Home Assistant’s default dashboard got a major glow-up

Home Assistant keeps getting better and better, and a recent update brings another key improvement to the self-hosted, open-source smart home platform: a revamped “overview” dashboard that’s far easier to scan and use. 

The redesigned Overview dashboard takes over as the default Home Assistant home screen, replacing the old, clunky, and bloated overview from years past. 

Now instead of a jumble of smart home interface cards and controls, you get a clean, minimalist control panel with three sections: Favorites, Areas, and Summaries. 

The Favorites section groups eight of your most-used smart home devices, allowing you quick access to their controls with a single tap. The Summaries section next to it aggregates your smart devices by type, including Lights, Climate, Security, and Media players, with a Weather widget just beneath. 

A highlight of the Summaries section is the “Devices discovered” button, which gives you a quick rundown of all the devices that Home Assistant has discovered but hasn’t yet configured. Tap the button, and you’ll jump to a “What do you want to add?” interface with a list of all your discovered devices; tap a device, and Home Assistant will step you through a configuration wizard. 

Nice, but my favorite new section is Areas—well, not the section itself, which is just a grid of buttons for each area in your smart home, but what’s behind each button: a smartly designed and organized dashboard with controls for the lights, scenes, and other smart devices in each room.  

This being Home Assistant, you can tinker with the new default dashboard to your heart’s content, and you can still create your own dashboards, either through a graphical interface or via raw YAML files. And if you’re a fan of the old Overview dashboard, you can easily dig into the Dashboard settings and resurrect it. 

But what I love about the new Overview dashboard is that it’s terrific as-is, with no further configuration required. It’s also a solution to one of the biggest pain points of Home Assistant—building and customizing its dashboards, which is such a daunting prospect that many Home Assistant users (myself included) have resorted to vibe-coding them. 

The new Overview dashboard so good that I might finally make the switch—for real this time—to Home Assistant, a smart home platform that’s a) free, b) impervious to price hikes, and c) completely under my control.  

I’ve toyed with the idea in the past but ultimately drifted back to Alexa, Google Assistant, and other established ecosystems that are more forgiving to everyday smart home users.  

Of course, there are still significant barriers to making the Home Assistant switch; namely, when it comes to smart speakers. Yes, there’s Home Assistant Voice, the speaker made by Home Assistant backer Nabu Casa, but it doesn’t offer the plug-and-play experience that Alexa and Google Home users might expect. 

Still, Home Assistant’s gorgeous new Overview dashboard is a big step in the right direction. 

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems.