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The default Home Assistant dashboard that gets auto-generated the moment you add your first few devices is, almost universally, a wall of entities nobody but its creator understands. That's the single most repeated complaint in the Home Assistant community, and it's the reason most people never show their dashboard to a partner, a kid, or a guest. A good dashboard isn't a bigger dashboard — it's a smaller, room-based, purpose-built one that a person who's never opened the app can still use correctly on the first tap.
This guide exists because most "dashboard inspiration" articles are screenshot galleries with almost no explanation of how the screens were built, and most card tutorials cover one component in isolation without ever explaining where it fits into a full house. Neither approach tells you what to actually build for your living room versus your bedroom, or what to mount on the wall to display it. Home Assistant's dashboard engine changed meaningfully in late 2024 with the Sections view, and two free community cards — Mushroom and Bubble Card — have become the default vocabulary for anyone building a touch-friendly, room-based UI on top of it.
This guide walks through the current dashboard toolkit (Sections view, Tile cards, Mushroom, Bubble Card), gives concrete design patterns for the rooms and functions people build most often — living room, kitchen, bedroom, climate, lighting, security, energy, presence — and then covers the part inspiration posts usually skip: what hardware actually displays this well on a wall, and what breaks over time.
This is written for anyone past the "I just installed Home Assistant" stage who now has a growing list of entities and wants a dashboard that survives contact with the rest of the household — from a first room-based rebuild to someone deciding between a budget tablet and a dedicated wall panel.
What You'll Need
- A running Home Assistant instance on HA Yellow, HA Green, a Raspberry Pi, or a mini PC — any host on a recent core release works
- HACS installed if you plan to add Mushroom Cards, Bubble Card, or Kiosk Mode (none are required to build a clean dashboard, but all three are free)
- A rough device inventory sorted by room and function — you'll design around this, not around the auto-generated entity list
- Optional: a tablet, dedicated wall panel, or e-ink display, plus a mount, if the goal is a permanent wall dashboard rather than a phone-only one
Before You Start — Sections, Masonry, and What Changed
Home Assistant's dashboard system — officially "Dashboards," still called Lovelace internally — supports four view types: Sections, Masonry, Panel, and Sidebar. Masonry was the original auto-flowing layout and is now considered legacy. Sections shipped experimentally in the 2024.3 release under the internal codename "Project Grace," named after Admiral Grace Hopper, and became the generally-available default in the 2024.11 release. It uses a grid layout where sections flow left to right and wrap to a new row when full, with column widths staying fixed for predictable behavior across screen sizes and row heights following the tallest section in the row. That predictability is why the Sections view solved a problem Masonry never did: a dashboard that looks intentional on a phone, a tablet, and a wall panel without three separate builds.
Two structural decisions follow directly from this. First, the built-in Tile card is the default suggested card in the Sections editor for a reason — it's zero-maintenance, ships with core, and covers most entity types (lights, switches, climate, locks, sensors) without a single custom-card dependency. Second, conditional cards let a section change based on context: hide heating controls in summer, surface a room's controls only when presence is detected in that room, or drop a solar generation gauge from view after dark. Multiple dashboards are also fully supported and worth using deliberately — a stripped-down kitchen-tablet view, a simple guest dashboard, and a detailed admin view are not the same dashboard shown three ways; they're three different builds serving three different audiences.
Step 1 — Decide How Much Custom Card You Actually Need
Before picking cards, answer one question honestly: does this dashboard need to look like an app, or does it just need to work? Stock Lovelace with Tile cards inside the Sections view produces a clean, fully supported, zero-maintenance result with no HACS dependency at all. That's a legitimate end state, not a compromise — plenty of well-run Home Assistant installs stop there.
Mushroom Cards and Bubble Card exist for the next tier: a more cohesive, touch-friendly, app-like look. Both are free, open-source HACS integrations with no purchase path, premium tier, or paid unlock for core functionality — worth stating plainly, because plenty of "best dashboard" content implies otherwise. Mushroom, built by developer Paul Bottein (GitHub: piitaya), is the more design-opinionated of the two: chunky icons, consistent spacing, one entity per card, and a built-in visual editor with color and icon pickers for every card type, including Chips (compact status pills for things like presence or alarm state) and a Template card that accepts Jinja2 for computed icons, colors, and text. Bubble Card, built by developer Clooos, adds something Mushroom doesn't: pop-up panels triggered by hash links, navigation actions, or entity state — a security pop-up that auto-opens with a camera feed on motion, for example, with an auto-close timer. Bubble Card reached v3.2.5 in July 2026, requires Home Assistant 2023.9.0 or newer, and fully supports resizable cards inside the Sections view.
