Home Assistant Community Store (HACS): the 2026 UK buying guide

The Home Assistant Community Store — HACS to almost everyone who uses it — is what turns a stock Home Assistant install into something that behaves much more like a proper app store. It is a free, community-built integration that adds its own sidebar panel to Home Assistant, from which you can browse, install and update the custom device integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates that the official ecosystem does not ship. Nothing else in the Home Assistant world changes so much about how a system looks and behaves for so little money.

That “for so little money” is the catch in reverse: HACS itself is free, so the real spending decision is the hardware you run it on. Some of it is browser-based and undemanding; some of it — polished dashboard setups in particular — is heavier than a budget hub expects. This guide covers what HACS does in 2026, how it differs from Home Assistant’s official add-on store, and which of the current hardware options makes sense. Every price below is an approximation and moves constantly between retailers, so treat the figures as a rough guide rather than a quote.

Quick picks: hardware for a HACS setup in 2026

What the Home Assistant Community Store actually is

HACS is a custom integration that acts as an app store for community-made Home Assistant components. Once it is installed, it adds a sidebar panel to your Home Assistant interface. From there you browse, download and update software the official Home Assistant ecosystem does not distribute: unofficial device integrations, custom dashboard cards, themes and template collections. According to the project’s own documentation, HACS has been part of the Home Assistant landscape since 2019 and is maintained by a small group of volunteer developers.

The mechanics are simple enough. HACS does not host the code itself; it points at GitHub repositories, pulls their release metadata, and installs the files into the right places inside your Home Assistant configuration. That is why setup requires you to sign in with a GitHub account: without authentication, the GitHub API rate-limits the number of requests HACS can make, and browsing or updating components would repeatedly stall. It is a mandatory step, not an optional convenience.

For scale, the project’s home is github.com/hacs/integration. That repository carries the star and fork counts that best indicate how large the community around HACS currently is, and those are worth checking as of 2026 rather than relying on second-hand figures from older tutorials.

HACS, the add-on store and Home Assistant Community Add-ons: three different things

This is the single most common source of confusion, and it is worth separating into three distinct entities.

1. HACS — the community store described above, a custom integration for device integrations, frontend cards, themes and templates.
2. The official Home Assistant add-on store — built into Home Assistant OS and Home Assistant Supervised via the Supervisor panel. Add-ons are separate containers: Mosquitto (MQTT broker), Zigbee2MQTT, Node-RED, the File Editor and so on.
3. Home Assistant Community Add-ons — a separate project hosted as the hassio-addons/repository on GitHub. It distributes add-ons, not HACS components, and is frequently mistaken for HACS because of the similarity in name.

Many mature setups run all three side by side. HACS and the add-on store complement rather than compete: one manages integrations and frontend assets, the other manages containerised services.

Who runs HACS, and what Nabu Casa’s involvement is — and isn’t

HACS is not owned or governed by Nabu Casa, the company behind Home Assistant itself. Its lead maintainer is ludeeus, who is publicly listed as a Nabu Casa employee — a detail you can verify on the contributor graph at github.com/hacs/integration/graphs/contributors and in the documentation at hacs.xyz/docs. The relationship between the two projects is broadly cooperative rather than formal. Several popular community components have later been absorbed into Home Assistant core, and the Thermal Comfort integration (community → core) is the example usually cited; the Home Assistant core changelog is the place to confirm exactly which release it landed in.

Practically, that governance picture matters for one reason: HACS is a community project with a documented maintainer and a public repository, so you can see for yourself who is behind the code you are installing.

What you can actually install from HACS

The categories most users care about are:

• Integrations — unofficial or pre-release device support. Frequently cited examples include Sonoff LAN (local control of eWeLink devices), Local Tuya (local control of Tuya-based hardware) and browser_mod.
• Dashboards — the frontend cards that make a Home Assistant interface look good. Mushroom, Bubble Card, Button Card, Mini Graph Card and card-mod all live here, and collectively they account for a large share of the polished dashboards shared around the community.
• Themes — colour schemes and typography packs applied across the whole interface.
• Templates — reusable snippets, a category that has been trimmed back over successive releases.

