Home Assistant Green Setup Guide (USA, 2026)

If you've decided you want Home Assistant in your house but you don't want to pick a Raspberry Pi model, source an SSD, flash an image, and fight USB boot order on a Sunday afternoon, the Home Assistant Green is the path of least resistance. It's a small box, made by the company behind Home Assistant itself, that you plug into power and ethernet and finish setting up in a browser ten minutes later. This guide walks you through buying one in the US, getting it online, deciding whether you also need a Zigbee radio, and what to do if you eventually decide you'd rather not maintain it yourself.

What Home Assistant Green actually is

Home Assistant Green is a purpose-built smart home hub made by Nabu Casa, the company that funds and develops Home Assistant. It's a 112 mm × 112 mm aluminum-and-plastic box with a quad-core 1.8 GHz ARM CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of eMMC storage, designed to run Home Assistant OS and nothing else. It has a gigabit ethernet port, two USB-A ports, an HDMI output for diagnostics, and a microSD slot used only for recovery.

As of January 2026, Nabu Casa raised the suggested retail price to $199 USD, citing a near-doubling of memory component costs since production began. You can buy it from the Nabu Casa store directly, or from US resellers like CloudFree, AmeriDroid, and Apollo Automation. Refurbished units, when in stock, run roughly $20 less. There is no kit version — the box, a power supply, and an ethernet cable are what's included.

What it is not: a router, a security system, a media server, or a VPN appliance. It runs Home Assistant. That's the whole job.

Who Green is the right choice for

If you've already used Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and outgrew it, you probably don't want Green. You want a custom Pi 5 / mini-PC build with room to grow. Green is for the person who hasn't touched Home Assistant yet and wants the shortest path from "decided to try it" to "thermostat is on the dashboard." It's also a reasonable fit if you've been running Home Assistant in a Docker container on a Synology and you're tired of the upgrade dance — Green simplifies that into one machine that does one thing.

The ceiling on Green is real, though. With 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC, you'll be fine running a typical home with thirty to fifty integrated devices, an energy dashboard, and a stack of automations. If you're running a multi-property STR portfolio, recording 4K camera streams in Frigate, or planning to throw fifty Z-Wave devices and a Plex server on the same box, you'll outgrow it. That's a buyer's-remorse conversation worth having before you spend $199, not after.

Green vs DIY Raspberry Pi 5

There are two sensible hardware paths for a new Home Assistant install in the US in 2026 — Green or self-built Pi 5. (Home Assistant Yellow used to be the middle option, but Nabu Casa took it out of production in early 2026; see the note at the end of this section.)

Home Assistant Green ($199). Plug-and-play. No assembly, no flashing. You're trading flexibility for a shorter setup. No Zigbee radio built in — you add a ~$49 Connect ZBT-2 USB stick later if you need one.

DIY Raspberry Pi 5 + NVMe SSD. A Pi 5 (2 GB is fine for a typical home; 4 GB if you'll run Frigate), an NVMe HAT or NVMe-supporting case, a 256 GB or 1 TB NVMe SSD, the official 27 W USB-C power supply, and Home Assistant OS flashed to the SSD. Total cost lands in the $130–$200 range depending on capacity and case. It's faster, has more headroom, and handles things like Frigate or local LLM voice assistants that Green will struggle with. The catch is that you build it yourself, and you own the bootloader, the SSD compatibility list, the case airflow, and the next firmware update. Walked through in detail in the US Pi+SSD guide. This is the right path if you've done it before, or if you genuinely enjoy this kind of thing.

The honest summary: Green if you want the minimum decisions; DIY Pi 5 if you have specific performance needs or already have parts in a drawer.

What about Home Assistant Yellow? Per Nabu Casa, Yellow is "no longer in production" as of early 2026. The pre-assembled Yellow Standard is discontinued; only kit versions requiring a separately-purchased Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 remain available, and Nabu Casa's own page now redirects buyers to Green. Third-party resellers (ameriDroid in particular) still list assembled Yellow units with newer compute modules as aftermarket builds — those are real products and they work, but they're not the official path any more. If you own a Yellow already, software updates continue. If you're buying new, Green is what Nabu Casa is steering you toward.

Unboxing and first boot

The box contains the Green itself, a US-style two-prong power adapter (the unit takes a barrel-jack DC input), and a short ethernet cable. Plan for it to live somewhere with a wired ethernet drop. Wi-Fi is technically possible later but the official guidance, and the configuration the device ships with, is wired ethernet — and there's a real reason for that, which is that Zigbee/Thread and Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz coexist on the same band and a Zigbee USB stick living next to a Wi-Fi radio in the same chassis is a bad time.

