Disclosure: Some links in this article are affiliate links. We may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
Picking the right box to run Home Assistant is the first real decision every new smart home enthusiast has to make, and in 2026 the answer isn't as simple as it used to be. Home Assistant Yellow — the official, expandable option many tinkerers loved — is gone. Home Assistant Green got a lot more expensive since launch. And a growing share of the community has quietly moved from Raspberry Pi boards to small x86 mini PCs, some running Home Assistant OS as a virtual machine under Proxmox.
That shift matters because the "just buy the newest Raspberry Pi" advice that circulated for years is no longer the default recommendation — even Nabu Casa has acknowledged the trend. Meanwhile, plenty of buying guides still list Yellow as purchasable, quote outdated Green pricing, or gloss over the one failure mode that ends more Home Assistant setups than anything else: SD card corruption on a Raspberry Pi.
This guide compares the five realistic hosting options for Home Assistant today — Green, Yellow (as a legacy/secondhand pick), Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, and a mini PC/NUC — across power draw, radio support, storage reliability, and expandability, including when Proxmox actually makes sense. It also clears up a common point of confusion: a wall-mounted tablet is not a Home Assistant host, it's a dashboard.
Whether it's a first Home Assistant install for a handful of Zigbee sensors or a more ambitious build running Frigate and a dozen add-ons, the goal here is to point at the box that fits, not the one with the flashiest spec sheet.
Quick Verdict
| Option | Best for | Radios built in | Expandability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Assistant Green | Beginners who want plug-and-play | None (USB dongle needed) | Low — sealed, ARM, HAOS only |
| Home Assistant Yellow (discontinued) | Existing owners / secondhand buyers | Zigbee 3.0 + Thread (Silicon Labs MGM210P) | High for its class — NVMe, PoE, swappable compute module |
| Raspberry Pi 4 | Budget DIY, light setups | None (USB dongle needed) | Moderate |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | DIY users who want headroom (cameras, more add-ons) | None (USB dongle needed) | Moderate-to-high with NVMe |
| Mini PC / NUC | Power users running Frigate, local AI, or a broader homelab (optionally on Proxmox) | None (USB dongle needed) | Highest |
Which Versions Are We Comparing?
Before comparing specs, it's worth being precise about what each of these actually is, because two of them are easy to get wrong.
Home Assistant Green is Nabu Casa's official appliance: an RK3566 ARM board in a sealed case, running Home Assistant OS out of the box. As of mid-2026, it's the only official Home Assistant hardware still in production.
Home Assistant Yellow was Nabu Casa's other official device — a carrier board for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module (CM4, CM5-compatible) with a built-in Zigbee/Thread radio. Production ended on October 15, 2025. It still receives software updates and remains a legitimate option secondhand, but it is not something a reader can walk into 2026 and buy new. Treating it as a current recommendation, which several competing guides still do, sets buyers up to search for a product that no longer exists at retail.
Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 are the general-purpose single-board computers that predate and outlive both official devices — bare boards that need a case, a power supply, storage, and (for any wireless protocol) a USB radio dongle.
Mini PC / NUC covers small x86 machines — commonly built around an Intel N100 or N150 chip — that can either run Home Assistant OS directly (bare metal) or as a virtual machine under a hypervisor like Proxox VE alongside other services.
One more clarification worth making upfront: none of these is a tablet. A wall-mounted tablet running Fully Kiosk Browser or the Home Assistant Companion app is a dashboard — it displays and controls an existing Home Assistant instance, it doesn't host one. That's a completely different purchase from anything in this comparison.
Power Consumption & Running Costs
Idle power draw adds up over a year of 24/7 operation, and the gap between these options is real.
- Home Assistant Green: roughly 1.7 W idle, up to about 3 W under load — the lowest of the group, and consistent with a device designed to do one job.
- Home Assistant Yellow: power draw depends on the installed Compute Module, but sits in a similar range to the Green when running a CM4.
- Raspberry Pi 4: around 1.0 W idle, climbing to roughly 6.2 W under stress.
- Raspberry Pi 5: noticeably higher — about 2.7–3.0 W idle and up to 16 W under heavy load, a consequence of its faster Cortex-A76 cores. It also requires a proper 5V/5A (27 W) USB-C power delivery supply; underpowered chargers are a common source of instability.
- Mini PC / NUC (N100/N150 class): roughly 5–15 W idle in real-world measurements — higher than any single-board option, but still cheap to run continuously, and the extra headroom buys the ability to run several services on the same box instead of buying multiple devices.
For a Home Assistant-only install, Green and the Pi boards win on pure efficiency. Once Frigate, local voice processing, or a handful of other containers enter the picture, the mini PC's slightly higher draw is easily justified by not needing a second machine.
Radios & Wireless Connectivity: Built-In vs USB Dongle
This is where Yellow's discontinuation actually changes the shopping list, not just the price tag.
