Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
I've just had to add a second smart home platform back into my setup because I swapped a single Tesla Powerwall for 3x Fox batteries, nearly 40kWh, and no consumer platform will give you the control that needs.
Which got me thinking about this: Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, Homey, Home Assistant. What's each one actually for?
I've run all of them. Here's the honest comparison.
My Honest Guide to Picking a Smart Home Platform in 2026
Here's how I'd think about the options, from simplest to most powerful:
🧩 Apple Home, Google Home and Alexa: nice apps, voice control, easy setup.
Apple Home, Google Home and Alexa are all genuinely useful.
🍎 Apple Home
The cleanest interface and the best privacy story of the three, with proper local control.
The catch: it works with the fewest devices, and it now needs an Apple TV 4K or HomePod as your hub.
🔵 Google Home
The obvious pick if you've got Nest gear and Android in your pocket. Gemini for Home has replaced Assistant, and it's noticeably better at understanding what you actually meant.
🟠 Alexa
Cheapest way in, widest device support, and an Echo Pop costs less than a takeaway. Alexa+ landed for everyone in the US in February: free with Prime, $19.99/month if you're not a Prime member. It's also still cloud-first, which is fine right up until your internet drops.
The thing is, none of the three will let you build the automation you actually want.
In my house, all three end up feeding into Homey or Home Assistant rather than running anything themselves.
🏠 Homey: the one I'd recommend to almost everyone
If you want one hub that talks to basically everything, with an interface a normal human can use — Homey is it.
Homey Pro packs eight radios into one box: Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave Plus, Thread, Matter, Bluetooth LE, 433MHz and infrared. That's more than anything else on the market.
Over 1,000 brands supported.
Everything runs locally, and there's no mandatory subscription — remote access and the app store are included.
I still use Homey for everything in the house and the studio. Flows are genuinely enjoyable to build, which is not a sentence I'd write about most automation tools.
The trade-offs:
It's gone up in price: Homey Pro moved from $399 to $449 because of the component costs, and the Pro mini from $199 to $249
The mini has no Z-Wave: you'd need to add a Homey Bridge, though that combo still comes in under the full Pro
Ethernet is a $29 adapter, not a port
Smaller community than Home Assistant, so some integrations lean on Homey's own apps
For most people with a normal number of smart devices, the Pro mini is the smarter buy. Get the full Pro if you're running a lot of kit and want everything on one hub.
Source: Ars Technica
⚡ Home Assistant: when Homey isn't enough
I've just gone back to running Home Assistant alongside Homey because of energy. I recently swapped a single Tesla Powerwall for 3x Fox batteries, nearly 40kWh of storage.
Here's what Home Assistant does that nothing else on this list can:
Talks directly to my FoxESS inverter and batteries
Runs Predbat, which pulls half-hourly tariff pricing, forecasts your solar generation and your household usage, then decides every 30 minutes whether to charge from grid, charge from solar, discharge, or export
Integrates my myenergi car charger, so the EV charges on the cheap solar/tariff windows instead of whenever I plug it in
Ties it all together: solar, batteries, EV, house load, one dashboard
The result is a dramatically lower electricity bill.
🎯 How I'd pick between these
If you… | Start here |
|---|---|
Live entirely inside Apple and want simple + private | Apple Home |
Have Nest cameras and Android everywhere | Google Home |
Want the cheapest way in and the widest device support | Alexa |
Want one hub that speaks every protocol, no subscription | Homey Pro mini |
Have a lot of devices and complex flows | Homey Pro (2026) |
Want to automate solar, batteries and EV charging | Home Assistant |
Want an easy interface and deep automations | Homey + Home Assistant |
Refuse to pay a monthly fee for your own house | Homey or Home Assistant |
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