Cloud outages, sunset notices, subscription fees, data collection. There's a better way. Home Assistant lets you build a smart home that runs entirely on your local network. No internet dependency, no monthly fees, no company deciding to kill your devices. This guide covers everything: why local matters, which devices work offline, which protocols to pick, and how to set it all up.
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A locally controlled smart home means your devices talk directly to a hub on your network. No signals leaving your house. No dependency on someone else's servers. No waiting for a round trip to a datacenter in Virginia before your kitchen light turns on.
Commands stay on your network and execute in milliseconds. Flip a switch and the light responds instantly. No cloud round trip, no loading spinners, no "sorry, something went wrong."
Your ISP goes down? Your smart home keeps running. Lights, heating, sensors, cameras, automations: all local, all working. The way it should be.
No voice recordings sent to Amazon. No thermostat data sold to energy companies. No camera footage stored on someone else's computer. Your home, your data, full stop.
Home Assistant is open source and free. Camera recording? Local NVR. Voice control? Local speech processing. No monthly fees for features that should be included with the hardware you already bought.
IKEA lights, Aqara sensors, Shelly relays, Reolink cameras, Sonos speakers. Home Assistant supports 2,800+ integrations. Use whatever hardware fits your needs and budget.
No company can shut down your smart home. Home Assistant is community-built by thousands of contributors. Your Zigbee devices will keep working regardless of what happens to any single company.
Every cloud-dependent smart home is one corporate decision away from becoming a pile of expensive paperweights. This isn't hypothetical. It keeps happening.
Google is shutting down Assistant, leaving millions of Nest speakers and smart displays with reduced functionality. Years of routines and voice commands, gone. What to do about it
The company went bankrupt overnight. Servers shut down with no warning. Customers woke up to a completely dead smart home. Years of investment wiped out in a single day.
Belkin quietly exited the smart home market. No more app updates, no more cloud support. Smart plugs and switches that cost $30+ each became basic power strips.
Caught uploading camera thumbnails to the cloud despite marketing themselves as "local storage only." Trust broken, privacy violated. This is what happens when you can't verify the claims.
Started as "buy the doorbell, everything works." Now requires Ring Protect ($4/mo per camera) for video history, person detection, and even some basic features. The hardware you paid for got slowly locked behind a paywall.
Every major AWS outage takes down Ring, Alexa, iRobot, and dozens of other services. Your "smart" home becomes dumb because a datacenter in Virginia had a bad day. Happens multiple times per year.
The secret to a cloudless smart home is choosing devices that communicate over local protocols. These signals never leave your network. Here's what you need to know about each one.
| Protocol | Best For | Range | Power | Cloud? | Devices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zigbee | Sensors, bulbs, switches | Mesh (extends itself) | Very low | Never | Thousands |
| Z-Wave | Locks, switches, sensors | Mesh (certified) | Very low | Never | 4,000+ |
| Matter/Thread | New devices, cross-platform | Thread mesh or Wi-Fi | Low (Thread) / Medium (Wi-Fi) | Local by design | Growing fast |
| Wi-Fi (local firmware) | Relays, plugs, cameras | Router range | Higher | Only with local firmware | Hundreds |
| Bluetooth/BLE | Presence, temp sensors | Short (10-30m) | Ultra low | Never | Growing |
Zigbee is the most popular protocol for local smart homes. Devices from IKEA, Aqara, Sonoff, Philips Hue, and dozens of other brands all speak Zigbee. You need a USB coordinator (around $25) plugged into your Home Assistant hub, and every device talks to it directly. The mesh network means each powered device extends range for battery devices. No cloud, no internet, just radio signals bouncing around your house.
Z-Wave has stricter certification requirements than Zigbee, which means every Z-Wave device is guaranteed to work with every other Z-Wave device. It operates on a different frequency (800/900 MHz vs Zigbee's 2.4 GHz), so it doesn't compete with your Wi-Fi. Popular for locks, switches, and sensors. A bit more expensive than Zigbee, but rock solid.
Matter is the new industry standard backed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. It was designed to be local-first from day one. Thread is its low-power mesh network layer (think of it as the next-gen Zigbee). Device support is growing quickly. If you're buying new devices in 2026, check for Matter compatibility. Home Assistant is one of the best Matter controllers available.
Most Wi-Fi smart devices phone home to the cloud. But some brands (Shelly) work locally out of the box, and others (Sonoff, Tuya) can be flashed with open firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome to remove cloud dependency. Once flashed, these devices communicate directly with Home Assistant over your local network. A great option for plugs, relays, and energy monitors.
Not every smart device works locally. Here are the ones that do, sorted by category. Every device listed here works with Home Assistant without ever touching the cloud.
