Top 5 Add-Ons 2025 Edition
Add-ons are an important part of Home Assistant and these are my top 5 for 2025. Without these, my smart home would not work.
I like to start the year with a listing of my top add-ons or top technology that I am using in my smart home. With that in mind, here is my list for 2025.
1 - Z-Wave JS UI
Not surprisingly, this add-on is still number on my list. Without it, I wouldn't be able to control many of the things in my smart home. This add-on was previously known as Zwavejs2mqtt. As of this writing, I have 22 Z-wave devices, which is actually down 10 from last year. Most of that is just clean up of old or non-used devices I had while testing this or that. I control things like lights/lamps and switches. I monitor various aspects of my home including temperature/humidity as well as voltage and some aspects of the alarm system. The HUB I use with this: Aeotec Z-Stick 7 Plus.
2 - Zigbee2MQTT
This comes in second place because I have added a number of zigbee devices and those are very important to my overall smart home operation. I use many sensors for temperature and humidity around the house, as well as my alarm system sensors. As of this writing I have 14 devices. I use mostly Aqara sensors for this and I don't use an Aqara hub. It all goes directly to Home Assistant via a ZigBee dongle. The device used with this: Home Assistant SkyConnect.
3 - Mosquitto Broker
This is one of those "behind the scenes" add-ons that doesn't have a pretty interface and doesn't require much interaction. Its job is to communicate important stuff from all my IoT devices around my smart home to Home Assistant and allow Home Assistant to send stuff back to the IoT devices. Since I am using the Zigbee2MQTT and ZWaveJS UI add-ons that both communicate via MQTT, this broker is critical the functioning of my smart home.
Using a tool such as MQTT Explorer, you can see the number of messages and topics being processed over MQTT.
4 - Local Voice Control
I'm lumping a few add-ons into one here because they are all related to local voice control. This is part of the voice assist stack and includes the following add-ons:
All these combined make up the fully local voice assist pipeline. Piper is a text-to-speech engine, whisper is a speech-to-text engine, openWakeWord allows you to use a wake word based on some available choices or make your own, and Wyoming Protocol ties it all together by allowing communication between each add-on. Wyoming isn't an add-on but is an integration that will automatically detect the other add-ons to build the full communication stack.
There are many considerations when building a fully local assist pipeline. One of the biggest is the processing power of the device you are running all this on. Voice takes more processing power than other aspects of Home Assistant. I won't go into the detail here, but be aware that you will need to balance hardware with speed when using local control. If you don't have powerful enough hardware and are a Home Assistant cloud subscriber, you can use their cloud to process all the speech, which is super fast.
Voice control in Home Assistant will continue to evolve and improve. For example, I am experimenting with using an LLM paired with their new voice hardware to get more of a "smart device" experience so that my family, who is used to asking questions of the smart speaker, can get parity with that experience. This would eventually allow me to replace my big name smart speakers with the Home Assistant hardware.
5 - Automations
This one is not technically an add-on. However, it does replace one of my long standing favorites so I thought it appropriate to mention it in the context of my favorite and important technologies in Home Assistant.
You might notice that Node-RED is not on my top 5 list this time around. Earlier this year, there was a small hiccup during a Node-RED update that broke some of my automations. While there was a workaround and subsequent fix (thanks Frenck!), that was enough of a push to get me to see if I could run all of my Node-RED automations in the constantly improved automation engine in Home Assistant.
I have more than 50 automations that run regularly. Some more often than others. Sixteen of those automations were pulled directly in from Node-RED. The automation engine and UI in Home Assistant has come a long way since I started using Home Assistant, when all of that had to be done directly using YAML code. This is why I give it a spot in my top 5.
One of the issues when using Node-RED was the inability (or very painful ability) to edit anything on the fly from my mobile device. Having everything in Home Assistant allows me to make those changes directly from my phone, no matter where I am. It also removes a dependency and makes things run just a bit faster.
Since moving from Node-RED to native automations, I haven't run anything in Node-RED and the automations have run flawlessly.
There are many more add-ons that I use and are important to my smart home as well as other aspects of my home network. Here is a picture of those running (or turned off but installed) that I have in my production Home Assistant instance. I also run Proxmox and Unraid with other things so this is not an exhaustive list of all my technology.
I should also mention that there are integrations that don't require an add-on to function and I run many more of those. This view is of both that type and integrations that are a required part of an add-on.
As you can see, my top 5 list is but a very small part of my overall smart home setup. This was just a peek into this year's list. Stay tuned to see what changes for next year. In the meantime, take a look at my other articles and watch the many videos I have over on my YouTube channel.
Thank you for reading and for watching!