Top HACS Integrations for Home Assistant in 2026 Setup

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HACS has a huge catalogue of community integrations, and only a small slice is worth installing. The rest are hobby projects, abandoned forks, or niche edge cases. The list below gathers the best picks I reviewed in the projects' own repositories and READMEs, rather than from a long-running test install, so I've noted each project's current maintenance status where it matters.

My own Home Assistant setup is a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant OS in the electrical panel of a house that's still being finished, so I haven't put years of daily use behind any of these. What I can do is tell you what each project says it does, where the sharp edges are, and in what order installing them makes sense.

Bottom line: Mushroom Cards is the safest first HACS integration, it only changes the dashboard. Adaptive Lighting is a strong second for tunable bulbs. LocalTuya matters most if you own Tuya hardware, since it replaces cloud-dependent control with local control. And check maintenance status before installing anything: Spotcast, once a staple, has been abandoned by its original author.

Dashboard and UI Picks

The category where HACS earns the most casual user time. Three integrations transform the default Lovelace dashboard from functional to polished.

Mushroom Cards by @piitaya is a collection of customizable dashboard cards with built-in UI editors, so you don't have to write YAML to use them. The repository lists cards for lights, climate, locks, media players, covers, vacuums, fans, alarm panels, and person tracking, plus generic entity and template cards. It's installable straight from HACS, and the project is actively maintained.

Browser Mod by @thomasloven turns each browser into a controllable entity. Its browser_mod.popup service shows custom dialogs on chosen browsers, and per-browser settings let a kitchen tablet behave differently from a phone. Version 2 was rewritten from scratch, and the author asks you to remove version 1 completely before upgrading.

Card-mod by @thomasloven (same author) adds CSS styling to almost any Lovelace card. The use cases are small, fixing visual inconsistencies, theming individual cards, hiding specific elements, but the cumulative result is dashboards that feel polished rather than templated. Its current release targets recent Home Assistant versions, so check compatibility before updating.

Lighting and Climate Picks

Adaptive Lighting by @basnijholt adjusts the brightness and color temperature of your lights based on the sun's position, while still letting you override manually. A single configuration can replace dozens of manual time-of-day scenes. It works with lights that support color temperature, and it has a sleep mode with its own brightness and color settings.

Smart Thermostat (PID Climate) by @ScratMan creates a virtual thermostat driven by a PID controller. It controls on/off heaters, air conditioners, or radiator valves through pulse width modulation, and the project lists outdoor temperature compensation, auto-tuning, and sensor-stall safety features. For rooms with dumb heating plus smart valves, a PID loop is the textbook way to avoid the overshoot of plain on/off logic. It's a smaller project than most on this list, so read the open issues first.

Voice and Media Picks

Alexa Media Player by @alandtse is the integration Echo households reach for when the official Alexa integration falls short. Through it you get per-device features such as announcements to a single Echo, text-to-speech routing, and per-device switches including Do Not Disturb. The project's own wiki gives the caveat plainly: it mimics the Alexa app, so Amazon may cut off access at any time.

Spotcast deserves a warning rather than a recommendation. The original author has declared it abandoned, citing Spotify's attitude toward third-party developers, and points users to a maintained fork. If you want Spotify casting from automations, look at the fork and its migration guide rather than the original.

Ecosystem Bridges

HomeKit Bridge is built into Home Assistant Core, so you don't need HACS for it. It lets devices Home Assistant already controls, including ones from other ecosystems, appear in Apple Home.

Niche Hardware Support

SmartThinQ Sensors by @ollo69 monitors and controls LG ThinQ appliances such as washers, dryers, fridges, and air conditioners. Its README is blunt about a limitation: LG has started blocking the APIs it uses, and polling more often than every 300 seconds gets you blocked for 24 hours. The README points people who hit that wall to the native Home Assistant LG ThinQ integration, which offers fewer options but doesn't suffer from these limits. Our guide to smart kitchen devices covers the rest of the appliance side.

Wyze Bridge by @mrlt8 exposes Wyze cameras as local streams (it ships as a Docker container and a Home Assistant add-on) so you can use them without the cloud. Maintenance has slowed, and there was at least one report of the add-on disappearing from Home Assistant after an update, so a maintained fork may be the safer route today. The cleaner answer is buying cameras that expose RTSP out of the box; our Shelly camera article asks whether that one fits a local setup.

