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Shelly Plus 1

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.

Home Assistant Yellow

Home Assistant Yellow is the official purpose-built hub from Nabu Casa, the company that employs the core developers of the open-source Home Assistant project. It pairs a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with a carrier board designed specifically for home automation: Gigabit Ethernet, an M.2 slot for NVMe storage, two USB-A ports, and a Silicon Labs MGM210P radio module that handles Zigbee 3.0 and is Thread-capable for Matter ecosystems. It ships with Home Assistant OS preinstalled, so it boots straight into a fully local smart home controller with no account, no subscription, and no cloud dependency.

Philips Hue

Philips Hue is the longest-running mainstream smart lighting ecosystem, sold since 2012 and made by Signify, the lighting company spun off from Philips. This listing covers the ecosystem as a whole: the Zigbee-based bulbs, light strips, lamps, and fixtures, plus the Hue Bridge that coordinates them. The Bridge connects to your router over Ethernet, stores and runs automations locally, and exposes a fully documented local REST API that has been a fixture of the smart home hobbyist world for more than a decade.