The software emphasizes local control and privacy and is designed to be independent of any specific Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.

[24] In July 2017, a managed operating system called Hass.io was initially introduced to make it easier to use Home Assistant on single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi series.

[29] In the beginning of January 2021, Home Assistant made a public service announcement, disclosing vulnerabilities with its third-party custom integrations.

The founder of Home Assistant made statements in the announcement that this transfer of ownership and change in governance should mean no practical change to its developers or users as it was primarily done to ensure that Home Assistant source code will remain a free and open-source software and with a continued focus on privacy and local control.

Statements in the press release also included secondary plans and goals of making Home Assistant transition from an enthusiast platform to a mainstream consumer product.

[36] It is possible to use Home Assistant as a gateway or bridge for devices using different IoT technologies like Zigbee or Z-Wave; necessary hardware can be mounted onto GPIO (Serial/I2C/SMBus), UART, or using USB ports.

[39][40] Moreover, it can connect directly or indirectly to local IoT devices, control hubs/gateways/bridges or cloud services from many different vendors, including other open and closed smart home ecosystems.

[41][42][43][44] In December 2020, a customized ODROID N2+ computer appliance with bundled software was introduced under the product name "Home Assistant Blue" as an officially supported common hardware reference platform.

"Home Assistant Yellow" is designed to be an appliance, and its internals are architected with a carrier board (or "baseboard") for a computer-on-modules compatible with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) embedded computer as well as an integrated M.2 expansion slot meant for either an NVMe SSD as expanded storage or for an AI accelerator card, and an onboard EFR32 based radio module made by Silicon Labs capable of acting as a Zigbee Coordinator or Thread Leader (Thread Border Router), as well as optional variant with PoE (Power over Ethernet) support.

The provided rule-based system for automation allows creating custom routines based on a trigger event, conditions and actions, including scripts.

In January 2021, cybersecurity analyst Oriel Goel found a directory traversal security vulnerability in third party custom integrations.

[61] This security issue affected Home Assistant's default remote access solution, Nabu Casa, due to Nabu Casa's remote access security model that publicly exposes the local Home Assistant server to the public internet.

[73][74][75][76][77][78] GitHub's "State of the Octoverse" in 2019 listed Home Assistant as the tenth biggest open-source project on its platform with 6,300 contributors.