The honest trade-off: Mushroom's color and icon customization is more accessible out of the box; Bubble Card's pop-up and navigation system produces the more "native app" feel but requires more manual styling to match Mushroom's polish. Most builds that look the most finished actually run both side by side — Bubble Card for navigation and pop-up structure, Mushroom cards inside those pop-ups for the actual controls.
Step 2 — Design by Room
Room-based views are the most durable organizing principle for a dashboard a whole household can use, because "the kitchen" is a concept everyone already understands — unlike an alphabetized entity list.
Living room. The most common pattern pairs a room header (a Bubble Card pop-up or a Sections header) with four real controls: a climate card, a lighting section (sliders for dimmable circuits, toggles for switched ones), a media player card, and one or two scene buttons for "movie" or "relax" states. Community feedback is consistent here — living rooms are where dashboards get overcrowded fastest, and the fix is to surface only those four groups and push everything else (individual bulb-level detail, diagnostics) to a secondary view.
Kitchen. Kitchens are the most common wall-tablet location in the community, which changes the design brief: bigger touch targets, a temperature readout in the header, and a horizontal stack of light buttons for counter, sink, oven-hood, and fridge zones rather than a single dimmer. Many kitchen builds also add a Todo card for shopping lists and a camera tile if a doorbell or driveway camera is in scope. Because kitchens tend to be bright, screen readability in direct light is a real constraint on hardware choice — worth keeping in mind before Step 5.
Bedroom. Bedroom views favor dark themes, dimmable sliders over toggles, a climate readout, blinds/cover controls, and a single "good night" scene button that consolidates several actions into one tap. Displays used at night should either auto-dim on an ambient light sensor or run on an automation-driven schedule — a screen that stays at daytime brightness in a dark room is a fast way to guarantee the dashboard gets ignored.
Step 3 — Design by Function
Function-based views work best layered underneath or alongside room views, especially for systems that don't map to one room.
Climate. The built-in Thermostat card and the Mushroom Climate card are the two standard building blocks; the community-favorite HACS alternative, Simple Thermostat Card, adds a denser layout for the same data. A common structure is one card per room's thermostat, a whole-home temperature summary as a badge row, and conditional logic that hides heating controls once the season shifts to cooling.
Lighting. Tile, Mushroom Light, and Bubble Card button types cover this without much debate — sliders for dimmable circuits, toggles for switched ones, grouped by room in a stack, with a template-driven "N lights on" counter as a quick-glance badge. Lighting is the single most-used control category in the house, which is exactly why it needs the largest, most obvious buttons on the whole dashboard; this is not the section to get precious about minimalism.
Security and locks. The built-in Alarm panel card, Mushroom's Lock and Alarm cards, and a Bubble Card pop-up that opens a camera feed on motion cover most of this ground. The highest-value single element here is a template-driven "All Secure" / "3 Open" counter built from your door and window sensors and lock states — it's the one thing people check on the way out the door, and it deserves a fixed, prominent spot rather than being buried in a room view. If you're still choosing lock hardware to feed this section, a Kwikset model comparison or a sliding-door-specific guide covers that decision separately.
Energy. The built-in Energy Dashboard, available since the 2021.8 release, handles electricity, gas, and water, grouping usage into consumption, production, and storage with optional tariff cost calculation. It needs cumulative kWh sensors with state_class: total_increasing; a raw wattage sensor has to pass through the Riemann sum integral helper first to become an energy reading the dashboard can use. Build it in stages — grid, then solar, then export, then battery, then tariffs, then per-device breakdowns — rather than trying to configure everything at once, and expect the most common failure mode to be a sensor missing the right device class rather than a dashboard problem at all.
Motion and presence. Mushroom Chips for occupancy, plain Tile cards for binary motion sensors, and Bubble Card pop-ups that auto-trigger on motion are the standard toolkit. The pattern that gets the most genuine enthusiasm in the community is presence-driven reordering — showing the room you just walked into first, or surfacing its controls automatically — which is a real "wow" feature and not difficult to build once occupancy sensors are already in place.
