9 Home Assistant Integrations and How to Use Them

By Community / Developer
Jun 05, 2025

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With the advent of automation and smart devices, the adoption of home automation has increased.

The number of smart home users is projected to soar by about 86.5% between 2023 and 2027. Managing a smart home can get complicated, especially when dealing with multiple devices and platforms that don’t work together seamlessly. Navigating different interfaces and apps to control and monitor your devices can be time-consuming and confusing. Many of these devices and applications will also be generating time series data that you can utilize in a number of ways to make your Home Assistant more efficient and reliable while also enabling powerful automation.

However, Home Assistant integrations provide a powerful and flexible solution to these problems by allowing you to connect and control a wide range of smart home devices and platforms from a single interface.

This post will introduce you to Home Assistant and list nine Home Assistant integrations alongside ideas about how to use them. You will also learn how you can use these integrations with time series databases like InfluxDB to maximize the utility of your Home Assistant installation.

What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform for smart home devices and services. It allows you to control and automate a wide range of devices from a single interface, including lights, thermostats, cameras, and sensors.

With Home Assistant, you can create custom automation based on your needs. Custom automation can be triggered by various aspects, such as weather conditions or time of day.

Home Assistant can be installed on different devices and operating systems, including Raspberry Pi, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Additionally, you can integrate third-party services and platforms like Google Assistant.

You can also use community-developed add-ons that extend Home Assistant’s functionalities, giving you a robust home automation experience.

What are Home Assistant integrations?

Home Assistant integrations are add-ons or plugins that allow Home Assistant to communicate with other devices or services, such as smart home devices, platforms, and protocols. These tools make Home Assistant a powerful and flexible home automation platform.

Home Assistant has over 2,000 built-in integrations that cover a wide range of smart home devices and services, such as lights, switches, thermostats, sensors, media players, and more.

The Home Assistant community typically develops integrations that are open source and free to use.

Pairing Home Assistant with a time series database

Home Assistant provides a recorder integration that can be used for short-term logging and data storage, but this solution will become inefficient as you increase the amount of data you are storing or if you want to analyze your long-term data. A time series database is designed to handle large amounts of data from sensors, switches, thermostats, and other IoT devices. This enables you to monitor changes, identify patterns, and retain historical data far beyond what Home Assistant typically allows.

Beyond just storage, the integration of a time series database allows you to pair Home Assistant with visualization tools like Grafana to create intuitive dashboards and graphs. These dashboards offer deep insights into your smart home’s performance, including tracking energy consumption by device, monitoring temperature trends by room, and visualizing motion detection over time. This level of visibility empowers smarter decision-making and can even improve automation logic—for example, adjusting HVAC settings based on seasonal data or optimizing device usage during peak hours. Ultimately, a time series database turns Home Assistant from a reactive automation tool into a proactive, data-driven smart home hub.

Adding integrations to Home Assistant

To use an integration in Home Assistant, you need to install and configure it in the Home Assistant configuration file. The configuration process can vary depending on the integration but typically involves providing configuration details, such as credentials, API keys, or device IDs.

Once you’ve set up the integration, you can use Home Assistant to control and monitor the associated devices and services, create automation routines, and receive notifications and alerts.

You can access and manage integrations from the Home Assistant user interface. Depending on your needs, this makes adding, removing, and configuring integrations easy.

Below is a list of nine popular integrations you can add to your Home Assistant.

1. Weather Integration

The Weather integration in Home Assistant provides real-time weather data directly within your dashboard. By setting up your location, you can access current conditions, hourly forecasts, and extended outlooks.

Use this data to trigger weather-based automation, such as adjusting your thermostat when temperatures drop or notifying you of incoming storms. Multiple providers are supported, including OpenWeatherMap, AccuWeather, and the National Weather Service.

2. Z-Wave Integration

Z-Wave is a low-power wireless protocol designed specifically for smart home automation. Home Assistant’s Z-Wave JS integration allows you to add and control a wide variety of Z-Wave devices like lights, locks, sensors, and switches.

You’ll need a compatible Z-Wave USB stick or hub to get started. Once configured, you can include Z-Wave devices in automation, scenes, and routines—all managed locally and securely from Home Assistant.

3. HomeKit Integration

HomeKit is an Apple framework that allows you to control smart home devices using your Apple products.

The HomeKit integration connects your Home Assistant devices to your HomeKit ecosystem. To use this integration, you’ll need a HomeKit-enabled device, such as an iPhone or iPad, and the HomeKit integration set up in Home Assistant.

Once you’ve set up the integration, you can use your Apple devices to control your Home Assistant devices, such as turning on the lights or adjusting the thermostat.

4. Google Assistant Integration

Google Assistant is a virtual assistant by Google that can control smart home devices.

You’ll need a Google Assistant-enabled device, such as a Google Home or a smartphone with the Google Assistant app, to use this integration.

Once you’ve set up the integration, you can use voice commands to control your Home Assistant devices, such as turning on the lights or adjusting the thermostat.

5. MQTT Integration

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight, publish-subscribe protocol widely used in IoT systems. Home Assistant’s MQTT integration allows you to connect to a broker and communicate with DIY devices, microcontrollers, and third-party systems.

By configuring an MQTT broker (like Mosquitto), you can send and receive data from sensors, switches, and custom automation. This integration is ideal for advanced users looking to create a fully customized smart home environment.

6. Philips Hue Integration

Philips Hue is a smart lighting system that can be controlled with Home Assistant. To use this integration, you’ll need a Philips Hue bridge and some Philips Hue lights.

