Nabu Casa Home Assistant Green

The Home Assistant Green is the closest thing the Home Assistant project has to an appliance: a 112 mm square, 340 g slab of translucent polycarbonate with Home Assistant OS already baked onto its eMMC. There is no SD card to flash, no Linux distro to pick, no first-boot terminal session. You plug in power and Ethernet, open the app, and the guided setup takes over while the hub sniffs out devices already on your network. For anyone who has previously bounced off a Raspberry Pi build, that alone is the product's reason to exist.

What it deliberately isn't is a self-contained radio hub. There is no Zigbee, Thread, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth silicon inside — Ethernet only — so the moment you want to talk to anything that isn't IP-based you're buying a Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee or Thread, one or the other) and/or a ZWA-2 for Z-Wave, and feeding them into the two USB 2.0 ports. The Green is therefore aimed at the person with a wired network, a willingness to read documentation, and an interest in keeping their automations local rather than renting them from a cloud. Tinkerers who want NVMe storage and an integrated radio are being pointed, fairly explicitly, at the pricier Yellow.

Judged as the thing it's trying to be — a dependable, low-maintenance always-on box for a local smart home — the Green is very good. The Rockchip RK3566 and 4 GB of RAM are unremarkable on paper but entirely appropriate for a workload that is mostly bookkeeping, and the sub-minute boot and passive, fanless cooling matter more in a hallway cupboard than benchmark numbers do. The standout figure is power draw: around 1.7 W idle and no more than about 3 W loaded, which for a device that never turns off is the difference between a rounding error and an annoyance on the electricity bill. The no-subscription, no-cloud-dependency model covering thousands of devices across hundreds of brands is the real product here, and the fact that Nabu Casa channels most of its profit into the Open Home Foundation makes the purchase feel less like buying a gadget and more like funding the software.

The compromises are real and worth weighing:

• Radio-free design means the advertised price is not the landed price. Add roughly $40-worth of ZBT-2, plus a Z-Wave stick if you need one, and you've eaten most of the gap to a better-equipped hub.
• Two USB 2.0 ports is exactly one too few. Run Zigbee and Z-Wave together and you're full, with no headroom for a backup drive or a UPS cable — and stacking two dongles side by side in adjacent USB ports is rarely ideal for radio performance.
• The 32 GB eMMC is soldered down. Fine for a database of sensor readings; a hard ceiling if you plan on long-term history, camera recordings or add-on sprawl, and a wear item you can't swap.
• Home Assistant itself still has a learning curve. The hardware is plug-and-play; the automations, YAML edge cases and integration quirks are not. Remote access and voice realistically push you toward a Home Assistant Cloud subscription or a DIY tunnel.
• At the $219 US listing rather than the $199 nominal price, the value case softens — particularly against the Yellow, which costs roughly double but bundles the radio and adds an NVMe slot.

One caveat on our confidence: we've assessed this from verified specs and third-party reporting rather than long-term hands-on use, and the supplied material is inconsistent on launch year and on whether a ZBT-1 or ZBT-2 ships alongside it. Those are minor points, but they're worth confirming with the retailer before you order.

Four stars. The Green nails the job of making Home Assistant approachable, cheap to run and silent, and the ethics of where your money goes are a genuine bonus. It loses a star for the radio omission and the cramped, non-upgradable I/O and storage, which turn what looks like a simple $199 purchase into a small shopping list — and which will have some buyers stretching to the Yellow instead.