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If you've spent any time searching for a Home Assistant hub recently, you've probably run into two names: Green and Yellow. And you've probably also run into a pile of comparison articles that treat them as two current, side-by-side options — spec sheets stacked next to each other, pros and cons neatly balanced, as if you could order either one today and have it on your porch by Thursday.
You can't. That's the first thing this comparison needs to say plainly: Home Assistant Yellow is discontinued. Nabu Casa ended production on October 15, 2025, and there is no new stock coming. Any article that still frames this as an even fight between two active products is working from outdated information, and it's going to send you chasing a board you can't actually buy new.
That doesn't make the comparison pointless, though. Plenty of Yellow units are still out there — in drawers, on secondhand marketplaces, in leftover retailer stock — and understanding what Yellow actually offered (and where Green genuinely falls short of it) still matters if you're deciding between a used Yellow and a new Green, or just trying to understand why the community still argues about this.
This guide breaks down what each device actually is, what's built in versus what you have to add yourself, and who should realistically be looking at each one in 2026.
Quick Verdict
| Home Assistant Green | Home Assistant Yellow | |
|---|---|---|
| Status (2026) | Currently produced, only official HA hub | Discontinued Oct 15, 2025 — used/old stock only |
| Best for | Beginners, plug-and-play setups, low-maintenance homes | Enthusiasts who already own one, or found a good used unit |
| Built-in radios | None (Zigbee/Thread/Z-Wave all via USB) | Zigbee 3.0 + Thread (one at a time) via onboard chip |
| Expandability | USB only, no NVMe, no upgrade path | M.2 NVMe slot, optional PoE, swappable Compute Module |
| Setup complexity | Plug in, done | Requires sourcing and installing a Compute Module yourself (kit versions) |
| Buy new today | Yes | No — new production has ended |
Which Versions Are We Comparing?
Before getting into specs, it's worth being precise about what "Yellow" even refers to, because the product line wasn't a single SKU.
Home Assistant Green is straightforward: one current hardware revision, sold pre-assembled with Home Assistant OS already installed. Announced in September 2023 and broadly available from November 2023, it's the only Home Assistant hub Nabu Casa still manufactures.
Home Assistant Yellow shipped in a few different configurations over its life:
- Yellow Standard — the pre-assembled version, sold with a Compute Module 4 (CM4) already installed. This variant was discontinued in August 2024, well before the rest of the line.
- Yellow Kit (with power supply) and Yellow Kit (with PoE) — carrier boards sold without a Compute Module. Buyers had to source their own CM4 (or later, a CM5) separately and assemble the unit themselves. These kits continued until the full discontinuation in October 2025.
That distinction matters because a lot of the "what's inside a Yellow" confusion online comes from people describing the Standard's bundled CM4 as if it were a fixed spec, when in fact Yellow's actual capability depended entirely on which Compute Module you paired it with — anything from a 2 GB/16 GB CM4 up to an 8 GB/32 GB variant, or a Compute Module 5 for roughly double the CPU performance.
Green has no such variance. Every unit sold is identical: same SoC, same 4 GB of RAM, same 32 GB of storage, no options to configure.
If you're shopping used, this is the first thing to check on any Yellow listing — which Compute Module is actually installed, because that answer changes the device's real-world capability more than anything else on the spec sheet.
Availability & Production Status — Green vs Yellow
This is the section that should have been the headline of every "Green vs Yellow" article published since late 2025, and it's the one most of them still bury.
Home Assistant Yellow's end-of-life was announced directly by the Home Assistant project, with the Standard variant discontinued back in August 2024 and the remaining Kit variants following in October 2025. There is no new-manufacture Yellow hardware being produced. What exists is what's left in distributor inventory (increasingly rare), or used units changing hands on secondhand marketplaces and community forums.
Software support is a different story — Home Assistant has a track record of continuing to ship OS updates to discontinued hardware (the earlier Home Assistant Blue, discontinued back in 2022, is still getting updates years later). So a Yellow you already own, or buy used, isn't going to stop working next month. But you're buying into a board with no future hardware revisions, dwindling parts availability for repairs, and a shrinking pool of sellers.
Green, meanwhile, is actively sold, actively stocked, and is explicitly positioned by Nabu Casa as the hub for anyone starting fresh in 2026. If your criteria include "can I actually buy this new, right now, with a warranty," Green wins by default — there's no real Yellow-shaped alternative on the market anymore.
