Homey Pro (2026)

The Homey Pro (2026) is the rare smart home product that tries to solve the whole problem at once. Instead of asking you to pick a side in the Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter/Thread wars, it stuffs seven radios into one squat black cylinder and lets the Flow automation engine sort it out locally, with no cloud dependency and no subscription attached. Released in December 2025, it's a refresh rather than a reinvention: more memory and more performance headroom for bigger device networks and gnarlier automations.

This is clearly aimed at the person who has accumulated a decade of mismatched gear — an old Z-Wave lock, a drawer of Zigbee sensors, a few Matter bulbs, an IR-controlled air conditioner — and wants one box to rule them without spinning up a server. The ability to bridge Siri, Alexa and Google Home simultaneously is a genuinely underrated superpower in a mixed household, and 1,000+ supported brands means you're unlikely to hit a wall on day one. It is emphatically not the cheap entry point; anyone with a handful of Matter devices and a single voice assistant already owns a capable enough hub. The design helps its case too — matte sides, glossy top, and an LED status ring you can switch off in the app when it stops being useful.

On the fundamentals, Homey delivers. Local-first automation with no subscription is exactly what this category should be doing, and the breadth of protocol support is unmatched by anything else you can buy as a single consumer appliance. The extra memory in the 2026 model addresses the most obvious ceiling of the previous generation. An 8/10 expert consensus and a Recommended verdict from Smart Home Explorer tracks with what the spec sheet promises — this is a power-user tool that mostly lives up to the label.

The compromises are real, though, and they cluster around openness and value. A single USB-C port for power means wired Ethernet — the connection you actually want for a device orchestrating your entire home — requires a separate adapter, which is a strange omission on a $449 flagship. The inability to join an existing Thread network is the more strategic irritation: it insists on being the border router rather than a good citizen alongside the ones you may already have. And while the app ecosystem is broad, it leans on proprietary Homey 'Apps' with a smaller community behind them than Home Assistant enjoys — which matters when a niche integration breaks. North American buyers should also note the 433 MHz radio is disabled in the US and Canada.

The $50 rise from the original $400 launch price, attributed to industry-wide RAM costs, doesn't help the value calculation either. Still, for the power user with a genuinely heterogeneous home, nothing else consolidates this much into one box this cleanly. Four stars: excellent at its core job, held back by avoidable hardware and ecosystem stinginess.