Our story and values

A brand is more than a logo and a tone of voice. Home Assistant's brand starts with what the project stands for. The personality, the voice, and the visual design all express the same thing: a smart home that belongs to the people who live in it.

The Open Home is the vision for the smart home behind Home Assistant. It defines the values at the heart of every decision in the project. They are woven into the architecture, the licensing, the community, and everything else.

The Open Home Foundation, which owns Home Assistant, puts it in three words: privacy, choice, and sustainability.

Your home should be your safe space: a place where you can be yourself, without acting differently to avoid an algorithm categorizing your behavior. For the Open Home, privacy means that devices work locally. No one else needs to know when you turn on a light or change the thermostat.

A product can offer a cloud connection, but it should be extra, and opt-in.

The devices in your home gather data about themselves and their surroundings. That is your data. Vendors shouldn't limit your access to it, or limit how your devices work with the rest of your home.

For the Open Home, choice means that devices make their data available through local APIs. That avoids vendor lock-in, and lets people build their smart home with devices from different manufacturers.

Technology companies are good at launching new products. Keeping them working is often an afterthought: a vendor stops supporting a device, and features break, or the device stops working at all. The more devices a home has, the more that matters. Nobody should have to buy everything again every couple of years because a manufacturer moved on.

For the Open Home, this means devices are designed and built to keep working. Not just this year, but for the next decade.

The values are the reason the brand sounds the way it does. A project that puts people's privacy and choice first can't talk down to them, hide limitations, or lock them in with words either. That is where the personality comes from: welcoming, candid, supportive, generous, and independent.

The values also shape the rest of the project, each in its own way:

• Our principles: how the values show in how we work together
• Architecture principles: what they mean for the code
• Design principles: what they mean for the interface

• 2013: Paulus Schoutsen starts Home Assistant as a Python application in September, and publishes it on GitHub in November.
• 2017: in July, Hass.io, a managed operating system with a Supervisor that installs, backs up, and updates Home Assistant, makes it easier to run on single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. In December, Home Assistant Cloud launches as a free public beta, with Amazon Alexa as its first service.
• 2018: in April, Google Assistant support follows, still in the free beta. In September, the founders and core contributors of Home Assistant establish Nabu Casa, which runs Home Assistant Cloud as a subscription from then on.
• 2019: in March, Home Assistant Cloud adds secure remote access to your Home Assistant.
• 2020: in January, the names change, so the parts are easier to tell apart. The Python application becomes Home Assistant Core. The full suite, with the operating system and the Supervisor, is Home Assistant.
• 2024: Home Assistant and other projects are transferred to the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit.
• 2025: everyone working on the foundation's projects moves from Nabu Casa to the Open Home Foundation. Nabu Casa continues as a commercial partner of the foundation.
• 2026: Home Assistant Cloud is renamed Home Assistant Link.

How the project is organized explains how the foundation, its partners, and the contributors work together today.

• The Open Home and the history: the "Our story" page that was published on design.home-assistant.io, which this page replaces
• The values and the foundation: openhomefoundation.org and its structure page
• Nabu Casa: About Nabu Casa