I want to love Home Assistant, but it has felt overly complex compared to the likes of Samsung SmartThings and Google Home. Thankfully, there’s a new dashboard on the way that completely rewrites my first impression.
Home Assistant Can Feel Overwhelming
Like many aspects of Home Assistant, the default dashboard can be described as functional. It works, but it’s not exactly a looker, nor is it easy to know what’s going on at a glance.
I find the current dashboard to be quite overwhelming and not the best introduction after setting up my Home Assistant Green. Toggles for every connected device in your home all exist on one screen. This means you’re looking for room names alongside device names all in one giant list.
I know some people like being able to control everything from one place without needing to do any extra taps, but that approach isn’t for me. So I’m quite happy to move this conversation along to the dashboard that’s eventually replacing this one.
The New Dashboard Is a Gulp of Fresh Air
The new dashboard is a model of what a difference whitespace can make. There are no new graphics introduced—everything is merely more spaced out. Rooms and areas are arranged as large, square touch targets that are easier to navigate with fingers. Plus, I can almost fit the entire thing in a single screenshot.
The dashboard is now divided into two primary sections. At the top, you find summaries. These include:
- Lights: Displays which lights are on in your home. Tapping this section brings up a screen that shows all the lights in your home in one place. It’s an easy way to quickly scan and see what to turn off without having to also scroll past smart outlets or various safety sensors.
- Climate: This pulls up devices that allow you to adjust the temperature. In my house, there’s only one: our Honeywell X2S Matter-compatible smart thermostat for the entire home. If you have internet-connected window AC units, fans, or space heaters, you would see more here.
- Security: This includes smart locks and security cameras. While I do have smart locks, mine aren’t yet Matter-compatible and aren’t connected to Home Assistant. For me, this area currently shows up blank.
- Media: This shows what songs or other media is currently playing through the smart speakers or TVs in your home.
Underneath the summaries, you get a grid of every room in your home. There are no toggles here. You tap on a room to list the devices in each room. And at the very bottom, you get a look at the current climate outside your home.
The new dashboard makes it easier to dive into each room, thanks to its more opinionated design. It takes guesses at the kind of tasks most people want quick access to and places that information at the top. It then takes the next most likely way people want to manage their home—by room—and makes that just as easy to dive into.
This approach may require an extra tap, but that’s a small sacrifice for gains in accessibility.
I No Longer Need to Create My Own Dashboard
One appealing thing about Home Assistant is that you are not required to love the default dashboard or to use the experimental one. You can swap out the default dashboard for a pre-built configured alternative or use the available building blocks to create your own. Some people have put together some truly impressive dashboards that put all of their desired information on-screen in an often beautiful way.
I didn’t create my own dashboard from scratch. Rather, I selected a different experimental dashboard that merely presented all the rooms in my home. To do anything more than turn the lights for an entire room on or off, I had to click on a room to get any information. I didn’t consider it ideal, just preferable to the default. It was a placeholder until I felt confident to create my own.
The new experimental home dashboard, frankly, is my ideal. I see little reason to swap it out, nor do I have a desire to create something more.
This Will Be the New Default Soon
For the time being, this new dashboard is experimental. That means the design is not yet set in stone. But changes are coming—Home Assistant’s developers have announced their intention to make this dashboard the new default.
If you also want to try out the new dashboard before then, make sure you’ve updated your Home Assistant box to version 2025.9. From the sidebar, open Settings > Dashboards > Add Dashboard. Then select “Home (Experimental).”
This new dashboard has sped up my adoption of Home Assistant. I already preferred the project’s commitment to privacy and local ownership compared to the data-collecting smart home hubs from the various multinationals. With this update, I’m starting to enjoy the software more as well. That’s a good thing, since I’ve already set up one Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition in my home, and I’m planning to add Thread support next.