Here's what a fully local smart home looks like in practice. Every device listed below works without internet.
You can go from zero to a fully local smart home in a single weekend. Here's the step-by-step path.
The easiest option is the Home Assistant Green ($99). Plug it in, connect to your network, done. If you want more power, an Intel N100 mini PC ($120-180) gives you room to grow with Frigate, Grafana, and more. Already have a Raspberry Pi 5? That works great too.
Plug a Home Assistant SkyConnect ($30) or Sonoff ZBDongle-E ($25) into your hub via USB. This gives you Zigbee (and Thread for the SkyConnect). Home Assistant detects it automatically and walks you through setup. Takes about 5 minutes.
Don't try to automate your entire house at once. Pick one room (living room is popular) and add 3-5 devices: a couple of Zigbee bulbs, a motion sensor, and a temperature sensor. Get those working, build a couple of automations, and learn the system before expanding.
Home Assistant's dashboard shows all your devices in one place. Add cards for lights, temperature graphs, camera feeds, and quick-toggle buttons. Install HACS to access community dashboard cards like Mushroom (gorgeous minimalist cards) and Bubble Card.
Once your first room works, expand to the next one. Add energy monitoring, then security, then climate control. Each room takes a couple of hours. Most people have their whole house covered within a month of casual weekend tinkering.
These automations rely on instant local communication. With cloud latency, they'd feel sluggish or unreliable. Locally, they're buttery smooth.
Walk into a room and the lights are on before your foot hits the floor. With cloud, there's a 1-2 second delay. Locally, it's under 100 milliseconds. The difference is night and day (literally).
automation:
- alias: "Hallway motion light"
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.hallway_motion
to: "on"
action:
- service: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.hallway
data:
brightness_pct: >
{{ 80 if now().hour >= 7 and now().hour < 22 else 20 }}
- wait_for_trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.hallway_motion
to: "off"
for: "00:02:00"
- service: light.turn_off
target:
entity_id: light.hallwayWhen humidity rises above 65%, the fan turns on. When it drops back below 55%, the fan turns off. No cloud needed, no app needed. The sensor and the relay talk through your local Zigbee mesh.
automation:
- alias: "Bathroom fan auto"
trigger:
- platform: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.bathroom_humidity
above: 65
action:
- service: switch.turn_on
target:
entity_id: switch.bathroom_fan
- wait_for_trigger:
- platform: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.bathroom_humidity
below: 55
timeout: "01:00:00"
- service: switch.turn_off
target:
entity_id: switch.bathroom_fanFrigate detects a person at the door, takes a snapshot, and sends it to your phone. All processed on your local hardware with a Coral TPU. No cloud, no subscription, no monthly fee for "person detection."
automation:
- alias: "Doorbell person detected"
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.front_door_person_occupancy
to: "on"
action:
- service: notify.mobile_app
data:
title: "Someone at the door"
message: "Person detected at front door"
data:
image: /api/frigate/notifications/{{ trigger.to_state.attributes.event_id }}/snapshot.jpg
actions:
- action: UNLOCK_DOOR
title: "Unlock Door"A smart plug with energy monitoring tracks your washing machine's power draw. When it drops below 5 watts for 3 minutes, the cycle is done. You get a notification. Simple, local, no app subscription required.
automation:
- alias: "Washing machine done"
trigger:
- platform: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.washing_machine_power
below: 5
for: "00:03:00"
condition:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_boolean.washing_machine_running
state: "on"
action:
- service: notify.mobile_app
data:
title: "Laundry done!"
message: "The washing machine has finished its cycle"
- service: input_boolean.turn_off
target:
entity_id: input_boolean.washing_machine_runningWater leak detected? The valve shuts off immediately. With cloud, you're trusting that their servers respond quickly enough. Locally, the response is instant. When water is flooding your kitchen, every second counts.
automation:
- alias: "Water leak emergency"
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id:
- binary_sensor.kitchen_water_leak
- binary_sensor.bathroom_water_leak
- binary_sensor.laundry_water_leak
to: "on"
action:
- service: valve.close_valve
target:
entity_id: valve.main_water
- service: notify.mobile_app
data:
title: "WATER LEAK DETECTED"
message: >
Water detected by {{ trigger.to_state.name }}.
Main water valve has been shut off.
data:
priority: high
ttl: 0The biggest question people have about ditching the cloud: "But what about voice control?" Good news. Home Assistant has a fully local voice assistant pipeline that processes everything on your network.
Whisper converts your speech to text locally. Home Assistant Assist interprets the intent. Piper converts the response back to speech. All three run on your Home Assistant hardware. Nothing leaves your network.