What HACS 2.0 changed

HACS 2.0 rebuilt the interface and removed several legacy categories: Python Scripts, AppDaemon and NetDaemon. The release notes for the 2.0 series are published on the project’s site. If you are following an older tutorial that references any of those three, you are working from out-of-date instructions and the menus it describes will not exist in your install.

What HACS needs before you install it

Two requirements are worth checking before you start.

Your Home Assistant version. The release notes at hacs.xyz state the minimum Home Assistant version HACS 2.x requires, and that is the figure to check against the version you are running. Confirm it from the release notes rather than from a tutorial, because the minimum has moved as HACS has been updated.

Your install type. Per the official install documentation at hacs.xyz/docs/use/configuration/basic, HACS works on all four Home Assistant installation types: HAOS, Supervised, Container and Core. The same is not true of add-ons. Add-ons require the Supervisor and therefore work only on HAOS and Supervised — they do not work on Container or Core. So a Container or Core user can install HACS and every integration, card, theme and template inside it, but cannot install Zigbee2MQTT or Node-RED as add-ons; those have to be run as separate containers alongside Home Assistant.

Local Tuya vs Tuya Local: check before you install

These are two separate repositories with confusingly similar names, and both aim at the same job: controlling Tuya-based hardware locally instead of through the cloud. The actively maintained fork has shifted between them over time, which means a recommendation written two years ago may point at a repository that has since gone quiet. Before installing either, check the last-commit date on both repositories, and pick the one with recent activity. This is the clearest practical argument for making HACS part of your routine: when a component’s maintenance moves, HACS shows you the update or the lack of one.

How to choose hardware for HACS

Only a handful of hardware characteristics actually matter here, and it helps to know why each one does.

RAM. Every HACS integration and every custom dashboard card you load consumes memory inside the same Home Assistant process. Memory is the limiting factor for dashboard-heavy installs; storage is not. A 4 GB machine is workable, 8–16 GB is comfortable.

Storage and its type. Home Assistant OS, its add-ons and your configuration database all live on the boot device, so 32 GB is a practical minimum and 256 GB is generous. The Raspberry Pi route uses an NVMe Base HAT plus SSD so the Pi boots from NVMe storage rather than a microSD card; the Home Assistant Green uses 32 GB of onboard eMMC.

Radios. None of the machines below include a Zigbee or Thread radio in the base hardware. If you want Zigbee, Thread or Matter device support, plan for a USB dongle from the start.

Power draw and cooling. Mini PCs are quoted with a TDP — thermal design power, the heat the chip is designed to dissipate — of roughly 6–10 W. Lower TDP means less heat, so a quieter fan or a passive case is possible; a Raspberry Pi with an actively cooled case is similarly modest.

Best overall hub for HACS: Home Assistant Green

Best for: buyers who want HACS running in minutes with no assembly and an official support path.

Nabu Casa’s published specifications for the Green list an ARM Cortex-A53 processor, 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage, in a fanless chassis with Home Assistant OS preinstalled. There is no Zigbee or Thread radio onboard, so the radio section of the specification sheet is empty — pair it explicitly with a USB dongle if you want either protocol.

The strength is the absence of setup friction: Home Assistant OS is already on the device, so installing HACS is a matter of adding the custom integration and signing in with GitHub, with no operating system to flash and no storage to buy. The honest caveat is headroom. With 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC, a very large dashboard install — dozens of custom cards plus several HACS integrations — has less spare capacity than a mini PC at twice the memory or more.

Where to buy: around £90–£95 from the Nabu Casa store, which ships to the UK, or from Pimoroni UK. The Pi Hut also stocks Green and Pi hardware.