Hardware & Performance — Green vs Yellow
Strip away the radios and expansion options for a moment and look purely at compute:
Green runs a Rockchip RK3566, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor clocked at 1.8 GHz, paired with a fixed 4 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage. None of it is upgradeable — no RAM slots, no M.2 connector, no storage swap. What you buy is what you have for the life of the device.
Yellow is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module — CM4 officially, with CM5 compatibility for a roughly 2x performance jump (note: CM5 requires different mounting screws than CM4, so it's not a drop-in swap on older carrier boards). The CM4's Cortex-A72 cores run at 1.5 GHz — a lower clock speed than Green's A55, but the A72 microarchitecture is generally more capable per-core, so real-world performance between a base 4 GB CM4 Yellow and a Green tends to land close to parity for typical Home Assistant workloads.
Where Yellow pulls ahead is at the extremes. Because RAM and storage depend on which Compute Module you install, an 8 GB CM4 (or a CM5) gives you meaningfully more headroom for large device counts, heavy history retention, or add-ons that are memory-hungry. Green has no equivalent path — 4 GB and 32 GB is the ceiling, permanently.
For a typical home — somewhere in the 50 to 200 device range, without Frigate cameras or dense local AI workloads running on the same box — the practical difference between Green and a standard 4 GB Yellow is close to negligible. The gap only opens up if you're pushing either device toward the heavier end of what Home Assistant can do.
Radios & Protocol Support — Green vs Yellow
This is the single most misunderstood part of this comparison, so it's worth being blunt: Green has no built-in radios of any kind. No Zigbee, no Thread, no Z-Wave, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. It connects to your network over Gigabit Ethernet and that's it. Every wireless smart-home protocol has to be added externally over USB.
Yellow, by contrast, does have something built in: a Silicon Labs MGM210P chip supporting Zigbee 3.0 and OpenThread (with Matter capability), operating at 2.4 GHz with up to +20 dBm transmit power. That's a genuine hardware advantage over Green — you get one working wireless radio out of the box, no dongle required.
But it comes with a real limitation that gets glossed over constantly: that single onboard radio runs Zigbee OR Thread firmware — never both at the same time. If you need Zigbee devices and Thread/Matter devices running simultaneously, one board-level radio can't do both jobs. You'd need to add a second, external radio anyway, which narrows Yellow's built-in advantage considerably for anyone running a mixed protocol setup — which, by 2026, is most enthusiast homes.
Neither device has native Z-Wave support. If you run Z-Wave devices, you're adding a USB Z-Wave stick regardless of which hub you choose.
So the honest framing is: Yellow gives you one radio for free, with a real switching cost if you want a second protocol. Green gives you zero radios, with a straightforward "add exactly what you need over USB" model. If your home is Zigbee-only and you don't anticipate touching Thread, Yellow's built-in radio is genuinely convenient. If you're running Zigbee and Thread and possibly Z-Wave — which describes a growing share of Home Assistant users — you're buying external dongles either way, and the built-in radio stops being much of a differentiator.
For detailed options on which USB radios work best with each, see Best Zigbee Coordinators & Dongles for Home Assistant (2026).
Expandability & Upgrade Path — Green vs Yellow
Here Yellow's design intent shows clearly: it was built as an enthusiast board, not a sealed appliance.
Yellow includes an M.2 M-key slot supporting PCIe NVMe SSDs (common form factors from 2230 up to 2280), giving you a storage upgrade path Green simply doesn't have. It's worth noting that a Google Coral AI accelerator does not work in that slot, despite sharing the M.2 form factor — a mismatch that trips up buyers looking to pair Yellow with local AI object detection. Yellow also supports Power over Ethernet (802.3at Class 3/4) on the PoE kit variant, letting you run a single cable for both power and network — handy if the hub lives somewhere without a nearby outlet. There's also a 10-pin GPIO header and a built-in audio DAC with a 3.5mm line-out, both leftovers from its Raspberry Pi Compute Module heritage that give tinkerers room to build custom hardware projects around the hub itself.
