Open source smart home platform Home Assistant is putting an end to the cloud, at least in name. “We’re renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link because we hate clouds,” said founder Paulus Schoutsen. The edge in an interview before today’s announcement. “Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we’re out.”
The move is part of a long-term strategy Schoutsen and his team have been pursuing to make Home Assistant a mainstream smart home platform. Schoutsen says most users find the platform powerful after reaching the limits of mainstream options like Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple Home. But it has a steep learning curve, and that’s what it’s looking to change.
I spoke with Schoutsen at the Z-Wave Summit in Boca Raton, Florida, this week about Home Assistant’s changes and future plans, which include lowering barriers to entry by developing simpler control panels, making setup more intuitive, and using generative AI to reduce complexity. He also said they plan to launch a new center next year that is easier to use. “We are growing.”
“You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I simply don’t have your data.”
– Paulus Schoutsen
Renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Link is mostly symbolic. The features remain the same apart from some back-end improvements in speed and reliability. The new name also attempts to address a concern some new users had that it meant Home Assistant ran in the cloud, Schoutsen says. Home Assistant runs on local hardware and controls your smart home locally, but this means that once it leaves your home network, it can’t control anything.
For $6.50 a month or $65 a year, Home Assistant Link gives you a convenient way to access your Home Assistant instance from anywhere, along with the option to enable other internet-dependent features, such as integration with Alexa and Google voice control, speech to text, and encrypted backups.
The move addresses an uncomfortable dynamic for the platform: Schoutsen and his team have spent years campaigning against proprietary cloud ecosystems, which he believes harm the smart home, and encouraging people not to buy cloud-dependent products, while also offering a service with “cloud” in the name. However, unlike some cloud services, Home Assistant Cloud was never mandatory and you could always replicate everything it provided with other methods; The same goes for Link.
Schoutsen says Link also differs from many cloud services because it doesn’t have access to your data. Link is managed by Nabu Casa, Home Assistant’s business partner, and all Link traffic is encrypted. “We can’t see it and we don’t want to see it,” he says. “You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I simply don’t have your data.” The service provides a revenue stream to fund the development of the platform, with 60 percent of the profits going to the Open Home Foundation, a nonprofit that runs Home Assistant.
For Home Assistant, cloud-dependent products are a big no. “The cloud is ruining the way people think about the smart home,” Schoutsen says, pointing to recent examples of Nest turning off the cloud for its first thermostats, smart TVs sending your data to the cloud without you knowing, and Weber shutting down June Oven’s servers. “Now you have a dumb oven that costs $1,500. It’s crazy,” he says. “People get very used to it and very disappointed.”
The cloud is not all bad, Schoutsen admits. Speech-to-text, backups, and artificial intelligence work better online, but the problem is products that stop working without them. It wants product manufacturers to commit to offering local control by default, using open standards (Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome), never locking basic functions behind a cloud, and allowing users to control their own data.
“I would love to see a nutrition label on boxes that shows whether a product is cloud-dependent or not,” he says, adding that they are creating a database to help consumers find products that aren’t completely cloud-dependent.
This anti-cloud stance is likely to appeal to consumers who are increasingly concerned about who has access to their data. But Home Assistant still has a long way to go before it becomes commonplace. Schoutsen says Home Assistant is installed in about 2.7 million homes, but that’s still a fraction of the reach of Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings and Apple Home. Winning over mainstream users will be difficult.
The biggest barrier to entry is complexity. Home Assistant does a lot of things, which means you have a lot of options, which can be overwhelming. “If you want to try something with Home Assistant, the answer is never no,” says Schoutsen. “We want everything to be possible, which means the UX is more complicated and that scares people.” By comparison, “you open Apple Home and there’s nothing you can do,” he says.
Over the past few years, the team has been working to remove those barriers without removing functionality. “We’re looking to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling,” he says. There are plans to launch a successor to the Home Assistant Green hub that will be easier to set up. “We want it to be more like adding a Philips Hue hub,” says Schoutsen.
They are also working to make the user experience easier and will integrate the HACS community store, where users find and install community-created integrations, into Home Assistant next month. This should make the integrations easier to find and configure. “If people haven’t tried Home Assistant in over a year, they should give it a try,” he says.
“We are looking to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling.”
– Paulus Schoutsen
Another big push that could become a major selling point for the platform is the “No Device Left Behind” program. Nabu Casa is developing devices that will more easily incorporate people’s existing analog or legacy technology, such as legacy receivers, air conditioning units, solar panel inverters and even televisions, into the platform, using technology such as serial, IR and Modbus.
Schoutsen sees AI as a big driver of Home Assistant. “AI is going to solve the problem of complexity and our greatest weakness is becoming our greatest strength,” he says. As a broad, open platform that can bring together data and controls from across your smart home, Home Assistant could provide a useful foundation for AI agents.
I used Claude to set up Home Assistant last year and it was a huge improvement over trying to figure out what the heck YAML was. “Soon your agent will configure your software for you,” he says. “Because people don’t want the software, they just want the solution that comes from it.” Schoutsen acknowledges that agents raise obvious privacy concerns, but says Home Assistant keeps your data in-house and you can choose which agent to trust it to, including one that runs locally.
Ultimately, Home Assistant may not need to reinvent itself to conquer the mainstream if it can become the foundational layer that allows your home to talk to your AI agent or platform of choice. “If you just have a box in your house that runs Home Assistant and connects all your data to your agents or, say, Apple Home, that’s great,” he says. “That is a victory for Home Assistant.”
