Best Home Assistant Integrations & Add-ons UK 2026

HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store) is the gateway. It's a custom integration that lets you install other community integrations, themes, dashboards and front-end cards from a one-click UI - rather than copying files into custom_components/ by hand. Roughly 90% of the picks in this post are installed via HACS rather than the built-in catalogue.

Installation is a 5-minute task: download the HACS install script via SSH, restart Home Assistant, then add HACS as an integration. The official docs walk through it. Everything below assumes you've done that.

There's a healthy amount of HACS content that's either abandoned, redundant, or actively makes your system flakier. Specific patterns to skip:

• Old 'Tuya Local' forks. Multiple competing repos exist; the Local Tuya integration is the only well-maintained one. Pick that and ignore the rest.
• Hue beyond the official integration. The built-in Hue integration in HA is now feature-complete. Third-party Hue HACS integrations exist for historical reasons; don't install them.
• Anything 'home_assistant_smart_lock_X'. If your lock has a Zigbee or Matter chip, use the native protocol. Custom integrations for specific lock brands are usually thin wrappers around proprietary clouds.
• Multiple themes simultaneously. One theme is plenty. Two themes fight for the same CSS variables and break dashboards. Stick to Mushroom + one base theme.
• Automation 'packs' from random GitHub repos. Copying 50 automations you don't understand is how you end up debugging at 2am. Read the existing automation, adapt one rule at a time. See our [25 automation examples](/blog/home-assistant-automations-for-beginners/) for tested starting points.

The terminology trips up almost every new user. Same word ('add it to Home Assistant') for two completely different things:

• Integration: Python code that runs inside the Home Assistant process. Talks to an API or device protocol, exposes entities. Lives under Settings → Devices & Services. Updated as part of HA's normal release cycle (or via HACS for community ones). Examples: Octopus Energy, Hue, UniFi, Z-Wave JS.
• Add-on: A separate Docker container managed by Home Assistant OS / Supervisor. Runs alongside HA on the same host. Lives under Settings → Add-ons. Has its own UI and configuration. Examples: Frigate NVR, ESPHome, Node-RED, AdGuard Home, Z-Wave JS UI.

Critical implication: add-ons only work on Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Supervised. If you installed Home Assistant Container (raw Docker), you don't get the Add-on Store - you'll need to run each Docker container yourself. That's why we recommend HA OS as the default install method.

Home Assistant's strength is that you can extend it almost infinitely. Its weakness is the same. The 12 integrations and add-ons above are the ones I'd genuinely keep on a clean install in 2026 - Octopus and the energy stack for the UK tariff advantage, Z-Wave JS UI and ESPHome for device freedom, Mushroom and the chart cards for a dashboard that doesn't look like 2018, and Frigate/AdGuard as the headline add-ons that replace separate paid services.

Anything beyond that is shaped by your hardware. A solar-and-battery house adds Givenergy/Solax. A privacy-first household adds Wireguard and an unbound DNS resolver. A 3D-printing household adds OctoPrint or Bambu. Pick the integrations that match the problems you actually have, not the ones that look impressive in someone else's dashboard screenshot.