risk, because HACS performs no code review. That point is examined in detail further down, and it should influence what you install far more than which box you buy.

An Intel N100 mini PC is the other route buyers commonly weigh. It sits outside the price ranges quoted in this guide, so research it separately if your custom stack grows beyond what a single-board computer comfortably handles.

Home Assistant Green

Best for: the majority of buyers who want HACS running this afternoon with no assembly.

The Green is Nabu Casa’s own hardware — the official device, which is precisely why it takes the simplest HACS path: because it runs Home Assistant OS out of the box, you install the store through the My Home Assistant button on hacs.xyz rather than a shell script. It is also silent, which matters if it lives in a living room or a bedroom rather than a cupboard, and its setup is measured in minutes rather than an evening of flashing cards and hunting for power supplies.

Standout strength: it removes every decision between you and a working HACS install. No SSH add-on, no custom_components paths, no wondering whether Advanced Mode is the reason the menu is missing.

The honest caveat: it is the least expandable option here. Once you are running a long list of custom integrations, the Green is the box that will feel it first — which is exactly the trade-off you are accepting in return for the frictionless start.

Verdict: the default choice, and the right one unless you already know you want to tinker.

Where to buy: the Green is widely stocked in the UK — The Pi Hut, Pimoroni and Mouser UK all list it, and prices you see quoted are typically VAT-inclusive. Expect to pay around £99–£130.

Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB)

Best for: tinkerers who want processing headroom and a storage upgrade path.

The Pi 5 8GB is the enthusiast’s route. It offers a faster CPU than the boards that preceded it and, crucially, an NVMe storage option — a genuine benefit when your Home Assistant database, recorder history and camera integrations start writing constantly to the disk. It also sits at the centre of the largest single-board community in existence, which is useful when you need to troubleshoot something.

What you get for the price: the quoted figure is for the board alone. You supply the power supply, case, cooling and storage separately, and you flash Home Assistant OS yourself. That is the DIY tax, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it before comparing the Pi’s number with the Green’s.

Standout strength: the fastest of the three options here in normal use, with the widest community knowledge base behind it.

The honest caveat: it is a build, not a purchase. If assembling hardware is not the hobby, the Green is the better buy — and if your custom integration list is short, the Pi’s extra CPU is headroom you may never use.

Verdict: the best value for anyone who enjoys the build and expects to grow into it.

Where to buy: The Pi Hut and Pimoroni both stock the board. The 8GB model typically sits at around £75–£90, board only.

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (formerly SkyConnect)

Best for: anyone whose HACS setup revolves around Zigbee, Thread or Matter devices.

The Connect ZBT-1 is a radio, and it is the piece people forget until nothing works. It handles Zigbee, Thread/Matter and Bluetooth — protocols that a large proportion of the most useful community integrations depend on. The specifications are published at home-assistant.io/connectzbt1, so you can check the supported protocol list against your own devices before buying.

Note the name: this hardware was previously sold as SkyConnect and is now the Connect ZBT-1. Both names refer to the same device, so if you see one advertised under the older name in a UK listing, it is not a different product.

Standout strength: it converts a software catalogue into working hardware. Without a coordinator, half the integrations you install through HACS have nothing to communicate with — you get the menu entry and no functionality.

The honest caveat: it adds radio capability, not computing power. It will not make a HACS-heavy setup run any faster, and it is not a substitute for adequate CPU or memory.

Verdict: effectively mandatory if your smart home is built on Zigbee or Thread, and a sensible purchase even if it is not yet.

Where to buy: typically stocked by UK smart-home and Raspberry Pi specialist retailers, and often alongside the Green and Pi 5. Expect around £25–£35 — check current stock and pricing before ordering, as availability on this device fluctuates.

Frigate on HACS: the correction that matters

Frigate is one of the most popular things people install via HACS, and it is also the most commonly misunderstood. Installing Frigate through HACS gives you the Home Assistant integration — the connector, and nothing more. Frigate itself does not run inside HACS. It runs as a separate add-on or as a Docker container, on its own host.

That distinction has a direct purchasing consequence. The GPU and CPU load of NVR processing — video decoding, object detection, recording — sits on the Frigate host, not the Home Assistant host. Frigate’s own hardware requirements page at docs.frigate.video is the authoritative reference for what that demands. So if your plan is “buy a beefier Home Assistant box so my cameras get faster”, you are spending money on the wrong machine. Size the Frigate host for Frigate, and the Home Assistant host for Home Assistant.

The most-installed HACS repositories

These names recur constantly in community discussion, and each is verifiably among the most-downloaded HACS repositories — retrieve current counts from hacs.xyz/docs or each repository’s own README badge, as figures move.

