Open Source Homey Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Homey.
The best open source alternative to Homey is Home Assistant. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Homey alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Homey is Gladys Assistant.
Homey alternatives are mainly Internet of Things (IoT). Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Homey.
Open source home automation that runs on hardware you own, putting local control and privacy ahead of any cloud dependency.
Home Assistant is home automation that runs where your devices are. Control stays local and so does the data about your home, which removes the dependence on a vendor's cloud staying online and staying interested in the hardware you bought.
The system is built with a modular approach, so support for a new device or action arrives as a component rather than as a change to the core. That structure is why the integration list keeps growing without the project fracturing under it.
A few things define what running it looks like.
- Local control: automations execute on your own machine, not on somebody else's server.
- Privacy first: information about your household stays inside it by default.
- Modest hardware: a Raspberry Pi or a small local server is enough to run the whole thing.
- Featured integrations: a large catalog covers common devices, with architecture documentation for writing your own.
- Community built: a worldwide group of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts maintains it.
The project publishes a live demo, installation instructions, tutorials and full documentation, along with a help section for problems hit while using it or while developing a component of your own. Home Assistant is a project of the Open Home Foundation. It suits anyone who wants a smart home that keeps working when the internet does not.
Privacy-first smart home assistant you run yourself on a Raspberry Pi, NAS or mini-PC, with no cloud service in between.
Gladys Assistant is a privacy-first smart home assistant that runs on hardware you own. That single decision shapes the rest of it: the state of your home stays on a machine in your house rather than becoming a record held by someone else's service.
Getting it running takes one Docker command. The container is given the host network, the Docker socket and the device tree so it can reach hardware attached to the machine, and state is kept in a SQLite file on a mounted volume. A Docker Compose guide covers the same setup for people who keep their stack in files.
The documentation is organized around the ways people actually install it.
- Raspberry Pi: step-by-step instructions for the most common self-hosted setup.
- NAS and mini-PC: guides for putting the assistant on hardware that is already running anyway.
- Docker Compose: an alternative to the long run command, with the configuration written down.
- Development setup: separate environment guides for macOS with Linux and for Windows.
- Service development: a contributing guide explaining the project structure and how to build a new service.
Contributions are welcome as code, documentation, translations or ideas, and the maintainers are unusually direct about using AI themselves, pointing agents at an instructions file kept in the repository. The code is Apache 2.0 licensed, with a community forum for questions and a continuous integration suite guarding the main branch.
