ESPHome
Turns cheap chips into smart home devices that you program yourself.
Instead of Smart plugs and sensors
Screenshot from esphome.io, taken 2026-10-23, shown to help you recognise the tool. It belongs to its maker. Ask us to remove it.
Wallace's house in The Wrong Trousers runs on a morning routine of contraptions he built himself, which tip him out of bed and put breakfast in front of him, and nobody ever suggests he needed a subscription for any of it. ESPHome lets ordinary people have a house like that, with cheaper chips than Wallace ever had and, with luck, no penguin moving into the spare room. You take inexpensive chips, describe what you want in a short config file or in a visual Device Builder, and end up with sensors and switches that work locally, without going through a vendor's cloud. It comes from the same foundation as Home Assistant.
The devices are yours and the software is free and open source, and footprint, lock-in, self-direction and power all score a 5, with longevity a point lower at 4.
What it asks of you is hands-on work. You still handle some hardware yourself, so Delivery is a 3, and anyone hoping for a boxed product that works on the first evening will find a project instead.
The result is a sensor on the shelf that talks to your own hub and does not need anybody's servers to be switched on.
- Build your own sensors and switches from cheap chips
- Devices talk to your hub with no vendor cloud
- Still means handling some hardware
What stands out
Do you make ESPHome? Get the badge for your site
This badge reports a dated review. It is not a certification and it costs nothing. Link it to this page and leave the numbers alone: the image always shows the current score.
For dark backgrounds, use esphome-dark.svg in place of esphome-light.svg.
For comparison, we also reviewed Amazon Alexa (14/30) as a benchmark.