Once you’ve set up your Hue lights and bridge, you can use Home Assistant to turn your lights on and off, change their color and brightness, and create automation routines. For example, you can set an evening routine in which your lights are set to a warmer hue.

7. Sonos Integration

The Sonos integration lets you control your Sonos speakers from within Home Assistant. Play music, adjust volume, group speakers, or trigger playback based on motion or time-based automation.

With this integration, your Sonos ecosystem becomes a fully interactive part of your smart home, letting you sync music to lights, play alerts for door sensors, or announce weather updates in the morning.

8. Google Nest Integration

The Google Nest integration brings support for Nest thermostats, cameras, and doorbells into Home Assistant. After completing the account linking process, you can view live streams, adjust temperatures, or trigger automation based on motion or temperature events.

For example, set the thermostat to eco mode when no one is home or get notified if the doorbell camera detects motion after dark. It’s a powerful way to integrate your Nest devices into a broader automation ecosystem.

9. Tasmota Integration

Tasmota is open-source firmware for ESP8266/ESP32-based smart devices, often used to replace proprietary firmware on switches, plugs, and relays. Home Assistant’s Tasmota integration allows you to discover and manage these devices automatically.

Using MQTT or HTTP protocols, Tasmota devices can be easily controlled, monitored, and included in automation routines. This is a great option for privacy-conscious users who want reliable local control without depending on cloud services.

Why should you use InfluxDB with Home Assistant?

When you use InfluxDB with Home Assistant, you can collect, persist, analyze, and visualize data from your smart home devices over time. InfluxDB is the most popular database for Home Assistant, with over 7% of Home Assistant users installing the InfluxDB integration.

With the introduction of InfluxDB 3, the database has been completely reengineered to meet the modern demands of IoT and real-time analytics. It now supports high-ingest workloads, millisecond-level query responses, and object storage-based durability, making it ideal for smart home environments where large volumes of sensor data are continuously generated. InfluxDB 3’s new SQL-based query engine and native support for Parquet format also enable deeper, more complex queries for users who want to explore patterns or build advanced automations. InfluxDB 3 also includes a built-in Python engine that allows you to transform, process, and take action on your data without requiring external tools.

This architecture ensures that you can run InfluxDB Core on affordable local hardware for a single home setup—or scale to cloud or hybrid deployments with InfluxDB 3 Enterprise for larger or multi-site installations. Installing the InfluxDB integration in Home Assistant is straightforward:

  1. Add your instance configuration to the YAML configuration file.
  2. Define which entities or domains should report data to InfluxDB.

From there, you can easily forward information from devices like thermostats, humidity sensors, or energy meters—building a rich historical database of your smart home activity. With this dataset, you can create Grafana dashboards, optimize automation, detect anomalies, and gain long-term insights that wouldn’t be possible with Home Assistant’s default recorder.

Next steps and additional resources

Home Assistant is a powerful and flexible platform for managing and automating smart home devices and services. Its integrations cover a wide range of smart home devices and services, including lights, switches, thermostats, sensors, and media players.

Using Home Assistant integrations, you can streamline your home automation setup, reduce complexity and frustration, and gain more control and visibility into your smart home devices and services.

With Home Assistant and InfluxDB, you can take your home automation to the next level and create a brilliant and efficient living environment.

Here are some additional tutorials showing how you can use Home Assistant:

Home Assistant integration FAQs

How do I add a new integration in Home Assistant?

Integrations can be added to Home Assistant using the UI or the YAML configuration file. In the UI, you navigate to settings, then devices and services, and finally, the Add Integration section, where you can search for your desired integration. For certain advanced integrations, you will need to use YAML to set your configuration parameters.

What’s the difference between using InfluxDB and the Home Assistant recorder?

The built-in Home Assistant recorder uses SQLite or other configured databases to store and retain data for a limited time at set intervals. InfluxDB scales better for larger datasets, offers faster query performance, and allows for easy creation of retention and downsampling policies.

What can I do with Home Assistant data stored in InfluxDB?

With InfluxDB, you can build monitoring dashboards with Grafana, analyze historical trends in your data, detect anomalies in the activity of your devices, and create automated alerts based on your data.

Do I need coding skills to use Home Assistant integrations?

Most integrations do not require coding, and Home Assistant’s user interface makes it easy to add and manage them. However, some custom or community integrations may require light YAML editing or command-line usage.

Can Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa be used with Home Assistant?

Home Assistant supports both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integrations. These allow you to control your smart devices with voice commands by linking your Home Assistant instance with your Voice Assistant account.

What devices are compatible with Home Assistant?

Thousands of devices are compatible with Home Assistant, via direct integrations or common communication protocols like MQTT or Matter. Examples include smart lights, smart thermostats, switches and outlets, security systems, and various monitors or sensors.

Can Home Assistant work without an internet connection?

Home Assistant is designed to run locally, meaning it works even if your internet goes down. This ensures faster response times, increased reliability, and better privacy.

What is the difference between a Home Assistant integration and add-on?

Integrations connect Home Assistant to devices and services, while add-ons are additional applications like InfluxDB, Node-Red, or Grafana that run alongside Home Assistant.

Can I use Grafana with Home Assistant and InfluxDB?

Yes. Grafana connects directly to InfluxDB to create custom dashboards. Many users visualize trends like temperature, humidity, energy, or device activity over days, weeks, or months using Grafana’s powerful charting tools.

This post was originally written by Mercy Kibet and later updated by InfluxData staff. Mercy is a full-stack developer with a knack for learning and writing about new and intriguing tech stacks.