Stop buying new smart home devices—your old ones probably work with Home Assistant now

Home Assistant works with a lot of smart home devices, but it doesn’t work with everything. If you have smart home technology that you haven’t been able to connect to Home Assistant in the past, it’s worth checking again.

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Home Assistant is the answer to your smart home’s biggest problems

Control a wide range of devices, with or without an Internet connection.

Home Assistant is adding integrations at a crazy pace

Each version adds more options

Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek

Home Assistant releases updates on a monthly cycle, with smaller patch releases throughout the month. Each monthly update adds new features to Home Assistant, and these always include new integrations that have been officially added to Home Assistant.

There are usually a significant number of integrations added each month. For example, version 2026.4 included 14 new integrations, including Infrared, UniFi Access, WiiM, and Autoskope. Over the past 12 months, there have been as many as four new integrations in any release, and in some months as many as 17 have been added.

This does not include custom components that you can install through HACS that are not officially supported integrations. Many of these custom components allow you to connect smart home devices that aren’t supported by Home Assistant integrations, and some custom components become official integrations.

Dimensions (exterior)

4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H

Weight

12 ounces

Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that includes everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.

Infrared support opens up a lot of older devices

If it has an infrared remote, chances are you can control it

Credit: Nathaniel Pangaro / How-To Geek

Some new Home Assistant integrations only allow you to connect a limited number of smart devices from a specific brand. However, there are some that provide access to a whole series of smart home devices. One example is infrared integration, which was added in Home Assistant 2026.4.

Infrared integration adds native support for controlling IR devices such as TVs or AC units using Home Assistant. In the past, to do this you had to use manual workarounds or custom integrations, but Home Assistant now has a native platform dedicated to infrared control.

This means you can turn cheap ESP32 devices into infrared proxies capable of sending and receiving IR signals and controlling them directly from Home Assistant. For example, you can send commands to your TV as if you were pressing buttons on your remote control and use them to turn on the TV, change channels, increase the volume, etc.

Currently there is only infrared LG integration which will allow you to control an LG right out of the box, but for other IR devices you can use the remote.learn_command action to learn the commands your remote sends and the remote.send_command action to send these commands from your IR proxy. This means that, in theory, you can add almost any IR device that uses a remote control to Home Assistant.

Support for Bluetooth and Matter continues to expand

Support for all major protocols

Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

Infrared devices aren’t the only devices you can add to Home Assistant. All major protocols are supported, including those you might not expect.

For example, if you have Bluetooth smart devices in your home, you might assume that you cannot connect them to Home Assistant due to the limited range of Bluetooth. However, you can also use ESP32 devices as Bluetooth proxies and place them near your Bluetooth devices. These proxies can receive commands over Wi-Fi from Home Assistant and send the relevant Bluetooth signals to your Bluetooth devices, controlling them as if they were already within Bluetooth range of your Home Assistant server.

Home Assistant also has mature support for Matter and continues to add new Matter features. Home Assistant 2026.4 included an update that lets you manage users and PINs for Matter-enabled smart locks directly from Home Assistant. If you have Matter devices, Home Assistant is a great way to connect and control them.

How to check if your existing devices are supported

Autodiscovery does a lot of the work for you

If you want to know if a smart home device you own will work with Home Assistant, there are a few things you can do. The first is to see if the device is automatically discovered. Turn on the device and make sure it’s connected, and you may find that it appears in Home Assistant’s list of discovered devices.

If not, the next step is to seek official integration. On the Integrations page, click the button Add an integration and type in your device brand to see if any results appear. If so, install the integration and follow the setup instructions to connect your device.

If there is no official integration, you can try HACS. It’s a store of community-created custom components, many of which allow you to connect specific brands of smart home devices. If you can’t find a custom component in the HACS Store, try searching online, as some require manual installation.

If nothing works, you can try the Home Assistant community forums. You may find that someone is working on a solution.

Check your devices before replacing them

Home Assistant supports a huge range of smart home devices, and the list continues to grow. Before replacing old equipment or assuming a device won’t work, it’s worth double-checking Home Assistant. Support may have arrived since the last time you checked.