Home Assistant Green vs Yellow: Which to Buy in 2026

This is the comparison every UK Home Assistant beginner ends up running through Google because Nabu Casa's own product pages don't actually compare the two. Below: a head-to-head spec table, what each one is for in 2026 (the Green vs Yellow question changed materially when Yellow production ended in October 2025), and a decision rule that holds even if you find a discounted Yellow at a UK retailer.

Green is a sealed plug-and-play box. Yellow is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 carrier board with an M.2 NVMe slot and a built-in Silicon Labs Zigbee radio. That single sentence captures most of why you'd pick one over the other. Green wants to be your fridge - you plug it in, you forget about it, it just runs Home Assistant. Yellow wants to be your homelab starting point - you open it up, slot in storage, optionally power it over Ethernet, and customise the hardware as you go.

The Home Assistant Yellow end-of-life announcement on the official Home Assistant blog made the choice easier for new buyers in 2026: Nabu Casa now positions Green as the standard entry-point, and recommends Mini PCs (rather than Yellow) for buyers who want the upgrade headroom that Yellow used to provide. So the comparison below is partly historical - real, because plenty of Yellow stock still sits on UK retailer shelves, but framed by Yellow being a sunset product.

Yellow has the Silicon Labs EFR32MG21 chip soldered onto the carrier board, so Zigbee 3.0 and Matter-over-Thread work out of the box without buying anything extra. Green ships with no wireless radios at all - to use Zigbee or Thread devices you add the Connect ZBT-2, a USB-A dongle from Nabu Casa that costs around £25 in the UK.

For most buyers, the Connect ZBT-2 path is actually preferable. The dongle is replaceable when the next-generation Zigbee/Thread silicon ships, whereas Yellow's onboard radio ages in place. The cost gap shrinks too: Green plus ZBT-2 lands around £120-£135 in the UK; Yellow with PoE was £150-£180 and the standard kit around £130-£150.

Two things to think about. First, software support: Nabu Casa has committed to continued Home Assistant OS builds for Yellow indefinitely - the closest precedent is Home Assistant Blue (discontinued 2022), which still gets fresh builds. So a 2026 Yellow purchase will keep working and updating. Second, hardware sourcing: the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 supply problems that drove the discontinuation make replacement modules harder and pricier to find if yours fails. With Green, the whole unit comes from a single supplier with active production.

If you want PoE specifically (cleanly powering the hub through your Ethernet cable, no separate plug) Yellow is still the only first-party Home Assistant hardware that offers it. For homelabbers wiring switch + hub into a structured cabling setup, that's a real reason to grab a Yellow PoE kit while UK retailers still have them.

Day-to-day Home Assistant workload doesn't tax either of these hubs. For dashboards, light routines and a few dozen automations, both feel identical. Where Yellow pulls ahead is anything storage-bound: with an NVMe SSD installed, Yellow handles Frigate NVR (the popular AI-powered camera processor), large MariaDB recorder databases, or local AI/LLM workloads (e.g. Ollama on a small model) noticeably better than Green's 32 GB eMMC. Green's eMMC is also rated for fewer write cycles than a quality NVMe SSD, so heavy-recorder users will eventually hit storage wear on Green that Yellow defers via NVMe.

Nabu Casa themselves now recommend Mini PCs to power-users who'd previously have bought Yellow. A used Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q (around £120-£200 on eBay UK), an Intel N100 mini PC like the Beelink Mini S12 (around £160-£200 new), or even a used HP EliteDesk give you 16-32 GB RAM, NVMe storage, and meaningfully faster CPUs for similar money to Yellow. The trade-offs are extra setup work (you install Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Supervised yourself), a louder/larger box, and no built-in Zigbee radio. For most Home Assistant users a Green plus Connect ZBT-2 hits the sweet spot below the Mini PC tier; for power users, Mini PC is now the preferred upgrade path.

Buy Home Assistant Green if: you're new to Home Assistant; you want it to just work without thinking about hardware; you have any Wi-Fi smart-home gear (Matter/Wi-Fi, HomeKit, Tuya) and don't yet own Zigbee devices; you want a quiet plug-and-play box; or you're not sure which to buy. Add the Connect ZBT-2 (~£25) when you want Zigbee or Thread.

Buy Home Assistant Yellow if: you specifically want PoE; you definitely want NVMe storage and would rather not run a Mini PC; or you want the built-in Zigbee/Thread radio integrated rather than dongled. And only if your UK retailer still has stock - the official Nabu Casa store has wound down.

Skip both and buy a Mini PC if: you plan to run Frigate NVR with multiple cameras, local AI/LLM workloads, or you already have an existing Pi-style homelab where adding a beefier box fits the rest of your setup.