The Best Smart Home Setup for 2024: HomeKit & Home Assistant

By combining HomeKit and Home Assistant, you can get the best of both worlds! In this video I walk through the strengths of each platform and I show you how to use these two systems in tandem.

00:00 Intro
00:52 HomeKit Strengths
01:52 Home Assistant Strengths
03:11 Setting up Home Assistant's Bridge
05:12 Setting up HomeKit

Relevant links:

[johnm]

Thank you! Have home kit now and didn’t want to have to sell HA to my wife. Knowing she can just keep using the home app makes all the difference.

[boleric]

Thanks for this. Exactly the setup I want to do.

[chazdahda]

Thank you for this. I will be using this next week when I set up HASS to run our smart home. I’ll slowly be switching from Amazon to Apple because of this and other recommendations!

[stevewright]

Great video with one question which I think I know the answer (which I won't be happy about). If HomeKit has been up and running before setting Home Assistant, do I have to remove everything from my existing Home?

[donpowers]

Just stumbled across your channel and appreciated the video because what you describe is exactly how I function. Got frustrated with limitations to building automations in HomeKit so took the plunge with Home Assistant and have never looked back. Like you my wife would run the other way from HA so I keep a suite of basic automations in HK and build the stuff that requires some heft in HA (far and away most of my automations). The other nice thing about HA is that it exposes far more features in devices (Aqara is a great example) than HK does reducing the number of devices required for many automations. Love the Apple ecosystem but Apple builds their smart home platform for the masses (which I get) rather than for those of use who want to be power users.

[simonsayshomeassistant]

Great video mate, welcome to the smarthome creator network!

[scottskidmore]

I’m so glad I found you, and I'm looking forward to seeing all your videos. I’ve never used Home Assistant and am looking forward to trying it. What do I do if I already have things in HomeKit? Do I have to delete them and re-have them into HomeKit through Home Assistant?

[lahmyaj]

Great video mate 👍🏻 Subscribed.

I need some help please…

I’ve just bought some native HomeKit home automation products that are a mix of WiFi and Thread for their wireless connections and some of the Thread products are also Matter certified.

I haven’t got a Home Assistant bridge setup or anything yet but keen to at a later date if it means I can then purchase cheaper home automation products and integrate them into a HomeKit setup through Home Assistant for a family setup with all Apple devices.

Can I begin to setup the products I’ve bought and create HomeKit scenes and then migrate these over at a later date once I include a HA bridge?

What issues may I face with the mix of WiFi and Thread devices and also how does Matter affect things or not when it all mixes with HA?

I do have an Apple TV 4K which I assume will allow my Thread devices to get connected.

Have not tried anything as of yet.

[olivier]

great video thx for all, my wife = homekit :)

[simonsayshomeassistant]

Great video mate! Awesome to see another new Home Assistant youtuber. Let me know if you would like to come on my show as a guest!

[simonknight]

Thanks for the video. Nice summary. I used to use Alexa (echo voice clients), Home Assistant (automations) and HomeKit (mobile client) but have stopped maintaining HomeKit for about 6 months. I was getting very bad battery drain from devices constantly trying to reconnect on my iPad. Also, I found the requirement to add a new bridge for cameras, locks, media players (to make use of their full feature set) and so on quite confusing and difficult to maintain. Any idea if this is still needed? I couldn’t see it covered in your video.

[JayLewis]

I’m just getting started with home assistant and would love to implement your dual solution here, but can you please help me understand if I need to buy a HomeKit bridge too? I’m overwhelmed at all the usb adapters that it seems like I need to buy (zigbee, Z wave, Bluetooth, etc). I probably have too many adapters already because of my confusion. Thanks for your help!

[Isaac_kaufman]

Trying to figure out how to set this stuff up. If you integrate home assistant to HomeKit, does any of the data go through the apple cloud? Or is everything still local

[mdfavero]

This is great! Have you had any luck connecting Sonos through home assistant? That’ll be the next thing I look up. I’m trying to set up a permanent iPad in my kitchen to control music and automations and make it simple enough for my wife to use. Thank you for putting this video together. I’m excited to see more

[chilson]

Oh this is nice, now I want to set this up. When doing the bridge can you select all the options or go with the given selected options?

[CJBoom]

This is so helpful! Do you use HA green or yellow? which one should I get? Thx!

[ReemOsman]

So am I correct in understanding nothing should be added directly to homekit, but all through home assistant?

[beauthompson]

hi what hardware do you like to run ha on?

[johnvanzyl]

Hi There. I am still very new to Home Assistant (Day 2) lol, but I have been building my HK smart home over the last 2 years.
I have managed to get my Yeelights and my Govee lights into Home Assistant and they are working great. NOW I have a really NOOB So I should rather load my devices directly into home assistant instead of HK and then by using the bridge get all of my devices into Home Kit? Thanks for the Video. 👍

[erikrose]

Would you still need a home pod mini to be able to control devices away from home?