• Mushroom — a replacement set of dashboard cards that makes the default Lovelace interface look considerably more modern.
• Bubble Card — a second card collection, built around pop-up panels, that gives dashboards a layered feel rather than a flat grid.
• card-mod — CSS-level styling applied to individual cards. If you want a specific card to look like something other than the default theme, this is the tool that does it.
• Mini Graph Card — a compact line graph you can drop onto any dashboard, and the one most long-term users reach for first.
• ApexCharts Card — a more advanced graphing card, used widely for energy and temperature history where you need more control over how the data is plotted.
• browser_mod — lets automations target individual browsers and devices, which is what makes pop-ups and targeted notifications possible on a per-screen basis.
• Adaptive Lighting — a widely used integration that adjusts your lights automatically through the day, so brightness and colour temperature follow your routine rather than a fixed schedule.

The pattern to notice: these are almost all Frontend or Integration entries, which is why the HACS 2.0 filter list matters in practice. Most newcomers arrive wanting dashboard cards, not back-end plumbing.

Security and support: what HACS does not do

This section is not editorial opinion. Every point here is HACS’s own documented position, and it should shape what you install.

HACS performs no code review. That statement comes directly from hacs.xyz/docs/faq/security. Repositories are indexed and distributed; they are not audited. Download counts indicate popularity, not safety.

Custom integrations run inside the Home Assistant process. HACS’s own documentation warns that this gives them full access to your secrets.yaml and to long-lived access tokens. In plain terms: a piece of community code is not sandboxed away from your credentials. It runs with the same reach as the core system it sits beside. That is the mechanism behind every “is HACS safe?” debate, and it is why the practical discipline is to install from repositories that are actively maintained, to read the changelog before you update, and to remove anything you are no longer using.

Nabu Casa does not support HACS-installed integrations. This is stated in Home Assistant’s own support policy. If you install a community component and it breaks, Home Assistant Cloud support is not where you take the problem — you take it to the repository’s issue tracker. That does not make the two incompatible; it simply draws the line of responsibility.

Buying HACS hardware in the UK

The three components here are all sold by UK retailers rather than shipped from overseas, which matters for both VAT and returns. The Pi Hut, Pimoroni and Mouser UK cover the Home Assistant Green, and the Pi Hut and Pimoroni carry Raspberry Pi boards. Prices quoted by these retailers are typically VAT-inclusive, so the figure you see is close to the figure you pay — unlike US listings where sales tax appears only at checkout.

As a rough budget: a Green plus a Connect ZBT-1 lands at around £125–£165 all-in, while a Pi 5 8GB build plus the same radio starts at around £100–£125 for the board and radio alone — before the power supply, case, cooling and storage you will still need to add.

FAQ

Is HACS free, and what does it really cost to run? HACS itself carries no licence fee — it is open source, and the store adds nothing to your bill. Your only genuine costs are the hardware it runs on and the electricity that hardware draws. In the UK that means around £99–£130 for a Home Assistant Green, around £75–£90 for a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB board, and around £25–£35 for a Connect ZBT-1 radio if your devices need one.

Is HACS an add-on or a custom integration? It is a custom integration. That is why it installs into the custom_components/ folder and why it appears under Settings → HACS rather than in the add-on store — and it is also why the install method differs so sharply between Home Assistant OS and a Container deployment. The practical consequence is that HACS lives inside your Home Assistant process, exactly like the components it installs.

Will my HACS integrations break after a Home Assistant update, and who fixes them? They can, and Nabu Casa will not be the one to fix them — Home Assistant’s support policy explicitly excludes HACS-installed integrations, because they are not code Nabu Casa maintains. The mitigating factor is that HACS surfaces pending updates as native Home Assistant update entities, so you see them in the same place as your core updates and can choose when to apply each one rather than being upgraded automatically.

Do I need Zigbee or Thread hardware before HACS is worth installing? No — plenty of repositories are purely dashboard and theme related, and those work on any installation with no radio at all. But a large share of the integration catalogue exists to talk to Zigbee, Thread or Matter devices, and those integrations will install cleanly and then do nothing without a coordinator. If your devices are already Zigbee-based, budget for a Connect ZBT-1 at around £25–£35.

Can I run HACS on a Raspberry Pi 5, or do I need a mini PC? Yes, the Pi 5 is a perfectly sound host, and because it runs Home Assistant OS you get the one-click install route through the My Home Assistant button. The 8GB model with NVMe storage is the more comfortable configuration once your recorder database and custom integrations start writing constantly. A mini PC is the option to consider if your custom stack grows well beyond what a single-board computer handles comfortably.

Does HACS itself slow Home Assistant down? The store is a catalogue and updater, so the component itself is not what costs you performance. The performance question is about what you install through it: every custom integration executes inside the Home Assistant process alongside core, sharing the same CPU and memory. A handful of dashboard cards is negligible; a long list of polling integrations is where a modest box starts to feel the load.

Verdict

HACS is the highest-value free addition most Home Assistant users will ever make, and the catalogue — around 2,000+ integrations, per hacs.xyz — is why the official build so often feels incomplete by comparison. Install it correctly for your installation type, mind the fact that it performs no code review, and size the hardware for what you actually plan to stack on top. For most UK buyers that means a Home Assistant Green at around £99–£130, a Connect ZBT-1 at around £25–£35 if Zigbee or Thread devices are involved, and a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB board at around £75–£90 for anyone who wants the headroom and does not mind the build.