Step 4 — Add Navigation and Pop-Ups
Once the room and function views exist, Bubble Card's pop-up system is what turns a set of separate pages into something that feels like one connected app: a horizontal button stack across the top for room navigation, each button opening a full-screen pop-up for that room via a hash link, with entity-state triggers (open the security pop-up automatically when motion fires) layered on top. This is also where the "less is more" principle earns its keep — the community's most repeated design complaint, ahead of any specific card choice, is simple overcrowding. Split rarely-checked data (battery levels, individual device diagnostics, system health) into a separate view or a separate dashboard entirely rather than adding it to a room view "just in case."
Step 5 — Choose Your Display Hardware
None of the software in this guide costs anything, which means the entire commercial decision in a dashboard project is what displays it. The right choice depends on where it's mounted and who uses it.
For a budget wall tablet, the Amazon Fire HD 10 remains the most-recommended entry point: a 10.1-inch 1080p display, an octa-core processor, 3 GB of RAM, and roughly 13 hours of battery life on paper — though on a wall mount it typically stays plugged in. The catch is Fire OS: Fully Kiosk Browser, the standard kiosk app for locking a tablet to your dashboard, isn't in the Amazon Appstore and has to be sideloaded as an APK, adding some setup friction that a stock Android tablet doesn't have.
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If sideloading is a dealbreaker, the Lenovo Tab M11 runs standard Google Play, so Fully Kiosk installs the normal way. It pairs an 11-inch display with a MediaTek Helio G88 chip and 128 GB of storage on the Wi-Fi configuration, and some units include an ambient light sensor useful for automatic dimming at night — a real advantage for a bedroom build.
For longer-term reliability, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ is worth the step up: an 11-inch 90 Hz display, quad Dolby Atmos speakers useful for Assist voice feedback, and — per Samsung — eligibility for three major OS upgrades plus four years of security updates, the strongest software-longevity commitment in this price class. It has no ambient light sensor, so a bedroom install needs a scheduled dimming automation rather than an automatic one.
For something that isn't a repurposed tablet at all, the SONOFF NSPanel Pro 120 is a dedicated 4.7-inch in-wall touch panel with an embedded Zigbee 3.0 gateway and Matter controller built in, running near-fully-local through the Home Assistant app available via F-Droid. It fits a standard wall box, though the US version ships with a stand rather than a flush in-wall mount. It has no relays — unlike the older standard NSPanel, it isn't also a physical light switch — so it's a display and Zigbee coordinator in one, not a replacement for existing switches.
For a calmer, always-on e-ink alternative rather than a backlit touchscreen, the Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 is a 7.3-inch color e-ink panel built on an ESP32-S3 and configured natively through ESPHome. It's built for glanceable information — weather, energy totals, a to-do list — not for driving a full interactive Lovelace UI, and a full-color refresh takes roughly 17 seconds, which is fine for a calm info panel and frustrating for anything you expect to respond instantly. In deep-sleep mode with periodic refreshes it can run for months on its internal battery. Makers looking for a similar always-on e-paper build with more DIY flexibility often land on the Soldered Inkplate 10 instead, though it isn't sold through Amazon.
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Whatever screen you land on, an articulating wall mount matters more than it sounds — a swivel mount with a lock, sized for 7–11 inch tablets, lets you angle the screen for the shortest regular user rather than fixing it at eye level for whoever installed it. A cardboard cutout taped to the wall for a day before drilling anything is the community's standard sanity check.
One honest caveat worth stating outright: a real minority of experienced users argue wall panels are redundant next to a phone and voice control, and that argument has merit for a single-occupant household. Where a wall panel earns its keep is guest access, shared-household use, and always-on glanceability — the household-adoption test again, just applied to hardware instead of software.
Step 6 — Lock the Screen Down with Kiosk Mode
A tablet running the full Home Assistant interface — sidebar, header, notification bell, and all — isn't a wall panel, it's a tablet someone can accidentally navigate away from. Kiosk Mode, a free HACS plugin, hides the header and sidebar per-user, per-device, or per-dashboard through a kiosk_mode: YAML block, but it only applies to a dashboard created from scratch rather than the auto-generated default. It's version-sensitive — Home Assistant 2026.2.0 and newer requires Kiosk Mode v10.0.0 or later — and it pairs naturally with Fully Kiosk Browser on Android or Guided Access on iOS to lock the device to a single app. Give the tablet a static IP on the same network segment as your Home Assistant instance; the most common wall-tablet complaint isn't the dashboard design at all, it's a device that silently drops off Wi-Fi and never reconnects.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Building one dashboard for every audience. A detailed admin view, a stripped kitchen-tablet view, and a simple guest view are three different builds, not one dashboard shown three ways.