The flow:

1. Plug ethernet into your router or a switch on the same network as the device you'll set up from.
2. Plug power. A small white LED on the front turns on. The device takes one to two minutes to boot the first time, and another five to fifteen minutes after that to download the latest Home Assistant Core release before it lets you finish setup. This part feels longer than it is. Walk away.
3. From a laptop on the same network, browse to http://homeassistant.local:8123. This works on most home networks because the device announces itself over mDNS. If your network has an aggressive ad-blocker, a strict DNS rewrite, or you're on a corporate-style network with mDNS disabled, you may need to find the device's IP address in your router's DHCP lease table and use that instead (e.g. http://192.168.1.42:8123).
4. The onboarding wizard asks you to create the first user (this is your admin account — pick a real password and store it somewhere), confirm your home's location and timezone, agree to a small amount of anonymous usage telemetry, and start adding devices.
5. Add a few discovered devices to confirm it's alive. Home Assistant will detect things on your network automatically — a Sonos system, a HomeKit-paired thermostat, an Apple TV, a Roomba, a printer. Add one of them. You'll see it appear on the default dashboard. That's setup complete.

There are a few things people get tripped up on at this stage. The mDNS hostname homeassistant.local doesn't always resolve from a phone on the same Wi-Fi if the phone is on a guest network or a separate VLAN — easiest fix is to do the initial setup from a laptop on the main LAN. The first-boot core update can fail silently if the device's clock hasn't synchronized over the internet yet — if the wizard hangs, give it twenty minutes before declaring it broken. And the admin account you create here is the one with the keys to everything; treat it that way.

When you actually need a ZBT-2 Zigbee/Thread radio

Home Assistant Green has no built-in Zigbee or Thread radio. Whether that matters depends entirely on what brand of devices you own.

You probably don't need a ZBT-2 if your house is built on Wi-Fi and cloud-API devices: Nest or Ecobee thermostats, Schlage Encode or Yale Assure 2 locks (the Wi-Fi versions), Sonos, Roborock, August locks, Honeywell T9, most Sense and Emporia energy monitors, Lutron Caseta (which has its own bridge), or Hue with its own bridge plugged into your network. All of these talk to Home Assistant over your existing network or via cloud integrations. No radio needed.

You probably do need a ZBT-2 if you've gone direct-Zigbee or direct-Thread: Aqara temperature sensors and contact sensors, IKEA Tradfri bulbs and remotes, raw Hue bulbs without the Hue bridge, Sonoff Zigbee plugs, most Matter-over-Thread devices that don't already have a hub on your network. Roughly: if a device's box says "requires a Zigbee or Matter hub," and you don't already own one, the ZBT-2 is the hub.

The Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is the current radio Nabu Casa sells; it succeeded the older SkyConnect / ZBT-1 stick in late 2025. It plugs into one of the Green's USB-A ports. Home Assistant detects it on next reboot and offers to set up either Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) or OpenThread, or both. Buy it from Nabu Casa's store; resellers stock it intermittently.

A small practical note: the Green's USB ports are on the back of the case, very close to the ethernet port, and shielded ethernet cables can degrade Zigbee reception when the radio sits right next to them. A short USB extension cable that lets the ZBT-2 sit a foot or two away from the Green is cheap insurance — Amazon US and B&H Photo both stock plain USB 2.0 extension cables for a few dollars.

What to do in the first week

In the first week with a fresh Green, the work isn't technical. It's editorial. Add too many devices too fast, build automations from YouTube videos that don't match your house, and you end up with a hub full of stuff that doesn't quite do what you want and isn't quite worth ripping out.

A reasonable order of operations:

1. Add every device that auto-discovers. Climate, locks, lights, speakers. Don't build automations yet. Just see what Home Assistant can already see.
2. Pick one workflow that genuinely annoys you. Maybe it's "the porch light didn't come on at sunset again." Maybe it's "the house was 78°F when I got home from work." Build the automation that fixes that one thing. Live with it for a week.
3. Set up a backup target before you do anything else complex. Home Assistant has a built-in backup feature that snapshots your full configuration. Send the snapshots somewhere off the device — Google Drive, Dropbox, an S3 bucket, a NAS. The single most common Home Assistant horror story is "my install died and I lost everything," and it's almost always preventable.
4. Don't expose Home Assistant to the public internet directly. If you want to access it from outside the house, use Nabu Casa's own remote-access subscription, a Tailscale tunnel, or a Cloudflare tunnel. Never port-forward 8123 to the open internet — Home Assistant is not hardened for that, and the login screen will be hammered by bots within hours.

