Home Assistant Green vs a Raspberry Pi: which to build on

We sell Home Assistant Green, so treat our conclusion with suspicion and read the arithmetic instead. It is all below, with the prices we actually found and the date we found them.

The conventional answer to this question is that a Raspberry Pi is the cheap route and a Green is the convenient one, so you pay for convenience. That was true for years. In Australia, in the middle of 2026, it is no longer true, and the reason has nothing to do with either product: memory prices have pushed Pi board prices up sharply while the accessories around them have stayed flat.

The cost, honestly

A Home Assistant Green sells in Australia for roughly $270 to $280. Here is what bare Raspberry Pi 5 boards cost at Australian electronics retailers on 30 July 2026: about $105 for 2 GB, about $179 for 4 GB, between $286 and $308 for 8 GB, and between $488 and $537 for 16 GB.

Read the 8 GB figure again. The board on its own, with no power supply, no case, no cooling and no storage, costs more than a complete Green at all three Australian retailers we checked, though at the cheapest of them only by a few dollars. That is not a normal state of affairs and it may well unwind, because it is a memory-price story rather than anything structural. But it is the position today, and today is when you are buying.

What you have to add to a bare board

The official 27 W USB-C power supply is about $21, and it is not the optional extra it looks like. Raspberry Pi specifies the Pi 5 as 5 V at 5 A, and documents that a 5 V 3 A supply instead limits peripherals to 600 mA. That is the budget your USB SSD and your Zigbee adapter then have to share between them, which is a good way to produce faults that look like software problems. Buy the proper supply.

Then a case, from about $17, and cooling. The official case includes a fan, so on a plain build that is handled; the separate active cooler is about $9 if you use a case without one. If you go the NVMe route, the full-size M.2 board only fits inside the official case if you take the lid and the fan out, so in practice you buy a case built for it at around $40, or you buy the Compact version of the M.2 board, which is designed to fit around the fan. None of these are large amounts. They just are not zero, and they are the part people leave out when they compare a bare board price to a finished appliance.

Storage is the decision that actually matters

Our advice is to run Home Assistant from an SSD rather than a microSD card. Worth being precise about whose advice that is, though, because it gets misattributed constantly: Home Assistant's own Raspberry Pi installation page describes a microSD card install and asks for at least 32 GB, ideally Application Class 2, which you identify by the A2 label on the card. It does not tell you to use an SSD. That recommendation is ours.

The reason we give it is write volume. Home Assistant records state changes continuously, and a card under that kind of sustained write load is a known failure mode: a degrading card is one of the three usual explanations when a Pi install turns sluggish, alongside an oversized database and an underpowered host. Cards do not fail politely either. They fail slowly, in ways that look like software problems, which is what makes it worth avoiding up front rather than diagnosing later.

A Green sidesteps this by booting from 32 GB of soldered eMMC. That is not immortal, since eMMC has finite write endurance too, but it is materially tougher under this load than a card and it is not something you have to think about or specify.

Booting a Pi 5 from NVMe is very good once it works, and it is not the five-minute job the accessory listings imply. The Pi does not boot from PCIe storage by default, so you change the boot order, either through the configuration tool or by setting it directly. Raspberry Pi also states plainly that the Pi 5 is not certified for PCIe Gen 3 speeds and that Gen 3 connections may be unstable, so the safe setting is Gen 2 and the faster one is opt-in at your own risk. Adapters other than the official board sometimes need an extra configuration line, and some setups want a bootloader update before NVMe boot is reliable. None of this is beyond a patient person. All of it is an afternoon a Green does not ask for.

The radios are a genuine tie

Neither a Green nor any Raspberry Pi has a Zigbee, Thread or Z-Wave radio. Both need the same USB adapter, at the same price, and our guide to choosing a radio adapter applies identically to both. Anyone presenting the adapter as a hidden cost of the Green specifically is selling you something.