Green has none of this. Two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an HDMI port that's diagnostic-only (not for a general-purpose display), and a microSD slot reserved for recovery use — not general storage. There's no NVMe slot, no PoE option, no GPIO header. It is, deliberately, a sealed appliance: you plug it in, it works, and there is nowhere to go from there except adding USB accessories.
If your plans stop at "add a Zigbee dongle and maybe a Z-Wave stick," this difference won't touch you. If you're thinking about NVMe-backed databases, PoE runs to a utility closet, or GPIO-based side projects, Yellow's design was built for exactly that — and Green simply wasn't.
Power, Noise & Physical Footprint — Green vs Yellow
Both devices are fanless, so neither one makes noise under normal operation — a real point in favor of running Home Assistant on either rather than an always-on mini PC with active cooling.
Green draws around 1.7 W at idle and up to roughly 3 W under load, run off a 12V DC barrel connector rated at 1A. It's compact — 112 x 112 x 32 mm, about 340 grams — and its aluminum heatsink base handles cooling passively without any moving parts.
Yellow's power draw depends somewhat on configuration but generally sits a bit lower at idle (around 1.5 W, or roughly 2.5 W with an NVMe drive installed) and higher under load — up to around 9 W at peak, reflecting the more capable Compute Module and any attached storage. It's marginally larger at 123 x 123 x 36 mm. Power comes via a 12V/2A barrel jack or, if you're using the PoE kit, over Ethernet.
In practice, neither device's power draw is meaningful enough to factor into a buying decision on its own — both sip a few watts continuously, translating to a negligible line item on any electricity bill. The more relevant physical consideration is Yellow's PoE option, which genuinely simplifies installs in server closets or anywhere you'd rather not run a separate power brick.
Total Cost of Ownership — Green vs Yellow
Sticker price alone undersells what either hub actually costs to get running the way most people want it.
Green ships complete and ready to go — no additional hardware is strictly required to boot Home Assistant OS and start managing Wi-Fi and cloud-connected devices. But almost nobody stops there. If you own any direct Zigbee or Thread devices — Aqara sensors, IKEA bulbs, unbridged Hue hardware, Sonoff Zigbee gear — you'll be adding a USB radio like the Connect ZBT-2 on top of the base hub. Add Z-Wave into the mix and you're adding a second dongle for that too. The realistic cost of a fully wireless-capable Green setup is the hub plus one or two small USB adapters.
Yellow's total cost story used to look worse than it does today, ironically because it's no longer sold new. When it was in production, a Kit variant required buyers to separately source a Compute Module — during a period when Pi-family chip shortages made CM4 pricing genuinely painful — pushing a fully-built Yellow with a decent CM4 and an NVMe drive to something noticeably above Green's total cost. Buying a used Yellow today changes that calculus: you're typically paying only for the assembled board as a single secondhand purchase, which can undercut a new Green plus dongles — but you inherit unknown wear, no warranty, and whatever Compute Module the previous owner happened to install.
The practical takeaway: Green's "true" cost is the hub plus USB radios for whatever protocols you actually use. Yellow's true cost today is whatever a working used unit sells for, plus the same USB Z-Wave dongle if you need it, minus the Zigbee/Thread dongle Green would otherwise require — offset by the total absence of a warranty or guaranteed condition.
Head-to-Head Specs Comparison
| Spec | Home Assistant Green | Home Assistant Yellow |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Rockchip RK3566, quad-core Cortex-A55 @ 1.8 GHz | Raspberry Pi CM4 (Cortex-A72 @ 1.5 GHz) or CM5 |
| RAM | 4 GB LPDDR4X (fixed) | 2–8 GB depending on Compute Module (not upgradeable after assembly without swapping the module) |
| Storage | 32 GB eMMC (soldered, fixed) | 16–32 GB eMMC on-module, or NVMe via M.2 slot |
| Built-in radios | None | Zigbee 3.0 + Thread/Matter (one active at a time) |
| Native Z-Wave | No (USB add-on required) | No (USB add-on required) |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet only | Gigabit Ethernet |
| USB ports | 2× USB 2.0 Type-A | 2× USB 2.0 Type-A + 1× USB-C |
| Expansion slot | None | M.2 M-key (NVMe SSD) |
| PoE support | No | Yes, on PoE kit variant (802.3at) |
| GPIO / audio out | No | 10-pin GPIO header + 3.5mm audio DAC |
| Power draw (idle / load) | ~1.7 W / ~3 W | ~1.5 W / up to ~9 W |
| Dimensions | 112 × 112 × 32 mm | 123 × 123 × 36 mm |
| Setup | Pre-assembled, plug-and-play | Kit variants require sourcing + installing a Compute Module |
| Current availability | In production, sold new worldwide | Discontinued Oct 15, 2025 — used/old stock only |
Which Should You Buy?
