What “private” actually means for a hub
Three things, and they are separable — which is why a hub can be strong on one and weak on another.
Where the automation runs. When a motion sensor fires and a light comes on, something had to make that decision. If that something is a server in another country, then the fact that you walked into your kitchen at 2am left the building. All three hubs here decide locally: Hubitat runs automations on the box so they keep working offline, Homey runs them on the device for the same reason, and Home Assistant is a local platform by design.
Whether an account is required.A hub that will not finish setup without a login has made you identifiable before you have paired a single device. Home Assistant needs no account for a local setup. Hubitat and Homey both have portals for remote access — which brings us to the third thing.
What remote access costs, in money and exposure. This is where the three genuinely differ, and it is the row most comparisons skip. Hubitat’s Remote Admin is a paid monthly subscription — with Hubitat’s own honest caveat, worth quoting, that it “is not required to access your hub from a local network or use built-in remote features like cloud Dashboard access”. Homey includes remote access with no subscription for control, automation or remote access, and sells Cloud Backups separately as a yearly add-on. Home Assistant gives you the choice: run a tunnel yourself for free, or pay for Home Assistant Cloud and let somebody else handle it.
Why Home Assistant Green is first
Because it is the only one of the three where you can see the whole machine. The platform is open source, the integrations are open source, and nothing in the control path needs a company to stay in business. Our registry records it as fully local with no required fees, bridging Alexa, Google and Apple Home if you want them, and integrating nearly everything including via community add-ons. For the specific question “can I verify that this is not phoning home?”, no other hub here can be answered the same way.
It also has the deepest local-device support, which matters more than it sounds. Home Assistant publishes an IoT classper integration — Local Push, Local Polling, Cloud Push, Cloud Polling — so before you buy a camera or a lock you can read whether that specific device will be local. That is a privacy tool disguised as documentation, and we use it ourselves in our Home Assistant camera ranking and Home Assistant lock ranking.
The honest cons are real and we will not soften them. There is a genuine learning curve; this is a hobby, not an appliance. The Green needs a USB radio stick for Z-Wave and Zigbee, which the other two have built in. And support is community forums, so when something breaks at 11pm you are reading a thread, not calling anyone.
Why the Hubitat is the pick for most people anyway
Because it gets you most of the privacy for a fraction of the effort and a fraction of the money. Hubitat’s whole proposition is local-first automation: the rules run on the hub, so they survive an internet outage, and nothing phones home for permission to turn a light on. Z-Wave 800, Zigbee 3.0 and Matter are inside the box, with an external antenna per mesh radio and an Ethernet port — no stick to buy, no Wi-Fi dependency for the hub itself.
One published detail is worth knowing before you order, because this niche’s comparisons routinely miss it: Hubitat’s standard C-8 Pro carries Zigbee 3.0 but no Thread, and the Thread radio is only available in a separate Thread Special Editionwhich Hubitat states “does not include built-in Zigbee”. So on Hubitat, Zigbee and Thread are a choice. On the Homey, both are standard.
Hubitat’s cons: the learning curve is still real, just shorter than Home Assistant’s. There is no voice speaker, so it pairs with an Echo or a Nest if you want to talk to it — and that pairing is a cloud path you are choosing to add. And Remote Admin is the one subscription in this comparison, though as Hubitat itself points out, you do not need it for local access or the cloud dashboard.
Why the Homey Pro is third despite having the most hardware
Only because of the price, and because privacy does not scale with radio count. The Homey Pro (2026) is the most capable hub we list: Z-Wave 700, Zigbee 3.0, Thread and Matter v1.5 are all built in, with Bluetooth LE and infrared on top, and automations run on the device so they keep working when the internet does not. Homey charges no subscription for control, automation or remote access, and commits to updates until at least June 2031. Backups to a Mac or PC are free; the Cloud Backups add-on is optional and billed yearly.
The cons are specific and published. It is the most expensive hub in our registry by a wide margin. 433 MHz transmission is turned off in the US, Canada and South Korea— a listed radio you cannot use here. There is no Ethernet port on the hub itself; Homey sells an adapter separately, which is a surprisingly annoying omission on a device sold on local control. And Apple Home support is a HomeKit “experiment”, with not every device feature crossing over.
The three hubs compared
Manufacturer-published figures, read on the dates recorded in our sources. Where a maker does not publish a figure we say so rather than estimate it. | Home Assistant Green | Hubitat Elevation C-8 Pro | Homey Pro (2026) |
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| Automations run | Locally, on the box | Locally, on the box | Locally, on the device |
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| Account required to use | No, for a local setup | Portal for remote access | Homey account |
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| Open source | Yes, platform and integrations | No | No |
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| Z-Wave | Via USB stick | Z-Wave 800, Long Range at 908.4 MHz | Z-Wave 700 built in |
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| Zigbee | Via USB stick | Zigbee 3.0 built in | Zigbee 3.0 built in |
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| Thread | Via USB stick | Only in the Thread Special Edition, which has no Zigbee | Built in |
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| Matter | Yes | Yes | Matter v1.5 |
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| Ethernet | Yes | Yes, plus external antenna per mesh radio | No — adapter sold separately |
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| Required subscription | None | None for local use; Remote Admin is paid | None for control, automation or remote access |
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| Bridges Alexa / Google / Apple | All three | Alexa, Google, Matter | All three; Apple Home is a HomeKit experiment |
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| Support model | Community forums | Community + vendor | Vendor, updates to at least June 2031 |
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| Works with the internet down | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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The first three rows are the privacy ranking. The radio rows are the practicality ranking, and they point the other way — which is exactly why the Hubitat sits in the middle and is the one we recommend to most people. The Home Assistant Green is the most private box you can buy and the most work; the Homey is the least work and the most money.
Four practical notes that matter more than the hub
The devices decide more than the hub does.A local-first hub full of cloud-only gadgets is not a private smart home. Choosing devices with local integrations is the actual work, and it is why Home Assistant’s published IoT classes are so useful. Our compatibility matrix is the place to start.
Cameras are the sharp end. Video is the most sensitive thing in your house and the most likely to be stored somewhere else. The brands that record to storage you own are ranked in best cameras without a subscription, and the audio question — which almost nobody checks — is in do security cameras record audio?
Adding a voice assistant adds a cloud.All three hubs can bridge to Alexa or Google, and the moment you do, your voice commands travel. That can be a perfectly reasonable trade — just make it knowingly. Our ecosystems comparison lays out what each one takes.
Securing the hub is a separate job. Local does not mean safe from your own network. The free, first-party guidance from CISA, NIST and the FTC is summarised in how to secure smart home devices, and what still works without internet is the practical test of whether your setup is as local as you think. For a straight fight between the top two, see Hubitat vs Home Assistant; for the top and bottom, Homey Pro vs Hubitat.