When to hand it to habbb

If, six weeks in, you've realized that you like having Home Assistant but you don't want to be the person who restarts it when it stops working, that's where habbb comes in. We're a managed Home Assistant service for the US, currently in beta, and we adopt running Home Assistant installs — including a Green — for $60 per month plus state sales tax, with no contract.

What we take over: secure remote access through a Cloudflare tunnel, daily off-site encrypted backups, tested Home Assistant updates that we validate before they reach your hub, 24/7 health monitoring, fixes when integrations break, and a human you can email when something's wrong. What we don't take over: the deed to your data, your admin account, or your hardware. You keep all three. If you cancel, we remove our admin user and stop billing — your Green keeps running exactly as it did.

The boundary worth being clear about: $60/month is a maintenance contract, not unlimited custom development. If you want a brand-new automation built from scratch — say, a check-in flow for an STR property, or a whole-house presence-detection routine — that's quoted as a one-off project. The line is the same one a boiler service contract draws: we keep what you have working; adding a new radiator is a separate job.

Most US Green owners don't need a managed service in their first month. They need it around month three, when the novelty has worn off and the maintenance hasn't.

FAQs

Is Home Assistant Green worth $199 in 2026? For a non-technical buyer who wants the fastest path to a working Home Assistant install, yes. The price went up from its earlier sub-$100 launch positioning to $199 in January 2026 because of memory component costs, and then again in April 2026. At $199 it's still cheaper than a comparable DIY Raspberry Pi 5 build by the time you've added an NVMe SSD, a case, and a 27 W power supply, and you skip the assembly. If you already own a spare Pi 5, the math changes.

Can I move my existing Home Assistant install to a Green? Yes — make a full backup on your existing install, set up the Green from scratch, then restore the backup during the onboarding wizard. The restore copies over your configuration, automations, and most integrations. Some integrations that depend on hardware specifics (a USB Z-Wave stick, a specific Bluetooth dongle) will need to be reconfigured because the new hardware can't be assumed identical.

Does Home Assistant Green work with Matter? Yes, but Matter-over-Wi-Fi devices and Matter-over-Thread devices have different requirements. Matter-over-Wi-Fi works out of the box. Matter-over-Thread requires a Thread border router on your network — which the Green does not have built in. You'll need either a Thread border router elsewhere on your network (an Apple HomePod Mini, an Amazon Echo with Thread, a Google Nest Hub Max) or you add the ZBT-2 radio, which acts as a Thread border router for Home Assistant.

Do I need internet for Home Assistant Green to work? Not for local automations. Locks, lights, motion sensors, and climate devices that run on local protocols continue to work during an internet outage. What stops working: cloud integrations (anything that talks to a vendor's servers — Nest, Ecobee, Ring, August), remote access from outside the house, and the next-day update of any integration that needs to phone home.

Is the Green's 32 GB of storage enough? For most homes, yes — Home Assistant Core, Supervisor, and a year of recorder history fit comfortably. Where 32 GB gets tight is if you run Frigate (camera object detection), record long video clips locally, or store large amounts of energy history. If any of those is on your roadmap, a self-built Pi 5 with a 500 GB or 1 TB NVMe SSD is the better starting point.

Can I switch from Green to a Pi 5 later? Yes, and the upgrade path is exactly the migration you'd do for any HA hardware change: take a full backup, set up the new hardware, restore the backup. People do this routinely when they outgrow their first hub, and Home Assistant's backup format is portable across all the supported hardware paths (including the older Yellow if you happen to own one).

What's the warranty like? Nabu Casa offers a one-year warranty on the Green, handled through the retailer you bought it from. For US buyers, that means the Nabu Casa store directly, or whichever reseller — CloudFree, AmeriDroid, Apollo Automation, B&H Photo if they're carrying it that month — handled the original sale. Refurbished units carry a shorter warranty; check the listing.

Get in touch

If your Green is set up, working, and you've decided you'd rather not be the person on call when it isn't, the US managed service is open in beta. $60/month, no contract, state sales tax added at checkout.

Subscribe — $60/month + tax

If you'd rather talk first, drop us an email with what's running and what's currently bothering you. We'll come back within a working day.

A Home Assistant Green can run a household for years. It just helps to have somebody keeping an eye on it.