This is the easiest way to access your Home Assistant smart home remotely, no subscription
Home Assistant is amazing because it’s free, but it’s not always the easiest platform in the world to use. While you can choose to pay for remote access by signing up for Home Assistant Cloud or go it alone with VPN access, there’s actually another easy way to add remote access to your smart home.
HomeKit Bridge adds Home Assistant devices to Apple Home
HomeKit Bridge is a Home Assistant integration that adds Apple Home support to your smart home server. You can mirror all your Home Assistant devices to Apple Home or just choose a few. These will then become available for use in Apple Home, for everyone in your household.
Using Home Assistant as the backbone of your smart home setup means you get all the benefits of this versatile, open source smart home platform. You don’t need to make sure your devices are Apple HomeKit certified, for example. You can use any Home Assistant-enabled devices and then expose them to Apple Home using the integration.
Another benefit of doing this is that it makes your smart home really easy to use for everyone involved. Home Assistant may be the best tool for managing a powerful, locally controlled smart home, but it’s not always the most user-friendly choice. With Apple Home, you can design the most user-friendly dashboard without worrying about having all the smart home functions at your fingertips.
Apple designed its smart home platform with simplicity in mind. There is virtually no learning curve; you simply invite whoever you want into your home, and they can control your lights, scenes, and receive critical alerts from sensors like water leak detectors. You can do cool things like limit access to unnecessary devices or get more complex by exposing automations as switches (so you can turn features on and off).
For me, the main advantage of this method is remote access. Apple Remote Access “just works” in that you can access your Apple Home from any Apple device signed in to the same Apple ID. You won’t have access to your full Home Assistant dashboard this way (naturally), but you will be able to control all the devices and read the sensors you have exposed via HomeKit Bridge.
What you need to make it work
This solution is perfect if you already use an iPhone (or if you have a few members of your household using one), but it won’t work for non-Apple devices. There isn’t (yet) an Apple Home app for Android, Windows, Linux, or anything other than an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Apple also doesn’t let you control your smart home through iCloud.com. If your house is full of iPhone users, this is a perfect solution.
You’ll also need an Apple Home hub, like a HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV. With this device connected to the same network as your Home Assistant server, find and configure the HomeKit Bridge integration in Home Assistant (under Settings > Devices & Services).
You can then set “Inclusion Mode” in HomeKit Bridge’s integration settings to “exclude” or “include” your devices. If you want to include everything but exclude specific devices, choose “exclude” and list the devices you don’t do it want to appear. Personally, I use “include” mode, then add new devices as I want to see them in HomeKit Bridge.
Once everything is set up, open the Home app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac and create a new home. You’ll need to configure everything here to reflect your home, creating rooms and dividing your devices between them. Your scenes won’t be mirrored either, so you’ll have to recreate them.
Your existing automations in Home Assistant will still work, but you also have the option to set up automations in Apple Home if you want (I personally don’t mind).
Apple equipment is expensive, but you can save money
The two best things about this approach are the simplicity and not having to pay a subscription. I already had a HomePod lying around (and an old Apple TV which would have also done the trick). My partner loves interacting with our smart home using his iPhone, and even Siri is tolerable for this task.
Of course, not everyone has the necessary equipment. I would recommend buying a used Apple Home Hub to save money. An Apple TV will do just fine, just make sure you have the Apple TV HD (fourth generation) or newer, or choose a 4K model if you also want to hook it up to a modern TV.
Apple’s smart home platform was designed with local control in mind. So, unlike smart homes from Amazon or Google, offline control is still possible even without an Internet connection. You’ll also have access to HomeKit Secure Video if you have an iCloud+ subscription for your existing devices, which you can use to host security camera footage in the cloud, even with models that were never designed to support it.
Other ways to add remote access
I am well aware that this method is not for everyone; This is clearly of little use to Android users, and requires you to have a Home hub in your possession. I’d say it’s better to pay a one-time fee for a smart speaker or streaming box rather than an ongoing subscription.
I like the idea of supporting the Home Assistant project with services like Home Assistant Cloud, but there are other ways, like purchasing device hardware like the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread radio or the ZWA-2 Z-Wave Long Range Adapter.
Other options for free remote access to your Home Assistant server include using a VPN tunnel through a service like Tailscale, ZeroTier, or Wireguard. You can also configure port forwarding and make your server accessible through a domain with a dynamic DNS provider. If you go this route, make sure you properly secure your server using an add-on like Let’s Encrypt.
Whatever you do, don’t just YOLO and open the necessary port on your router without locking down your server first.