- Overcrowding a single view. The most-repeated complaint across the community, by a wide margin — split diagnostics, battery levels, and rarely-checked sensors into a secondary view instead of adding "just one more card."
- Forcing custom cards where core cards already work. The Tile card covers most entity types with zero dependency risk; add Mushroom or Bubble Card for look and feel, not because a stock card can't do the job.
- Skipping the household-adoption test. If a partner, kid, or guest won't tap the buttons correctly on the first try, the layout needs bigger targets and clearer labels — not more features.
- Designing for the wall tablet first. Most people check a dashboard on a phone far more often than on a mounted screen; build mobile-first and treat the wall panel as a second, simplified view.
- Assuming a bright kitchen and a dark bedroom want the same screen. Match brightness, ambient-light sensing, and theme (light vs. dark) to where the display actually lives.
- Ignoring YAML indentation. Tabs mixed with spaces is the single most common cause of a dashboard that silently fails to load; editing in VS Code with the Home Assistant extension catches this before it reaches production.
- Not expecting maintenance. Home Assistant ships fast, and a community card can break for a day or two after a core update until its author patches it. Keep the number of custom-card dependencies low and back up before every update.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need Mushroom or Bubble Card to build a good dashboard?
No. The built-in Sections view combined with the Tile card produces a clean, fully supported dashboard with zero custom-card dependencies. Mushroom and Bubble Card add a more cohesive, app-like look and touch-friendly navigation, but neither adds capability the stock cards lack.
Q: What's the real difference between Mushroom and Bubble Card?
Mushroom is the easier path to a cohesive, color-consistent look with a strong built-in editor for every card type. Bubble Card's standout feature is its pop-up and navigation system — hash-link panels that can auto-open based on entity state — but its color customization takes more manual work. Many finished-looking dashboards run both together.
Q: Will a custom card break after a Home Assistant update?
Occasionally, yes. Community cards are maintained separately from core, so a major release can break one for a day or two until its author pushes a fix. Keeping the number of custom-card dependencies low, backing up before updates, and checking the card's GitHub issues before updating reduces the risk.
Q: What's the best cheap tablet for a wall-mounted dashboard?
The Amazon Fire HD 10 is the most common budget recommendation, though Fully Kiosk Browser has to be sideloaded as an APK since it isn't on the Amazon Appstore. If avoiding that sideload step matters more than price, a standard Android tablet with Google Play, such as the Lenovo Tab M11, skips that friction entirely.
Q: Do I need a dedicated wall panel instead of a tablet?
Not necessarily. A tablet with Kiosk Mode and Fully Kiosk Browser covers most needs at a lower cost. A dedicated panel like the SONOFF NSPanel Pro 120 makes sense when you also want an embedded Zigbee coordinator and Matter controller built into the same device, rather than running a general-purpose tablet as a single-use screen.
Q: How do I hide the sidebar and header for a kiosk display?
Install the free Kiosk Mode plugin through HACS and apply it to a dashboard built from scratch — it won't apply to the auto-generated default dashboard. Configuration is per-user, per-device, or per-dashboard through YAML, and it needs to stay version-matched to your Home Assistant core release.
Conclusion
The tools for a genuinely good Home Assistant dashboard haven't changed much in substance since the Sections view landed as the default in late 2024 — what's changed is that Mushroom and Bubble Card have matured into the standard vocabulary for building on top of it, and both remain free with no purchase path. The design work that actually matters is organizing by room and function, keeping each view small enough to pass the household-adoption test, and matching the display hardware to where it lives — a bright kitchen wants a brighter, faster screen than a dark bedroom, and a guest-facing view should never look like an admin panel.
Start with the beginner's setup guide or HACS installation walkthrough if the platform itself is still new, layer in room views before function views, and treat hardware as the last decision, not the first — a good dashboard on a mediocre tablet beats a mediocre dashboard on premium hardware every time. If a wall panel is the end goal, the Home Assistant Green vs. Yellow comparison and the broader hardware options guide are the natural next stops for getting the platform itself right before the screen on the wall.