Yellow was the only device on this list with a built-in radio — a Silicon Labs MGM210P chip covering Zigbee 3.0 and Thread (one protocol at a time, not simultaneously). Every other option — Green, both Raspberry Pi boards, and any mini PC — ships with no wireless radio at all for Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread. That surprises a lot of first-time buyers who assume "smart home hub" means built-in wireless.
In practice, that means budgeting for a USB coordinator alongside any of these four options: Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 for Zigbee and Thread, or Connect ZWA-2 for Z-Wave. This isn't a downside unique to any one device — it's simply the current state of official Home Assistant hardware post-Yellow. For a deeper look at how Zigbee coordinators and hubs actually differ, see the Zigbee hub comparison and the Zigbee device compatibility list.
Matter and Thread support work the same way across all five options at the software level — the Home Assistant Matter Server runs identically regardless of host — but Thread specifically needs a Thread Border Router, which a USB dongle like ZBT-2 can provide on any of these machines.
Storage & Reliability: eMMC vs microSD vs NVMe
This is the criterion most buying guides underweight, and it's arguably the biggest real-world reliability difference between these options.
- Home Assistant Green uses 32 GB of soldered eMMC storage. It can't be expanded, but it eliminates the single most common Raspberry Pi failure mode: SD card corruption.
- Home Assistant Yellow supports direct NVMe SSD boot via its M.2 slot — a meaningful upgrade over microSD, and one reason it's still fondly remembered by owners.
- Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 ship configured for microSD by default, and community reports of repeated corruption within months of normal use are common enough that booting from a USB SSD instead of microSD from the start.
- Mini PC / NUC builds run on NVMe SSDs as standard, which is one of the quieter reasons the community has drifted toward them — nobody has to think about SD card failure at all.
The practical takeaway: Green's sealed eMMC and a Pi running from SSD/NVMe solve the same problem two different ways. A Pi still booting from its stock microSD card is the one configuration in this whole comparison worth actively avoiding.
Expandability & Headroom: Frigate, Add-Ons, and Proxmox
Expandability is where the five options separate the most clearly.
Home Assistant Green is intentionally the least expandable: ARM-only, HAOS-only, sealed storage, no Proxmox or general virtualization possible. It comfortably runs Home Assistant plus a normal set of integrations for under roughly 50 devices, but it's not the box for Frigate or local AI workloads.
Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage has enough headroom for Home Assistant plus a light Frigate setup (a camera or two), though it will run warmer and needs active cooling under sustained load. Raspberry Pi 4 is best kept to Home Assistant and a modest add-on list.
Home Assistant Yellow, for existing owners, sits in a similar performance band to whichever Compute Module is installed, with the advantage of PoE and NVMe built into the carrier board.
Mini PC / NUC is the clear winner for anyone planning to run more than Home Assistant on the same hardware. An N100/N150-class machine with 16 GB of RAM has enough capacity to run Frigate with several cameras, Zigbee2MQTT, MQTT, and other homelab services side by side — either as separate Docker containers on a bare-metal HAOS install, or as isolated VMs under Proxmox.
That last point deserves its own answer, since it's one of the most common questions buyers actually search for.
Is Proxmox worth it? Only if there's already a reason to want a hypervisor — running Home Assistant alongside other VMs, wanting clean rollback points before updates, or consolidating several services onto one machine. Under Proxmox, a USB Zigbee or Z-Wave coordinator passes through to the Home Assistant OS VM cleanly and stays bound, without the unplug/replug hassle some virtualization setups create. The community's practical two-tier backup approach is to keep Home Assistant's own built-in backups (fast, application-aware restores) and full Proxmox VM snapshots (a true point-in-time rollback if an update goes wrong). For someone who only wants Home Assistant and nothing else, though, installing HAOS directly on dedicated hardware is simpler and removes an entire layer of things that can break. Proxmox is a "yes, if" tool, not a default recommendation.
Ease of Setup vs DIY Flexibility
Green is the appliance experience: plug in Ethernet and power, onboard in about 10–15 minutes, done. Yellow, both Raspberry Pi boards, and a mini PC are all DIY to varying degrees — flashing an image, assembling a compute module and NVMe drive (Yellow), or configuring BIOS/boot order (mini PC). None of this is advanced, but it's a meaningfully different first experience than Green's out-of-the-box setup.
