Platforms
Explore 6 terms in the platforms category of our smart home glossary.
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Alexa is the smart home platform that won by showing up everywhere first. With over half the smart speaker market and compatibility with practically everything, it's the path of least resistance - affordable hardware, thousands of skills, and the voice assistant your less-techy relatives probably already have.
Learn more →Apple HomeKit
Apple HomeKit is the smart home platform for people who chose the Apple ecosystem and want that same "it just works" philosophy applied to their home. Privacy-first by design, everything encrypted end-to-end, and Siri ties it all together - but you'll need Apple hardware and accept a smaller device selection.
Learn more →Google Home
Google Home is the smart home platform for people who live in Google's world. The voice assistant is genuinely the smartest of the big three - it understands context, handles follow-up questions, and knows your calendar. The trade-off? Google's business model means your data fuels the machine.
Learn more →Home Assistant
Home Assistant is the fast-moving heart of the open-source smart home movement. With 2 million active installations and 21,000+ contributors, it's become the de facto standard for local-first home automation - the platform that made "your data stays home" a mainstream expectation.
Learn more →Homey
Homey is the smart home hub for people who want Home Assistant's power without the learning curve. With built-in radios for Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared, and 433 MHz RF - all in one box - it's the "no dongles required" approach to home automation.
Learn more →openHAB
openHAB is the "configure it once, run it forever" open-source smart home platform. Managed by a non-profit foundation, it runs on enterprise-grade Java for rock-solid stability and uses a structured abstraction model that separates your physical devices from your automation logic - meaning you can swap hardware without rewriting rules.
Learn more →Want more smart home knowledge?
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