This is the easiest way to access your Home Assistant smart home remotely, no subscription

Home Assistant is amazing because it’s free, but it’s not always the easiest platform in the world to use. Though you can choose to pay for remote access by signing up to Home Assistant Cloud or go it alone with VPN access, there’s actually another easy way to add remote access to your smart home.

HomeKit Bridge adds Home Assistant devices to Apple Home

HomeKit Bridge is a Home Assistant integration that adds Apple Home support to your smart home server. You can mirror all of your Home Assistant devices to Apple Home, or just choose a select few. These will then become available for use in Apple Home, for all members of your household.

Using Home Assistant as the backbone of your smart home setup means that you get all of the benefits of this versatile and open-source smart home platform. You don’t need to make sure that your devices are Apple HomeKit certified, for example. You can use any devices that are compatible with Home Assistant, then expose them to Apple Home using the integration.

Another benefit of doing this is that it makes your smart home really easy to use for all involved. Home Assistant might be the best tool for the job when it comes to running a powerful locally-controlled smart home, but it’s not always the most user-friendly choice. With Apple Home, you can design the most user-friendly dashboard without worrying about having every smart home function at your fingertips.

Apple designed its smart home platform with simplicity in mind. There’s virtually no learning curve; you simply invite whoever you want to your home, and they can control your lights, scenes, and receive critical alerts from sensors like water leak detectors. You can do neat things like limit access to unnecessary devices or get more complex by exposing automations as switches (so that you can turn functionality on and off).

For me, the main benefit of doing this is remote access. Apple’s remote access “just works” in that you can access your Apple Home from any Apple device that is logged into the same Apple ID. You won’t get access to your full Home Assistant dashboard this way (naturally), but you will be able to control any devices and read sensors that you have exposed via HomeKit Bridge.

What you need for this to work

This solution is perfect if you already use an iPhone (or have a few household members that do), but it won’t work for non-Apple devices. There’s no Apple Home app for Android, Windows, Linux, or anything that isn’t an iPhone, iPad, or Mac (yet). Apple doesn’t let you control your smart home via iCloud.com either. If you have a house full of iPhone users, it’s a perfect solution.

You’ll also need an Apple Home hub, like a HomePod, HomePod mini, or an Apple TV. With this device connected to the same network as your Home Assistant server, search for and set up the HomeKit Bridge integration within Home Assistant (under Settings > Devices & services).

You can then set the “Inclusion mode” within the HomeKit Bridge integration's settings to either “exclude” or “include” your devices. If you want to include everything while excluding specific devices, choose “exclude” and list which devices you don’t want appearing. I personally use “include” mode and then add new devices as and when I want to see them in HomeKit Bridge.

Once everything has been set up, open the Home app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and create a new Home. You’ll need to set everything up here to mirror your home, creating rooms and distributing your devices between them. Your scenes won’t be mirrored either, so you’ll need to create those again.

Your existing automations within Home Assistant will still run, but you also have the option of setting up automations within Apple Home if you want (personally, I don’t bother).

Apple gear is expensive, but you can save money

The two best things about this approach are simplicity and not having to pay for a subscription. I already had a HomePod lying around (and an old Apple TV that would have done the job too). My partner loves interacting with our smart home using their iPhone, and even Siri is tolerable for this task.

Of course, not everyone has the prerequisite hardware. I’d recommend picking up a used Apple Home Hub to save money. An Apple TV will do the job just fine, just make sure you get the Apple TV HD (fourth-generation) or newer, or pick up a 4K model if you also want to plug it into a modern TV.

Apple’s smart home platform was built with local control in mind, so unlike Amazon or Google smart homes, offline control is still possible even without an internet connection. You’ll also get access to HomeKit Secure Video if you have an iCloud+ subscription for your existing devices, which you can use to host security camera footage in the cloud even with models that were never designed to support it.

Other ways to add remote access

I’m well aware that this method isn’t for everyone; it’s clearly of little use to Android users, and it requires that you have a Home hub in your possession. I’d argue that paying a one-off fee for a smart speaker or streaming box is better than an ongoing subscription.

I like the idea of supporting the Home Assistant project with services like Home Assistant Cloud, but there are other ways, like hardware purchases of devices like the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread radio or the long-range Z-Wave ZWA-2 adapter.

Other options for free remote access to your Home Assistant server include using a VPN tunnel through a service like Tailscale, ZeroTier, or Wireguard. You can also set up port forwarding and make your server accessible via a domain with a dynamic DNS provider. If you go this route, make sure you secure your server properly using an add-on like Let’s Encrypt.

Whatever you do, don’t just YOLO it and open up the necessary port on your router without locking down your server first.