Home Assistant can feel intimidating, especially when there are a whole bunch of extra terms that you need to understand. Here’s a cheat sheet so that you can quickly get up to speed.

Server

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A server is the hardware—physical or virtual—that your Home Assistant instance runs on. It could be a Raspberry Pi, a Home Assistant Green, or even a NAS drive. Alternatively, it might be a virtualized environment managed by solutions like Proxmox or VirtualBox. It could also be a homelab machine running a Docker container.

Integration

Integrations are software components that allow you to expand Home Assistant’s capabilities. This is how you connect various smart home accessories, add external services (like weather or other online elements), and additional functionality like automation editors or backup systems.

An integration runs within Home Assistant, as a direct extension of the platform’s capabilities.

Add-on

An add-on is a piece of software that doesn’t run inside Home Assistant, but rather alongside it. Examples include network share add-ons, file editors, and even media servers. Containerized Home Assistant installations (those running in Docker) are not able to use add-ons, since add-ons are effectively containers themselves.

Automation

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An automation is a sequence of events that starts with a trigger and ends with a result. These can be manually operated like a button press, triggered automatically by time, or use input from other sources like a sensor or presence.

Home Assistant has a powerful automation editor, allowing the use of conditions and all manner of elements in an automation’s construction. Powerful automations are one of the best reasons to choose Home Assistant.

Blueprint

A blueprint is a framework that allows you to quickly and easily implement automations. Automations that use blueprints are essentially “managed” by that blueprint, allowing you to specify which sensors to use and other preferences.

Blueprints essentially allow you to copy other people’s work. The best place to find them is over on the Blueprints Exchange section of the Home Assistant Community forums.

Devices

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Devices are smart home accessories that connect to Home Assistant, like lightbulbs, plugs, temperature sensors, and HVAC systems. They can also be intermediary devices like Zigbee radios, Thread border routers, and Bluetooth nodes.

Entity

Every device in Home Assistant is represented as an entity, which is essentially a unique identifier. These entities have states and attributes associated with them, including data like the current light level or humidity. Entities can be virtual or exist only in software, like online services.

Helper

Helpers, as the name suggests, are virtual entities that help bridge gaps in logic that make automations easier to create. You can create helpers to do things like combine the input of several sensors (like temperatures), count cycles, provide random input, create timers, add toggles, and much more.

Take a look at five helpers you’re probably not using but should be for some ideas.

Home Assistant Cloud

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Home Assistant Cloud is an optional subscription service that you can use to remotely access your Home Assistant server. It also provides cloud storage for backup files and allows you to integrate voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Home Assistant’s own cloud-based Voice Assist.

Script

A script is like an automation in that it’s a sequence of events that run whenever the script is triggered. Each script gets its own entity, so you can do things like trigger multiple scripts with a single automation.