Verdict: the simplest route to a working HACS setup, provided you do not plan to stack heavy dashboards on top of it.

Best value DIY build for HACS: Raspberry Pi 5 (4 GB)

Best for: tinkerers who want the cheapest capable build and a genuine upgrade path.

The value pick here is the 4 GB board, not the 8 GB model — for most HACS-driven setups the extra memory is better spent elsewhere in the build. Because a Pi 5 is a bare board, it only makes sense priced as a complete bill of materials:

• Raspberry Pi 5, 4 GB board — approximately £50
• Official Raspberry Pi power supply — approximately £12
• Case with active cooling — approximately £10–£15
• NVMe Base HAT plus SSD — approximately £25–£35

That lands the whole build at roughly £100–£115, which is what makes it the value option — but note that it is only the value option as a complete build, since the board alone tells you nothing about what the machine actually costs to run.

The standout strength is the community: the Pi has the widest body of Home Assistant tutorials and forum answers of any platform, and the NVMe Base HAT means the system boots from NVMe storage rather than a microSD card, which also leaves room to store your configuration and database. The caveat is assembly — you are flashing Home Assistant OS, fitting cooling and mounting a HAT yourself, and there is no official support line if something goes wrong.

Where to buy: Pimoroni and The Pi Hut stock Pi hardware in the UK; rpilocator.com is the practical way to check current UK stock, since board availability still fluctuates.

Verdict: the best price-to-capability ratio if you are happy to build it yourself.

Best for heavy dashboard installs: Intel N100/N150 mini PC

Best for: buyers running large, card-heavy dashboards who want memory headroom rather than a smaller footprint.

This is the category the budget hub and the Pi cannot match. An Intel N100 or N150 mini PC with 8–16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe drive gives substantially more memory than either the Green’s 4 GB or the Pi 5’s 4 GB board, which is precisely the resource HACS dashboard cards consume. Beelink, Trigkey and Minisforum are the brands typically stocked for this specification.

The power story is better than a desktop machine’s: these chips are quoted at a TDP of roughly 6–10 W, so a machine left running continuously draws very little and can be cooled with a modest fan. Against the Green, the trade is straightforward — more memory and storage, but you install Home Assistant OS yourself and you are buying from a small-form-factor PC brand rather than from Nabu Casa. Against the Pi 5 build, the mini PC costs more (typically around £120–£180 versus roughly £100–£115), but arrives with the storage and cooling solved.

Where to buy: Amazon UK, where Beelink, Trigkey and Minisforum listings are typically around £120–£180 depending on RAM and storage configuration.

Verdict: the pick when your HACS setup is dashboard-led rather than device-led.

Best budget radio: Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus — E or P?

Best for: any of the machines above that needs Zigbee, Thread or Matter device support.

Because the Green, the Pi 5 build and the mini PCs all lack an onboard radio, a dongle is effectively a required accessory for most buyers. Sonoff’s two variants look near-identical, but they suit different jobs:

• Plus-E (EFR32MG21 chip) — the preferred choice if you want to flash the dongle as an OpenThread/Matter RCP, since the EFR32MG21 is the chip used for that role.
• Plus-P (CC2652P chip) — historically the stronger Zigbee coordinator, as documented in the Zigbee2MQTT adapter guidance at zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters.

The practical decision is therefore about which protocol you are building around first: the -E if Thread and Matter matter to you, the -P if Zigbee coordinator performance is the priority. Neither works with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT out of the box without configuration, but both are widely covered in existing guides, which is why they are the default recommendation rather than an obscure alternative. The caveat is that the firmware on these dongles often needs updating before first use — the adapter documentation at zigbee2mqtt.io is the reference for that.

Where to buy: around £18–£22 from Amazon UK or AliExpress UK.

Verdict: the cheapest meaningful upgrade to any of the three hubs above, and the one purchase most HACS users end up making.

