100,000 installations in analytics!

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Today we have reached a major milestone for Home Assistant Analytics: 100,000 users have opted in to be included!

This is a big deal because it’s not enabled by default, users have to opt-in, and we only launched Home Assistant Analytics last April. We promoted it in the release blog post and during live streams, but have never nagged existing users in the interface. New users did get asked to opt-in as part of onboarding.

The 100,000 installations are not the total number of Home Assistant users. The truth here is that we don’t know the total number of installations because Home Assistant is private by design. Our estimate is that there are 4-5x more installations than people that opt-in to analytics.

For the latest version of the graphs in this post, visit Home Assistant Analytics

Why we collect data

It’s good to start off with why we allow users to opt-in to share some data with us.

Manufacturers of IoT products live in their own world in which we have little presence. We don’t have stands at CES or other trade shows. Instead, manufacturers see we’re open source and assume it’s a small user base. They assume the ability to integrate with Home Assistant and other platforms is not profitable enough to allocate resources to add the necessary APIs to integrate.

With the data collected by Home Assistant Analytics, we can show that providing an API can expand their market around the globe.

Screenshot of analytics during Home Assistant onboarding

How people run Home Assistant

The collected data is also used to give us, the Home Assistant developers, insight into how Home Assistant is installed and what we should improve. As you can see in our installation breakdown, the operating system installation type is by far the most popular. This makes sense because it is our recommended installation type and the easiest to use. It gives the full Home Assistant experience and can be fully managed via the user interface. No text editors, Linux experience, or computer science degree necessary.

The board breakdown below only applies to the operating system installation type. The Raspberry Pi family of devices is by far the most popular way of running Home Assistant, followed by running it in a virtual machine. Running Home Assistant in a virtual machine is popular because it is our recommended approach for people that already have a server at home.

Tracking updates

We have spent a lot of time making sure that it is easy to update both Home Assistant Core and Home Assistant Operating System. Ease of updates is important because when critical bugs or security issues arise, users should feel confident to hit the update button.

Home Assistant can be updated using a single click in the interface and will automatically roll back if the update fails or the system fails to come online afterward. This gives our users the confidence to update and we see this reflected in the speed at which our users update when a new monthly release drops:

Home Assistant around the world

It’s our goal to make the privacy focused smart home a viable option for everyone, everywhere. That’s why Home Assistant is free and open source, translated into 60 different languages and why we integrate with products from around the world, not just the ones that are big enough to come to America or Europe.

As you can see on our map we have a global reach. Some countries only see a few users, like the country of Nepal having 13 installations. However, with open source all we need is 1 contributor to help translate our user interface into their native language and make it more accessible for speakers of that language. To learn more about helping translating Home Assistant, check the documentation.

Integrations

There are multiple levels of analytics that users can opt-in to. The basic level is how you run Home Assistant but you can also share what integrations you use.

This data is integrated into the Home Assistant website when users navigate the various integrations. It sometimes highlights certain integrations that serve their purpose but don’t have a big audience, like the integration for the Dublin bus schedule:

However, more interesting is of course the most popular integrations. I’m always surprised how high MQTT is on this list and very happy to see ESPHome doing so well.

For the full list, see Home Assistant Analytics.

We see that integrations that offer automated discovery do very well. This makes sense because once discovered we’ll prompt the user to set them up:

Screenshot of setting up integrations during Home Assistant onboarding

Statistics

It is also possible to share some basic statistics about your installation like how many states and users you have.

  • Average number of automations: 24
  • Average number of integrations: 74
  • Average number of installed add-ons: 7.01
  • Average number of entities: 204
  • Average number of users: 1.87

It’s impressive to see the high number of integrations and entities that are being used in Home Assistant. Our users sure love automating their homes!

Opt-in to analytics!

If you haven’t yet, please opt-in to Home Assistant Analytics by clicking the button below to help us and manufacturers better understand our impact.

