Home Assistant Green vs Yellow: which to buy now

If you are weighing these two up as a new buyer, the decision has already been made for you. Nabu Casa announced the end of Home Assistant Yellow on 15 October 2025: production has stopped, stock will not be replenished, and Green is the recommended alternative. There is no version of this comparison where a new Yellow is the answer.

The question keeps getting asked anyway, and for a fair reason. The official Yellow page does carry a note saying the product is no longer in production, but it still lists live places to buy it, one of which is now a dead link, and Nabu Casa's own site still shows Yellow among its hardware with no such note at all. If you have been looking at both and could not work out why one of them seemed strangely hard to buy, that is why.

So the useful version of this question is not which is better. It is which to buy now, and what to do if you already own a Yellow. Both have clear answers.

Where Yellow actually stands

Nabu Casa's own announcement is blunt: it will no longer be producing Home Assistant Yellow, and stock will not be replenished. Yellow was announced back in 2021 under the name Amber, and the pre-assembled version was wound down not long after Green arrived in late 2023, so the October 2025 announcement was the end of a long taper rather than a surprise.

Software is a different story, and this is the important part for existing owners. The project states that support for Yellow continues far into the future, and it has form here: Home Assistant Blue stopped being made in 2022 and still receives Home Assistant builds today. End of life means the end of manufacturing, not the end of updates.

In Australia the practical position is worse than limited stock. The Australian retailer linked from the official Yellow page now returns a 404. Of the listings that survive, Pakronics shows its Yellow kit sold out with no inventory, and Core Electronics lists the older Yellow Standard at $414.95 including GST as out of stock, with a single unit of supplier stock against a dispatch estimate months away. So it is not flatly impossible to get one here, but no Australian retailer has stock on the shelf and nothing new is coming behind it. Checked 30 July 2026; if you are reading this much later, assume it has got harder rather than easier.

What Yellow had that Green does not

What that expandability was actually worth

Reading that table, Yellow looks like the better machine, and on paper it is. In practice the four advantages were worth very different amounts.

The M.2 NVMe slot was the real one. Running Home Assistant from an SSD rather than eMMC gives you room for a large history and the write endurance to go with it, which is exactly the constraint people hit on a Green. Worth knowing what it would not do, though: the slot does not support a Google Coral accelerator, which is the one thing many people wanted it for.

The Compute Module socket sounded better than it was. The module was not included in the kit, so you had to find one yourself, and the guidance was at least 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of eMMC, with the cheaper Lite module requiring an NVMe SSD before it would work at all. There is also a regulatory wrinkle worth knowing: Yellow's approval does not cover the wireless variants of the module, so fitting a Wi-Fi module puts you outside the certification. Nothing official says it will not work, only that it is not covered. During the module shortage, "you supply the processor" was a real obstacle rather than a feature.

PoE was genuinely useful, but to a narrow group: anyone mounting the hub in a comms cupboard with a PoE switch and no power point. It was sold as a separate kit that came without a power supply.

The radio is the real gap, and it is cheap to close

Yellow's fourth advantage is the one you would actually notice every day: it had a Zigbee radio on the board, shipping ready to use. Green has no radios at all, so a Green buyer has to add one. That is the whole practical difference between these two products for most households, and it costs about $89 to $105 to erase with a Connect ZBT-2. Our guide to choosing a radio adapter covers which one and why.

There is an argument that the adapter is the better arrangement anyway. Yellow's radio sits on a board inside a plastic case, wherever the hub happens to live. A ZBT-2 puts the antenna on a weighted base on the end of a cable, so you can stand it away from the machine and out of the cupboard, which is worth more to Zigbee range than any specification on the box.

If you already own a Yellow

Keep it. There is no functional reason to migrate, and nothing about the end-of-life announcement changes what your hardware does. Software support continues, your Zigbee network keeps working, and if you fitted an NVMe drive you still have headroom a Green does not.

Two things do change. A failed unit is now a replacement decision rather than a repair one, because there is no more hardware coming. And if your plan involved buying a second Yellow, for a holiday house or a spare, that plan is finished; buy a Green for the second site and accept that the two boxes will not be identical.

Blue, briefly

Blue came first, in late 2020: an ODROID-N2+ in an aluminium case, with a six-core Amlogic processor, 4 GB of DDR4 and 128 GB of eMMC, which is still more storage than either of the others. It was always meant to be a limited edition and production ended in 2022. It is the proof behind the Yellow support promise, because it is still receiving Home Assistant builds four years after the last one was built.

Blue has no radios either, and no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so Zigbee or Z-Wave needed a USB adapter that was not in the box. One wrinkle if you inherit one: all four of its USB ports are USB 3.0, and USB 3.0 is a known source of interference for 2.4 GHz radios, so a Blue running Zigbee wants that extension cable more than most.

You cannot buy one new in Australia. If you are offered a used one, it is a capable machine with generous storage, but you are buying hardware that stopped being made four years ago with no warranty behind it.

So which one

If you are buying now, buy a Green and the adapter you need. Not because it is the better machine on paper, because it is not: a well-specified Yellow gives you a faster processor, twice the memory and a proper SSD. It is because you cannot reliably buy a Yellow in Australia, it will never see another hardware revision, and the one advantage you would feel day to day costs about a hundred dollars to add to a Green.

If Green is genuinely not enough for what you are planning, do not go hunting for a second-hand Yellow to solve it. The answer there is a mini PC, and Nabu Casa said as much itself in the same announcement: it noted power users gravitating that way, and described its own replacement for them as still some way off. Our guide to choosing the hardware to run it on covers where that line sits.

And if you already own a Yellow, there is nothing here for you to act on. That is the useful part of an end-of-life announcement that only ends manufacturing.