SmartThings vs Home Assistant

Ask which of these is better and you get an argument. Ask what each one actually is and it's simple. SmartThings is Samsung's platform: free to use as a consumer, and maintained for you. Home Assistant is open-source software you run on your own hardware, and you maintain it. Both reach the same radios. The choice is really about who's responsible when something breaks.

Radios are not the deciding factor

Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter and vendor clouds are on both lists, so device compatibility rarely settles it. What differs is how you get there. SmartThings hands you the radios in one box: the Aeotec Smart Home Hub carries Zigbee, Z-Wave and Thread together, and it's sold in an ANZ variant running on 921.4 MHz. Home Assistant's current hub ships no radios at all. Home Assistant Green has no Zigbee, Thread, Z-Wave or Bluetooth radio in it, so you add a USB adapter for each protocol you want, and the project's advice is to dedicate one adapter per protocol rather than run two roles on one stick.

The real difference is who runs it

SmartThings is Samsung's to maintain. You don't choose the update schedule, you don't patch anything, and when a driver breaks, waiting is usually the fix. Device logic used to run in Samsung's cloud. SmartThings Edge moved it onto the hub using Lua drivers, so control and automations for directly connected Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave and LAN devices now run locally. When the internet drops, those keep working. Everything account-shaped does not: remote access, cloud notifications, third-party cloud integrations and the Samsung account layer itself. A Samsung account is compulsory.

Home Assistant is yours. Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter devices are served by a coordinator plugged into your own box and software running on it, with no cloud service in the control path, and the project states that everything is processed locally, with cloud used only where a device offers no local option. The Open Home Foundation, which owns the project, states it cannot be sold or acquired. The bill for all this is real, and it's paid in time as much as money.

What SmartThings genuinely does better

Radio breadth in one box, without building a platform. Zigbee and Z-Wave and Thread and Matter and cloud integrations, all reached through a single hub and one app that somebody else keeps working, is a real advantage, and no Apple or Google device matches it. Home Assistant wins the other kind of breadth, the sheer number of brands and services it integrates with, but it asks you to assemble the radios yourself.

The other advantage is entry cost, and in Australia it's the one that matters most. If you already own a recent premium Samsung TV, Frame, soundbar, projector or Family Hub fridge, there's a SmartThings hub inside it and your hardware cost is nothing. Two limits on that. Read 'premium' strictly: entry and mid-tier models have a hub that reaches only Wi-Fi and cloud devices, and need the SmartThings Hub Dongle before they see Zigbee or Thread. And a built-in hub isn't a full substitute for a standalone one, because no built-in hub does Z-Wave, dongle or not. With no real hub channel here, that appliance-led route is still the likelier way an Australian ends up on the platform, rather than by buying a hub.

Where SmartThings falls short

• Z-Wave is disappearing from the newest hardware. The SmartThings Station has no Z-Wave radio, and Aeotec's own specification lists the Smart Home Hub 2 without one. The capability that most distinguished SmartThings is absent from the newest boxes.
• Australian hub supply is thin. Samsung Australia lists no hub hardware on its own storefront. Local retail runs through a single importer, and the rest is marketplace listings on Amazon and eBay, many of them imported.
• No Matter bridge. SmartThings acts as a Matter controller rather than a bridge. No Samsung documentation describes a bridge and the SmartThings community reports none, so it won't push its own Zigbee and Z-Wave devices outward into Apple Home or Google Home as Matter devices. Home Assistant has the same limit, and states it plainly in its own documentation.
• No native Apple Home path. Getting SmartThings devices into Apple Home means Matter or a third-party bridge. If your household is Apple-first, neither platform here is the obvious answer, though Home Assistant can bridge its devices into Apple Home. We've compared that pairing separately in Apple Home vs Home Assistant.
• Local control stops at the hub. Only devices connected directly to a hub run locally through Edge. Anything reached through a manufacturer's cloud stays cloud-dependent, so 'runs locally' may cover less of a SmartThings home than it first sounds.

Where Home Assistant falls short

• There's nobody to ring. The software has no vendor support line. Help is the forum, Discord and the issue trackers, and the quality of the answer depends on who happens to be reading.
• Updates are a standing commitment. Feature releases land every month, each with a published list of backward-incompatible changes and a list of retired integrations. Two installation methods have already been deprecated. If nobody in the house is willing to own that, this is the wrong platform.
• The box doesn't include the radios. Budget a USB adapter per protocol on top of the hardware itself.
• It asks more of the household than of you. One person builds it and everyone else has to live in it. Home Assistant's own 2025 roadmap research found 46% of the partners of long-time users engage with it directly, so check the rest of the house is willing before you commit, not after.

The Groovy shutdown, and why people still bring it up

SmartThings Classic ran on Groovy device type handlers and SmartApps, much of it written by the community. Migration off it began on 30 September 2022, the old developer tools stopped letting anyone create or debug code on 15 October, and Groovy integrations were shut down on 31 December 2022. Custom handlers and apps stopped working. The replacement, SmartThings Edge, is a better architecture and it runs on the hub rather than in the cloud. That's not the point people make. The point is that a large body of working community integration was ended by a platform decision on Samsung's timetable, and households had to rebuild setups that had been fine for years. The Personal Access Token expiry that later severed Home Assistant setups is the same shape of event.

You don't have to conclude from this that SmartThings is a bad bet. You do have to know it happened, because it's why the Groovy shutdown and the token expiry still get raised whenever someone weighs up building on Samsung's platform, and because the same class of decision sits behind the October 2026 change below.

Running both, which is often the right answer

These two aren't mutually exclusive, and the pairing is common: SmartThings as the device layer, Home Assistant on top for the automations, dashboards and everything Samsung's app won't do. The integration is jointly official, announced by Samsung and Home Assistant together in February 2025 and shipped in March 2025, and it's a core Home Assistant integration rather than a community one. You sign in with OAuth using a Samsung account. As the integration currently works, neither a Home Assistant Cloud subscription nor an internet-exposed webhook is needed, because SmartThings supplies the event stream itself. The old Personal Access Token route broke because tokens created after 1 January 2025 expire in 24 hours, and Samsung is deprecating those tokens outright.

One thing this pairing is not, and the wording matters: it isn't local. Home Assistant classifies the integration as Cloud Push, so your SmartThings devices reach Home Assistant through Samsung's cloud. Anything you specifically want running locally is better moved onto Home Assistant directly, on your own Zigbee or Z-Wave adapter.

So which one

On money, the two aren't priced the same way. SmartThings costs nothing to use as a consumer, and Samsung has been explicit that the app experience is unaffected by the API change. Home Assistant's software is free and open source, but the hardware isn't: you're buying a box to run it on, plus a USB adapter for each protocol you want, so there's real up-front cost where SmartThings can be zero. The options are set out in best hardware for a Home Assistant hub. After that the only recurring cost is the optional Home Assistant Cloud subscription, at US$6.50 a month or US$65 a year on the international band, before local tax and card conversion. You don't need it for core use; it buys remote access, the Alexa and Google voice bridges, cloud backup and cloud speech.