![](upload://f6NvX9eOvrZRgpLnakVYOxioZ45.svg)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/11/12/100k-analytics/
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I’m always surprised how high MQTT is on this list

It isn’t surprising as primary support for Zwave and Zigbee has been pushed out to external modules that require MQTT. Not to mention it is probably hiding a PILE of other popular integrations like tasmota which was more popular than ESPHome for a long time before ESPHome matured.

This might actually highlight a major issue with trusting the integration analytics to track this, as I suspect the native Z-wave and Zigbee to disappear and only show up as MQTT integrations in the future.

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HA is literally the only software I opted in for analytics. The communication is transparent and the data is available to everyone, which I think is a must, especially for open source software. Good work!

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The average number of automations per user has always seemed low to me given the average number of entities. Is this people not really automating and just collecting items to remote control or is Node-RED that prevalent and driving the average down with those users having very few or 0 automations reported?

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There seem to be very few automation threads where someone doesn’t chime in and say use node red instead or you could do this in node red.

Personally I find the build in system has improved a lot including the new debug features…

Having said that I only have 39 automation objects.

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Automations is here more then 24:)

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FWIW, my two instances don’t participate in analytics. Both use Home Assistant Supervised.

Just a thought, there may be a correlation between:

  • users who install/manage the OS
  • not participating in analytics
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Se, where is the cake and champagne?

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My automations were probably higher. But then Choose came along, and suddenly many of my automations were able to be remade so that a single automation would handle multiple situations. Typically I have one automation per device, or area now. So I have a lot less automations now than I used to, but probably doing MORE than they used to.

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While I agree, it will most likely contribute to the (faster) death of Supervised if the numbers continue to drop.
Rock and a hard place.

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Given that the native ZWaveJS runs on a websocket, and not MQTT by default, I don’t see this happening, any time soon, or indeed ever. Given the enormous amount of time that has been put in to developing the websocket API, I can;t see anyone going “yeah, let’s just get rid of it, and go with MQTT instead”

Zigbee2MQTT obviously is using MQTT though.

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Zwavejs2mqtt by default uses web sockets, not mqtt. Most users use it that way. It just so happens that you can also use mqtt with it.

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Is the update channel tracked? I didn’t see it on the analytics page.

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Actually, mqtt is my preferred way to integrate with Home Assistant. It is decoupled and easy to debug, and has not changed (much) since I started using HA almost 3 years ago.

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curious why? no judgement nor a plea to opt in, but do you have a concern with the way analytics work for HA or is it just a philosophical issue for you?

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I was offered a choice and I chose not to share my information.

Based on the blog post’s estimate, most users don’t.

Our estimate is that there are 4-5x more installations than people that opt-in to analytics.

I do appreciate that the development team offers users a choice. The last time they overlooked to do that (the Have I Been Pwned debacle) the community voiced its displeasure with having the software do unsolicited things with their information.

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fair enough. IMO the concerns about haveibeenpwned.com “debacle” was nothing like that. The site does a great job of explaining how using the service doesn’t impact anonymity and is in fact built around it. I’m going to assume based on your statement that you were in the “debacle” camp and to each his/her/their own so I will just leave it at that.

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Great job, to be honest I can see many many advantages to opting in and as the data is anonymous and next to useless other than to HA developers etc I really can’t see a reason why most would choose not to opt in.

It’s up there as one of the best most awesome open source projects and opting in surely only goes to help make it even more awesome?

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Congrats and thanks for sharing!

I got into HA before the prompt for analytics was available. Or maybe I got the prompt and said “No Way, I don’t know who these people are!”

Now I know, so this was a nice reminder to go in and turn analytics on. In a way it’s a “vote” for the way I’ve chosen to configure my system. For example, I never went to Zigbee2MQTT, since ZHA has done everything I ever wanted and it’s one less thing to learn/manage/maintain. Of all the integrations I run, it’s been the most stable, reliable and hands-off.

I’m not saying I’m right and anyone else is wrong. Just that having my “vote” for ZHA reflected in the analytics may help keep it in focus and well supported.