Best Hub

Home Assistant Green is the entry-level official hub from Nabu Casa, built to be the cheapest reliable way to run Home Assistant on dedicated hardware. Inside the small fanless case is a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM processor with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage, with Home Assistant OS preinstalled. You plug in Ethernet and power, open a browser, and within minutes you have a fully local smart home controller — no account, no subscription, and no cloud dependency of any kind.

The SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, commonly known by its model name ZBDongle-P, is a USB Zigbee coordinator built around the Texas Instruments CC2652P radio chip with a +20 dBm power amplifier and an external SMA antenna. Plugged into a machine running Zigbee2MQTT or Home Assistant's ZHA integration, it becomes the brain of a fully local Zigbee network, pairing and controlling bulbs, sensors, switches, and plugs from hundreds of manufacturers without any proprietary hub, account, or cloud service involved.

The Shelly Plus 1 is a miniature Wi-Fi relay from Shelly (Allterco Robotics) that installs behind an existing wall switch or inside a junction box, making ordinary lights, fans, gates, and garage doors smart without replacing any visible hardware. At roughly 42 by 36 by 17 millimeters it fits in standard wall boxes, its dry-contact relay switches up to 16 amps, and it accepts a wide range of supply voltages — 110 to 240 volts AC as well as low-voltage DC — which makes it useful well beyond lighting.