Home Assistant Green vs Yellow: Which Official Hub Is the Long-Haul Buy?
Choosing your Home Assistant hardware is the most buy-it-for-life decision in the whole hobby: everything else in the house connects to it, and it's the one device you genuinely want to set up once and forget. Nabu Casa — the company that employs Home Assistant's core developers — sells two official answers, and the names don't tell you anything. Here's the actual difference.
What they share
Both are small, silent, fanless boxes that run full Home Assistant OS with every add-on, both get the project's relentless monthly updates for as far out as anyone can see, and both are supported by the people who write the software — the strongest longevity guarantee available in this category. Buying either one funds Home Assistant development. You are not choosing between a good hub and a bad one.
The case for Green: the cheapest reliable answer
Home Assistant Green is the entry-level hub, built to be the cheapest dependable way to run Home Assistant on dedicated hardware. The fanless case holds a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM processor with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage — comfortably enough for a serious home's worth of automations, dashboards, and add-ons. What it doesn't have is any smart-home radio: Zigbee, Thread, or Z-Wave each mean adding a USB stick.
That's less of a drawback than it sounds. A USB coordinator is replaceable and upgradeable independently of the hub, and if you already own one, Green plus your existing stick is the budget path to a fully local smart home.
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Our review of the Green — the entry-level official hub and the cheapest reliable way in.
The case for Yellow: everything in one box
Home Assistant Yellow is the purpose-built flagship: a carrier board designed around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, with an onboard Zigbee/Thread radio and an M.2 slot for NVMe storage. The integrated radio means one tidy box instead of a USB stick dangling off a port, and the NVMe slot matters more than it looks — years of sensor history in a recorder database is exactly the workload that wears out cheap flash storage, and a proper SSD shrugs it off. The Compute Module is also socketed, so the brain of the hub can be upgraded down the line without replacing the board around it.
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Our long-term review of the Yellow — the modular flagship with the radio and NVMe slot built in.
The decision rule
Buy Green if you're starting out, watching the budget, or already own a Zigbee or Z-Wave USB coordinator you like. It does everything that matters and nothing you'd outgrow quickly.
Buy Yellow if you're building the ten-year install: heavy sensor history that deserves NVMe, a preference for one integrated box over dongles, and the upgrade path of a socketed compute module. The premium buys modularity, which is the most BIFL property a hub can have.
What about a spare PC or a Pi in a drawer?
Perfectly valid — Home Assistant runs happily on generic hardware, and plenty of long-running installs live on old laptops. You trade the appliance experience for scrounging: you become the integrator responsible for storage quality, power, and the radio. The official hubs exist so the most important box in the house can be boring.
Bottom line
There's no wrong answer between these two — only a wrong match. Green is the right first hub for most people. Yellow is the right last hub: the one you buy intending never to think about hub hardware again.