If you're setting up Home Assistant for the first time in 2026: buy Green. It's the only one of the two you can actually purchase new with a warranty, it requires zero assembly, and for the overwhelming majority of homes its fixed 4 GB/32 GB specs are plenty. Budget for a USB Zigbee/Thread radio if you have direct devices that need one, and consider offloading your recorder database to an external USB drive early to manage the eMMC wear that shows up in community reports.
If you already own a Yellow: keep using it. Software support isn't going anywhere, and if you installed a decent Compute Module (4 GB or better) with an NVMe drive, you likely have more headroom than a stock Green — particularly useful if you're running heavier workloads like Self-Hosted Camera Systems: The Complete Frigate + Home Assistant Guide (2026) or multiple add-ons alongside your core automations.
If you're considering a used Yellow specifically because of its price or its built-in radio: proceed carefully. Confirm exactly which Compute Module is installed (RAM and storage vary enormously), test the NVMe slot if one is populated, and go in accepting there's no warranty and no future hardware revision coming. If you only need Zigbee and don't care about Thread, Yellow's onboard radio is a genuine convenience — just remember it can't run Zigbee and Thread at once, so a mixed-protocol home will need a second dongle regardless.
If you're planning to push either hub hard — dense camera setups, local AI inference, huge device counts — neither is really the ideal answer. A Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage or a small x86 mini PC will outperform both, at the cost of losing the fully sealed, zero-maintenance simplicity that makes Green in particular appealing to beginners. For a broader comparison across all Home Assistant hardware options, see Home Assistant Hardware Compared (2026): Green vs Yellow vs Raspberry Pi vs Mini PC.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is Home Assistant Yellow still available to buy new?
No. Nabu Casa discontinued Yellow on October 15, 2025, following the earlier discontinuation of the pre-assembled Standard variant in August 2024. Any Yellow available today is used or leftover distributor stock, not new production.
Q: Does Home Assistant Green have built-in Zigbee?
No, and this is the most common misconception around this device. Green has no onboard radios at all — no Zigbee, Thread, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. Every wireless protocol is added via a USB adapter.
Q: Can Yellow's built-in radio run Zigbee and Thread at the same time?
No. The onboard Silicon Labs MGM210P chip runs either Zigbee 3.0 firmware or Thread/Matter firmware — never both simultaneously. Running both protocols requires a second, separate radio.
Q: Do either Green or Yellow support Z-Wave out of the box?
Neither does. Both require an external USB Z-Wave adapter to add Z-Wave device support, regardless of which hub you choose.
Q: Is a used Home Assistant Yellow worth buying in 2026?
It can be, if you understand what you're getting: no warranty, unknown Compute Module specs unless the seller confirms them, and no future hardware revisions. If Zigbee is your primary protocol and you find a well-specified used unit at a fair price, it can still be a capable hub. For most first-time buyers, a new Green is the simpler and safer choice.
Q: Will Home Assistant Green wear out over time?
Green's storage is soldered eMMC with no upgrade path, and community reports point to noticeably fast "lifetime used" wear under default settings — some users report meaningful wear within weeks of normal use. Moving your recorder database and backups to an external USB drive, and trimming history retention for entities you don't need logged, are the standard mitigations.
Conclusion
The "Green vs Yellow" debate that used to define this corner of the Home Assistant hardware conversation has effectively been settled by discontinuation, not by which spec sheet wins. Yellow was the more expandable, more tinkerer-friendly board, with a genuine built-in radio advantage and room to grow via NVMe and PoE — but it's no longer something you can buy new, and its single-radio limitation always meant mixed-protocol homes needed a second dongle anyway.
Green is the practical answer for anyone starting today: sealed, plug-and-play, actively sold, and more than capable for the vast majority of smart homes once you add the USB radios your specific devices require. If you already have a working Yellow, there's no reason to abandon it. If you're choosing new hardware in 2026, Green is the one actually available to choose.
