Home Assistant 2026.11 is described as the biggest release the project has ever shipped, and the star of the show is the new built-in Marketplace. On top of that, there are big quality-of-life changes for naming entities, smarter automations, new camera features, and more ways to store data and track energy. In total, this release adds 38 new integrations and reshapes how most people will install community-made extensions and customizations going forward.
The New Marketplace Built Into Home Assistant
The new Marketplace pulls what people know as HACS straight into Home Assistant under Settings > Marketplace. There is nothing to set up, and it works with every installation type, including Home Assistant Container, so anyone can start using it right after the update. Administrators can browse and install community-built connectors for devices and services, dashboard cards, themes, and templates from one place.
Installing something from the Marketplace no longer needs a GitHub account. You pick a project, click install, and for a new device or service connector you jump right into its setup flow without restarting Home Assistant, although updates still need a restart for now. Each project page shows extra details like the number of downloads, GitHub stars, and the minimum Home Assistant version it needs, so you can quickly see how popular something is and whether your system meets the requirement.
Once you install a Marketplace project, Home Assistant creates update entities for it. That means updates for those projects show up alongside everything else under Settings > Updates, instead of being managed in a separate place. On first use, you see a notice that Marketplace projects are community-made and not tested, audited, or supported by the Home Assistant project, and you need to accept that before you can install anything. If you want to add a custom repository, you do connect to GitHub using the GitHub device sign-in flow, but Home Assistant only reads public information.
HACS Moves Into Home Assistant
For anyone already running HACS, the move into the Marketplace is designed to be automatic. After you update and Home Assistant starts, it migrates HACS into the new Marketplace without you needing to change anything. Installed items stay installed, keep updating, and any custom repositories you added are carried over.
From this release on, you no longer install HACS as a separate thing, since it has moved into Home Assistant itself as the Marketplace. The old standalone HACS will not get new releases, so all future improvements land in the built-in version instead. The project notes that HACS founder @ludeeus donated HACS to the Open Home Foundation about a year and a half ago, which set the stage for this move.
Before You Update: How Entity Names Change
Home Assistant now names an entity once and adds the device and area context to it, a change more than four years in the making. When you rename a device, its entities follow. Names you already set are migrated, and old displayed names stay on as aliases for voice assistants.
The entity naming change is a backward-incompatible shift in how names are displayed on dashboards. Cards, badges, and rows that never had a custom name set will now show the device name followed by the entity name, so some dashboard tiles may suddenly read differently. Your entity IDs do not change, so your automations, scripts, and dashboards continue to work, but if the new labels bother you, you will want to spend a moment renaming devices or entities, turning on “Main entity of the device,” or setting a name on individual cards to get things looking the way you like again.
Smarter Targets and Dashboards
Automations and scripts can now exclude items from a target. That means you can say “all downstairs lights except the kitchen” or “all lights on this floor except devices with a certain label.” New devices you add to an excluded area stay excluded, so your rules keep working the way you intended as you add more hardware. On dashboards, you can now copy, cut, and paste sections between views and dashboards, and light tiles gain a color hue strip so quick color tweaks are easier.
Cameras, Audio, Storage, and Energy
On the camera side, support for Matter 1.5 cameras arrives, including live video and snapshots. Live streams use WebRTC directly between your browser and the camera. You need a Matter server recent enough to support cameras, since Home Assistant only discovers them when the connected server does. This opens the door for newer Matter-based cameras to show up next to your existing ones in Home Assistant.
There is also a Labs preview of two-way audio on camera streams. When you turn it on under Settings > System > Labs, camera live views can show a talk button. In this release, two-way audio works with Matter cameras and with Reolink when Reolink is set up using RTSP, and it currently needs Home Assistant to be opened over HTTPS for security.
For storage, you can now send backups and media straight to an internal or USB drive. You set this up under Settings > System > Storage > Add storage > Local disk. Restores no longer create a temporary full copy before writing back, which saves free space and time, especially for backups on network storage.
Energy tracking also expands in a practical way. Devices that only report power in watts can be added to the Energy dashboard, and Home Assistant offers to derive the needed energy sensor for you. The same convenience applies to gas and water: if you have flow-rate sensors, Home Assistant offers to derive the running total from it for long-term tracking.
More Radios: LoRaWAN and Zigbee Green Power
On the connectivity side, Home Assistant now supports LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power wireless protocol. You can connect to ChirpStack or The Things Network and manage this from a new LoRaWAN page under Settings > Connectivity. That opens the door to battery-powered sensors in places your Wi-Fi never reaches, like a garden or a shed.
Zigbee users get support for Zigbee Green Power devices through ZHA. Green Power targets batteryless devices, like Friends of Hue switches that harvest tiny amounts of energy from button presses. With this support, those battery-free switches can join your Zigbee network through ZHA and act like any other control point in your automations.
If you use HACS today, there is nothing to do before updating. Just expect some dashboard labels to read differently, while your entity IDs, automations, and scripts stay the same.
View the original press release.