Home Assistant Yellow: check availability before planning around it

Nabu Casa’s Home Assistant Yellow has been listed as discontinued or in limited stock at various points, so before building a plan around it, confirm its current status on the Nabu Casa store — availability, not specification, is the deciding factor here.

Risk, recovery and UK buying notes

HACS is community-maintained code running inside your production smart home, and the failure modes are worth stating plainly.

Breaking changes. Home Assistant’s monthly releases can disable HACS integrations immediately — a core change to an API or a state attribute can break a component that has not yet been updated. This is the normal cost of running software outside the core release cycle.

Safe mode. If Home Assistant fails to start cleanly, it can boot into safe mode, which bypasses custom integrations so the system comes up with core components only. The Home Assistant documentation covers safe mode in detail; the point to know is that it is a recovery state, not a repair — your custom integrations will be inactive until you fix or remove the offending one.

Snapshots. The mitigation is procedural rather than technical: take a full snapshot before each Home Assistant update cycle, as described in the Home Assistant backup documentation. That way a monthly release that breaks a HACS integration is an inconvenience you roll back from, not an outage.

UK buying. The Nabu Casa store ships to the UK, which is the simplest route for a Green. Pimoroni and The Pi Hut cover UK Pi hardware and the Green itself. Amazon UK covers Sonoff dongles and the Beelink/Trigkey/Minisforum mini PCs, and AliExpress UK is the alternative dongle source.

FAQ

Do I need HACS to install Zigbee2MQTT or Node-RED? No. Both are add-ons, and add-ons are distributed through the official Home Assistant add-on store in the Supervisor panel, not through HACS. That distinction also means Container and Core users cannot install them as add-ons at all, since add-ons require the Supervisor — they would run them as separate containers instead.

Is HACS free, and do I pay for anything inside it? HACS itself is free software with no subscription and no vendor lock-in. It is a browser and installer for components hosted on GitHub, so the software it points at is not bundled or licensed by the HACS project — check the individual repository before relying on an integration for anything important.

Do I need a Zigbee or Thread radio to use HACS? Not for HACS itself, which is entirely network- and software-based. You need a radio if you want Zigbee, Thread or Matter device support, and none of the hardware reviewed here includes one onboard — the Home Assistant Green’s Nabu Casa specification lists no Zigbee or Thread radio, so a USB dongle is a separate purchase.

How much RAM do I need for a dashboard-heavy HACS setup? It depends on how many custom cards and integrations you load, since they all consume memory inside the same Home Assistant process. A 4 GB machine — the Green or the 4 GB Pi 5 board — is workable for typical use, while 8–16 GB, as found in the N100/N150 mini PCs, gives noticeably more headroom for large dashboard installs.

What should I do before each Home Assistant update if I run HACS integrations? Take a full snapshot first, following the Home Assistant backup documentation. Monthly releases can break community integrations immediately, and a snapshot turns that into a rollback rather than a rebuild. If Home Assistant then fails to start, safe mode bypasses custom integrations so you can identify and remove the offending component.

Where can I buy this hardware in the UK? The Nabu Casa store ships to the UK and is the direct route for a Green. Pimoroni and The Pi Hut cover UK Pi hardware and the Green, rpilocator.com tracks Pi board stock, Amazon UK covers Sonoff dongles and N100/N150 mini PCs, and AliExpress UK is an alternative dongle source.

The verdict

HACS remains the highest-value free addition to a Home Assistant setup: it costs nothing, and it unlocks the integrations and dashboard cards that most polished builds depend on. The decision is not whether to install it but what to install it on. If you want it working today, the Home Assistant Green at around £90–£95 is the least effort. If you want the best price-to-capability ratio and do not mind assembly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4 GB build at roughly £100–£115 delivers it. If your setup is dashboard-led, the N100/N150 mini PC at typically around £120–£180 buys the memory headroom that matters most. And whichever you choose, budget around £18–£22 for a Sonoff dongle if Zigbee, Thread or Matter devices are part of your plan — then take a snapshot before every update cycle.