There is one asymmetry worth naming, and it favours the Pi. A Pi 4 or 5 has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the board; a Green has neither. In practice this matters less than it sounds. You want a hub on Ethernet regardless, and Home Assistant's own documentation notes that the internal Bluetooth radio on a Pi 3B+ or 4B runs over a serial connection with limited performance, so it is not the Bluetooth solution you would choose anyway. But it is a real difference and the Pi does win it.

Performance, and where each one runs out

On raw capability the Pi 5 is the stronger machine, and it is not close if you buy memory. A Green is fixed at a quad-core Cortex-A55 with 4 GB and USB 2.0 for everything you attach. A Pi 5 is faster, can be had with 8 or 16 GB, and has PCIe, which is what makes the NVMe option possible in the first place. If your reason for choosing is headroom, the Pi genuinely offers more of it.

Two constraints on the Pi side before you plan around an older board. Home Assistant asks for at least 2 GB of memory, and the boards its installation pages actually offer images for are the Pi 4 and Pi 5. The Pi 3 still appears in the developer documentation, but no common Pi 3 has 2 GB, so treat it as nominally supported rather than a real option. More importantly, 32-bit support is gone rather than merely discouraged: after a six-month deprecation it was fully removed in the 2025.12 release, so these boards are 64-bit only now. An old 32-bit install is not something you can keep running.

Both machines run out at the same two workloads: camera object detection, and open-ended local voice. The voice figures are worth quoting because they are unusually concrete. Home Assistant's local-assistant documentation puts Whisper at around eight seconds per command on a Pi 4 against under a second on an Intel NUC, while the lighter Speech-to-Phrase model manages under a second on a Green or a Pi 4 but only understands a subset of commands. If fully local open-ended voice is the goal, neither of these is the machine.

Which is where the mini PC arrives, and where the Australian numbers get awkward for the Pi. A new N100-class mini PC starts around $279, though read those listings carefully, because at that price it is usually a barebone with no memory, no drive and no operating system; the same machine ready to run is nearer $400. Refurbished small-form-factor business machines are the other route, and they start around $280 and run up past $600 depending on specification. Either way, the entry point for x86 sits below or around a Pi 5 build with a proper SSD, for considerably more machine. Our guide to choosing the hardware to run it on goes further into where that line sits.

Setup, noise and power

Setting up a Green is Ethernet, power, and a browser. Setting up a Pi is writing an image to your storage, picking the 64-bit build, fitting the cooler, and sorting the boot order if you have gone to NVMe. Neither is hard. One of them is twenty minutes of shopping decisions and configuration that the other does not have.

Noise goes to the Green, which is passively cooled and genuinely silent. A Pi 5 with the official active cooler has a fan in it, so it is not. Passive cases exist, but then you are managing the thermals of a machine that never turns off, which is a job you have given yourself. On power, a Green idles at about 1.7 W and draws about 3 W under load. We have not measured a Pi 5 ourselves, so we are not going to quote a figure for it.

So which one

If you already own a Pi 4 or Pi 5 with 4 GB or more, use it. That is the clearest answer on this page, and you are nowhere near a side path: when Home Assistant added Pi 5 support it noted that a third of its users were running on Raspberry Pi boards. Spend your money on an SSD and a radio adapter, in that order, and ignore everything else here.

If you are buying from scratch and you want the thing to work without becoming a project, buy a Green and an adapter. On today's Australian prices that is also the cheaper option once storage is comparable, which is not a sentence we could have written a year ago.

If you are buying from scratch and you want headroom for cameras or local voice, buy a mini PC rather than a Pi 5. You will spend similar money and get considerably more machine.

And if you want to tinker, to learn Linux properly, or to keep a board you can repurpose for something else next year, buy the Pi. That is a perfectly good reason. Just go in knowing that the premium you are now paying is the price of that flexibility, not a saving, which is the opposite of how this comparison worked for most of the past decade.

There is one case where the Pi is still plainly cheaper: a 2 GB or 4 GB board running from a microSD card. It meets Home Assistant's stated minimum and it will work. We would not run a house on it, for the storage reasons above, but we are not going to pretend it is not an option.