The default Home Assistant dashboard is... functional. But it doesn't have to be ugly. These real-world examples show what people have built with custom cards, themes, and a bit of creativity. Steal these ideas for your own setup.
A well-designed dashboard isn't just pretty. It makes your smart home easier to use for everyone in the house. Your partner, your kids, your guests. If the interface is confusing, nobody uses it. If it's beautiful and intuitive, suddenly everyone wants to control the house.
A clean dashboard means your partner doesn't need to learn YAML to turn off the porch lights. Big buttons, clear labels, logical grouping. That's the difference between "cool project" and "our smart home."
Mount a cheap tablet on the wall with a custom dashboard and visitors will think you spent thousands on a professional setup. It's the single most impressive thing you can do with Home Assistant.
Energy usage, temperature trends, security camera feeds, weather forecasts. A good dashboard puts your home's vital signs right where you can see them, without opening five different apps.
Less is more. These dashboards strip away everything except what you actually use daily. Perfect for phones and tablets where screen space is limited.
Everything on one page. Room chips at the top to filter, Mushroom cards for lights and climate, a weather card, and nothing else. Uses the Sections layout with a dark theme. The goal: control your entire home without scrolling.
Cards used: Mushroom Light, Mushroom Climate, Mushroom Chips, Weather Card
Rounded pill-shaped buttons for every room and device. Looks like a modern mobile app. Uses custom button-card with heavy CSS customization. Popular on Reddit for its clean, iOS-like aesthetic.
Cards used: Custom Button Card, card-mod, layout-card
Inspired by flight departure boards. Big text showing what's on, what's off, who's home. No fancy graphics, just information density. Perfect for a quick glance from across the room.
Cards used: Markdown Card, template sensors, auto-entities
Organize by room instead of by device type. Tap on "Living Room" and see everything in that room: lights, media, temperature, blinds, cameras. The most intuitive approach for families.
An actual floor plan of your home as the dashboard background. Tap on a room to control it. Lights glow on the map when they're on. Doors show open/closed status. It's the most visually impressive approach, though it takes real effort to set up.
Cards used: Picture Elements Card, custom SVG floor plan, conditional elements
Each room gets its own tab. Simple and organized. The living room tab has media controls, light sliders, thermostat. The kitchen tab has appliance timers and recipe displays. Easy to build, easy to maintain.
Cards used: Default Sections layout, Mushroom cards, mini-media-player
Uses the Bubble Card custom component for a mobile-first design with a bottom navigation bar, pop-up panels, and smooth animations. Rooms slide in from the side. Feels like a native app rather than a web interface.
Cards used: Bubble Card, Mushroom cards, card-mod
For the nerds who want graphs, statistics, and real-time data. Energy monitoring, network status, server health, weather trends. If you love data, these are your people.
Solar production vs grid consumption in real time. Daily/weekly/monthly cost breakdowns. Per-device energy usage with mini-graph sparklines. The built-in Energy dashboard is decent, but custom builds with energy monitoring integrations blow it away.
Cards used: ApexCharts Card, mini-graph-card, Energy Dashboard, power-flow-card
Embed full Grafana panels into your Home Assistant dashboard for beautiful time-series visualizations. Temperature over the last month, humidity trends, energy patterns. Requires a Grafana instance (free, self-hosted) and InfluxDB or PostgreSQL for long-term data.
Cards used: Webpage Card (iframe), Grafana panels, InfluxDB
Internet speed tests, device connectivity status, router stats, Pi-hole ad blocking numbers. Great for anyone who also runs a home network lab. Shows which devices are online, their IP addresses, and bandwidth usage.
Cards used: mini-graph-card, entities card, Speedtest integration, Unifi/router integration
The crown jewel of any Home Assistant setup. A tablet on the wall that controls everything. These designs are built specifically for always-on displays with touch interaction.
Dark background with minimal UI that appears to float. Clock, weather, and upcoming calendar events always visible. Tap zones for room controls that appear as overlays. Uses screen dimming at night to prevent burn-in and save energy.
Cards used: Mushroom cards, card-mod, clock-weather-card, Fully Kiosk Browser
Large touch targets designed for walking up and tapping. Big light toggles, large temperature controls, prominent scene buttons. Optimized for the specific tablet resolution (1280x800 for Fire HD 8, for example). Every button is at least 60px tall.
Cards used: Custom Button Card, Mushroom cards, layout-card, Fully Kiosk Browser
Shows family photos as a screensaver. Wake with motion (using the tablet camera or a separate sensor). Controls slide up from the bottom when needed. Doubles as a digital photo frame when not actively being used for home control.