Head-to-Head Specs Comparison
| Spec | HA Green | HA Yellow (discontinued) | Raspberry Pi 4 | Raspberry Pi 5 | Mini PC (N100/N150 class) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 @ 1.8 GHz | Depends on installed CM (CM4/CM5) | BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 @ 1.5 GHz | BCM2712 quad-core Cortex-A76 @ 2.4 GHz | Intel N100/N150, 4C/4T |
| RAM | 4 GB LPDDR4X | Up to 8 GB (CM4) | 1–8 GB LPDDR4 | 2–16 GB LPDDR4X | 8–32 GB DDR4/DDR5 |
| Storage | 32 GB eMMC (sealed) | M.2 NVMe (direct boot) | microSD (SSD boot recommended) | microSD (NVMe via HAT recommended) | NVMe SSD standard |
| Built-in radio | None | Zigbee 3.0 + Thread | None | None | None |
| Idle power | ~1.7 W | Similar to CM4 class | ~1.0 W | ~2.7–3.0 W | ~5–15 W |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet only (no Wi-Fi) | Gigabit Ethernet, optional PoE | Gigabit Ethernet + dual-band Wi-Fi | Gigabit Ethernet + dual-band Wi-Fi | Gigabit/2.5GbE + Wi-Fi 6 |
| Runs Proxmox / VMs | No | No | No | No (limited) | Yes |
| Availability (2026) | Currently sold | Discontinued (secondhand only) | Currently sold | Currently sold | Currently sold |
Which Should You Buy?
Complete beginner, fewer than ~50 devices, no cameras. Check Price on Amazon for Home Assistant Green. It's the appliance experience: sealed storage that sidesteps SD card failures entirely, minimal power draw, and a setup that takes minutes. Pair it with a USB Zigbee/Thread coordinator from day one, since none is built in.
Already own a Home Assistant Yellow, or found a fair-priced secondhand unit. Keep using it or buy it — the built-in Zigbee/Thread radio and NVMe boot are still genuinely good, and software support continues. Just don't go looking for a new one; treat a marketplace search as a secondhand hunt, not a current product line.
Budget DIY build, or already own a Pi 4. Check Price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4. It remains completely capable for a typical Home Assistant setup — just boot it from a USB SSD instead of microSD from the start.
Want more headroom without going full mini PC — light Frigate use, more add-ons, future-proofing. Check Price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 5, ideally with an NVMe M.2 HAT rather than microSD, and make sure the power supply meets the 5V/5A spec.
Running Frigate with several cameras, local voice/AI, or planning a broader homelab (with or without Proxmox). Check Price on Amazon for a mini PC like the Beelink S12 Pro, or the dual-NIC Beelink EQ14 if isolating the camera/IoT network on its own interface matters. This is also the only category here where running Home Assistant OS as a Proxmox VM makes practical sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is Home Assistant Yellow still worth buying in 2026?
Only secondhand. Nabu Casa ended production of Home Assistant Yellow on October 15, 2025, citing declining sales, and there is no current official retail listing. Software support continues, and existing owners have no reason to switch, but new buyers should treat it as a legacy option rather than a current recommendation.
Q: Do I need Proxmox to run Home Assistant?
No. Proxmox is worth setting up when there's already a reason for a hypervisor — running Home Assistant OS alongside other VMs, wanting clean snapshot-based rollbacks before updates, or consolidating multiple homelab services on one machine. For a dedicated, Home-Assistant-only setup, installing Home Assistant OS directly on hardware like Green, a Raspberry Pi, or a mini PC is simpler.
Q: Can Home Assistant run on a tablet?
No. A wall-mounted tablet running a kiosk browser or the Home Assistant Companion app is a dashboard that displays and controls an existing Home Assistant instance — it connects to a separate host running Home Assistant, it doesn't run Home Assistant itself.
Q: How much RAM and storage does Home Assistant actually need?
Home Assistant's official floor is 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, but the practical community minimum is closer to 4 GB RAM, with 8 GB as a comfortable baseline once Zigbee2MQTT, MQTT, and several add-ons are running.
Q: Which hardware works best for Frigate and security cameras?
A mini PC with an NVMe SSD and enough RAM (16 GB is a comfortable target) handles Frigate with multiple cameras far more comfortably than Green or a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage can manage a light Frigate setup with one or two cameras; Green and the Pi 4 are best kept to Home Assistant itself.
Q: Does Home Assistant Green include Zigbee or Z-Wave?
No. Green has no built-in wireless radio for Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread — a USB coordinator such as Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee/Thread) or Connect ZWA-2 (Z-Wave) is required. Yellow was the only official device with a radio built in.
Conclusion
The honest 2026 picture is simpler than most comparisons make it look: Home Assistant Green is the plug-and-play default for most homes, Yellow is a legacy device worth keeping or buying secondhand but not chasing new, and the real fork in the road is between a Raspberry Pi and a mini PC — with the mini PC increasingly the community's pick once cameras, local AI, or a broader homelab enter the picture.
Whichever box gets chosen, two habits matter more than the hardware itself: never leave a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant from its stock microSD card long-term, and budget for a USB Zigbee/Thread or Z-Wave coordinator from day one, since none of the current official hardware includes one built in.
For getting a fresh Home Assistant instance running on any of these boxes, start with the beginner's guide. Once the host is decided, the next practical steps are choosing a Zigbee coordinator or hub, checking device compatibility against the Zigbee compatibility list, and — for anyone planning cameras down the line — reading the Frigate and Home Assistant camera guide before committing to hardware.