LocalTuya by @rospogrigio gives local control of Tuya-based devices: switches, lights, covers, fans, climate entities, and vacuums, with status pushed rather than polled. The catch is setup: you need each device's local key and ID, and the project suggests a Tuya cloud API account to retrieve them. The cloud is needed once for the keys, not for daily control.

Utilities and Diagnostics

Powercalc by @bramstroker estimates energy use for devices that can't measure it themselves, such as lights, fans, and media players, using strategies and a library of measured profiles. It's useful for households that want energy dashboards without buying a smart plug for every appliance. Treat the numbers as estimates: the project doesn't publish an accuracy figure, so check it against a metered plug on one device before you trust it.

HACS itself, worth listing because newcomers often miss it. Keep an eye on the update list before applying updates, and read the release notes of any package that sits at the heart of your dashboard.

A Sensible Install Order

The order matters because some integrations depend on others. A sequence that works on a fresh install:

1. Mushroom Cards plus Card-mod plus Browser Mod (dashboard foundation)
2. Adaptive Lighting (immediate daily value if any tunable bulbs)
3. Alexa Media Player (if the household uses Echo)
4. LocalTuya, SmartThinQ, or Wyze Bridge (only if you own that hardware)
5. Powercalc (once you know which devices you want estimates for)

Steps 1-3 fit in the first weekend. Steps 4-5 can wait until use cases emerge. Resist the urge to install a dozen integrations on day one.

When a HACS Integration Graduates or Dies

HACS integrations sometimes graduate into Home Assistant Core. HomeKit Bridge is one example, and LG's native ThinQ integration now exists next to the community one. When that happens, switch to the official version even if the community one still works, because the official version follows the Home Assistant release process.

Other integrations simply die, as Spotcast's original did. That's the real maintenance cost of HACS: you inherit the author's free time. So prefer projects with recent releases, and treat an abandoned notice in a README as a hard stop.

How to Spot Worth-Installing Packages

Five quick checks before installing any HACS integration:

• A visible user base (stars and forks) that is growing, not shrinking
• A recent commit or release
• Open issues that get answers
• A clear README with screenshots
• Released versions tagged in GitHub (not just rolling main branch)

Anything that misses two of these five is probably not worth the maintenance risk. Anything that hits all five is usually safe.

The full HACS catalogue lives in the HACS default repositories list. The Home Assistant quality scale documentation explains the official integration rating system that HACS packages aspire to. Browsing both gives a sense of which community packages are likely to graduate to official status, and therefore stay around long enough to justify learning their conventions.

Your shortlist will diverge based on the specific hardware in your house, but the underlying principle holds: HACS is high-value when used selectively and high-risk when used impulsively. Pick deliberately and the community ecosystem becomes one of Home Assistant's biggest practical advantages.

Pairings That Multiply the Value

Some of the picks above work better in combination than they do alone.

Adaptive Lighting plus Mushroom Cards is the first pattern. The adaptive system runs the color temperature shift automatically; the Mushroom light card exposes a clean per-room dimmer on your dashboard.

Alexa Media Player plus a Do Not Disturb switch is the second. A scene such as "movie night" or "meditation" can silence Echo announcements at the same time as it dims the lights.

LocalTuya plus HomeKit Bridge is the third. Tuya devices controlled locally in Home Assistant can then be re-exposed into Apple Home through the built-in bridge, so an iPhone household can use cheap Tuya hardware that Apple doesn't officially support.

The Trap of HACS Maximalism

A common path for newer Home Assistant users: install HACS, browse the catalogue, get excited, install thirty integrations in a weekend. A few weeks later the install is unstable, updates break things, and Home Assistant gets the blame.

The cause is not Home Assistant or HACS. It is unchecked installation. Each integration adds a small failure surface, and the surfaces add up. Resist completionism. The catalogue is interesting but most of it is not relevant to your specific household. Install the handful that solve real problems you experience daily, ignore everything else, and the Home Assistant install stays stable enough to live with rather than constantly debug.