Cards used: Bubble Card pop-ups, Mushroom cards, Fully Kiosk's screensaver mode
Cameras, door sensors, alarm status, motion detection. Everything you need to keep an eye on your home, without paying a monthly fee to Ring or ADT.
Camera feeds in a grid layout. Tap to go full screen. Motion events highlighted with timestamps. Uses Frigate for local AI object detection, so you get "person detected at front door" notifications instead of "motion detected" (which is usually just a cat).
Cards used: Picture Entity Card, Frigate Card, conditional cards for alerts
Alarmo integration front and center with arm/disarm buttons. Door and window sensor status listed below. Shows which entry points are open before you arm the system. Check out our full guide to Home Assistant as a security system.
Cards used: Alarmo Card, Mushroom Entity cards, conditional cards
You don't need to be a designer. These tools and add-ons do the heavy lifting.
The gateway to custom cards. HACS lets you browse, install, and update hundreds of community-created frontend components. Every dashboard example on this page uses at least one HACS integration. Install it first.
The most popular card collection, and for good reason. Clean, minimal designs for lights, climate, media, persons, and more. Works with the visual editor. If you install one custom card, make it Mushroom.
Lets you apply custom CSS to any card. Change colors, fonts, borders, shadows, spacing. It's the secret weapon behind most beautiful dashboards. Small learning curve, massive payoff.
Transforms Home Assistant into a mobile-app-like experience. Bottom navigation bar, pop-up panels, smooth transitions. Created by Clooos, it's become the go-to for phone and tablet dashboards that feel native.
The ultimate customization card. Build literally anything: animated icons, dynamic colors based on state, multi-action buttons, conditional displays. It's YAML-heavy but gives you total creative freedom.
A theme changes everything. Popular picks: Catppuccin (warm pastels), Mushroom Shadow (dark and sleek), Noctis (deep midnight blue), iOS Theme (Apple-inspired). Install via HACS, activate in your profile settings.
You can go from the default dashboard to something beautiful in about an hour. Here's how.
Go to Settings > Add-ons > Add-on Store. Search for HACS. Follow the setup wizard (you'll need a GitHub account). Takes about 5 minutes.
In HACS, go to Frontend. Search "Mushroom" and install it. Then grab a theme like Catppuccin or Mushroom Shadow. Apply the theme in your profile settings. Restart HA.
Settings > Dashboards > Add Dashboard. Give it a name, an icon, and choose "Sections" as the layout type (the newest and most flexible). Keep the default dashboard as a backup.
Create sections for each room. Add Mushroom cards for your entities. Use chips at the top for quick status (who's home, weather, alarm state). Keep it simple. You can always add more later.
Once the layout works, add card-mod for fine-tuning. Adjust spacing, hide headers you don't need, tweak colors. Then share it on r/homeassistant and collect your karma.
These communities are full of people sharing their setups, complete with YAML configs you can copy.
The Reddit community posts dashboard screenshots constantly. Sort by "top" for the most upvoted designs. People usually share their YAML in the comments when asked.
The official Home Assistant forum has a dedicated "Share your Projects!" category. Detailed posts with screenshots, YAML, and step-by-step explanations. Gold mine for learning.
Search "Home Assistant dashboard tour 2025" or "2026" on YouTube. Creators like Everything Smart Home, Smart Home Junkie, and JuanMTech do detailed walkthroughs of their setups with downloadable configs.
There is no single best dashboard. It depends on your setup. For simplicity, the default Sections layout works great. For a wall-mounted tablet, Mushroom cards with a dark theme look stunning. For power users, custom button-card with YAML gives total control over every pixel.
Start with a consistent theme (try Catppuccin or Mushroom Shadow). Replace default entity cards with Mushroom cards for a cleaner look. Use card-mod to tweak spacing and colors. Group related controls together, and hide entities you rarely use. A good dashboard shows what you need, not everything you have.
Mushroom is the most popular custom card collection for Home Assistant. It provides clean, minimal card designs for lights, climate, media players, and more. Install it through HACS (Home Assistant Community Store). Most modern dashboard designs you see online use Mushroom cards.
Yes, and it looks amazing. Many people mount cheap Android tablets (like the Amazon Fire HD 8 or Lenovo Tab M8) on the wall running Fully Kiosk Browser. Design a dashboard specifically for the tablet resolution, with large touch targets and a dark theme to prevent burn-in.
Install HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) first. Then search for cards like Mushroom, custom button-card, mini-graph-card, or bubble-card. HACS handles installation and updates automatically. Most custom cards show up in the visual dashboard editor after installation.
Not anymore. Most custom cards work with the visual editor. Mushroom cards, Bubble Card, and many others have full GUI configuration. YAML is only needed if you want very specific customizations with card-mod or custom button-card templates.
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