M5Stack ATOM Echo ($13): tiny USB-powered mic/speaker. ESP32-S3-BOX-3 ($45): touchscreen + speaker + mic. Old tablet: wall-mount it with the Companion app. Any of these can be voice satellites around your house.
Local voice control works well for direct commands: "turn on the kitchen lights", "set thermostat to 20 degrees", "what's the temperature in the bedroom." The conversational AI doesn't match Alexa or Google yet, but it's improving rapidly. You can always keep Alexa/Google for voice while running all automations locally.
| Feature | Cloud Smart Home | Local Smart Home |
|---|---|---|
| Response time | 500ms to 2 seconds | Under 100ms |
| Works offline | No | Yes, fully |
| Monthly cost | $5-30/mo (Ring, Nest, etc.) | $0 (or $6.50/mo for Nabu Casa remote access) |
| Privacy | Data sent to company servers | Nothing leaves your network |
| Device support | Limited to one ecosystem | 2,800+ integrations, any brand |
| Sunset risk | High (company can kill it) | None (open source, community-maintained) |
| Setup difficulty | Easy (download app) | Moderate (weekend project) |
| Voice control | Excellent (Alexa/Google) | Good and improving (Assist) |
| Automations | Basic (if X then Y) | Advanced (conditions, templates, scripts) |
Here are three realistic budget tiers. All prices are approximate and assume you're buying new.
~$180 total, $0/mo ongoing
Covers: one room with smart lighting and basic sensors. Perfect for testing the waters.
~$400 total, $0/mo ongoing
Covers: 3-4 rooms with lighting, climate monitoring, energy tracking, and leak detection.
~$800 total, $0/mo ongoing
Covers: whole home with lighting, climate, energy, security cameras, smart lock, leak protection. Zero monthly fees.
Compare the ongoing costs: A typical cloud smart home (Ring doorbell + Nest thermostat + Alexa + smart plugs) runs $15-30/month in subscriptions. That's $180-360/year. A local setup costs $0/month after the initial investment. The Full House tier pays for itself in under 3 years, then saves you money forever.
Our free scan checks which of your current devices support local control, which are cloud-only, and what to do about each one. Find out what you can keep and what needs replacing.
Scan Your Devices FreeYes. Using Home Assistant with local protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread, you can build a fully functional smart home that never touches the internet. Lights, sensors, locks, cameras, climate control, and automations all run on your local network. Voice control is possible too, using local speech processing with Whisper and Piper.
Home Assistant is the best hub for a cloud-free smart home. It runs on your local network, supports over 2,800 integrations, and processes everything locally. Pair it with a Zigbee coordinator (like the SkyConnect or Sonoff ZBDongle-E) and you have a fully local smart home platform that does not depend on any company's servers. See our hub comparison guide for alternatives.
Zigbee devices (IKEA, Aqara, Sonoff), Z-Wave devices (Zooz, Aeotec, Fibaro), Shelly Wi-Fi relays, ESPHome/Tasmota-flashed devices, and Matter/Thread devices all work locally. Reolink cameras support local RTSP streams. Zigbee and Z-Wave devices never touch the cloud by design since they communicate directly with your local coordinator.
Initial setup takes a bit more effort than plugging in an Alexa. You need to install Home Assistant (about 30 minutes), add a Zigbee or Z-Wave coordinator, and pair your devices. After that initial setup, daily use is just as easy as any cloud platform, often faster because everything is local. The tradeoff is a weekend of setup for years of reliable, private, subscription-free operation. See our installation guide for step-by-step instructions.
Yes. Home Assistant Assist processes speech entirely on your local network using Whisper (speech-to-text) and Piper (text-to-speech). You can use ESP32-based voice satellites, repurposed tablets, or the ATOM Echo as microphone endpoints. The accuracy is good for home commands and improving rapidly. You can also keep Alexa or Google for voice while running all automations locally. See our voice control guide.
Not at all. You can access Home Assistant remotely using a VPN (WireGuard or Tailscale), Cloudflare Tunnel, or Nabu Casa ($6.50/mo, funds HA development). Your devices and automations still run locally. Remote access is just a secure window into your local system, not a dependency. See our remote access guide.
Everything keeps working. Your lights respond to switches and automations, your thermostat follows its schedule, your cameras record locally, and your sensors trigger alerts. The only things that stop are integrations that inherently need internet (weather forecasts, streaming music). Core smart home functions are completely unaffected.
Home Assistant software is free. A Home Assistant Green costs $99, or use a Raspberry Pi 5 ($80-120). A Zigbee coordinator runs $25-30. Budget starter devices start at $8-15 each. You can build a solid cloud-free setup covering lighting, sensors, and climate for $180-300 total, with zero ongoing subscription costs. See the budget breakdown above for three detailed tiers.