Introducing HAFlow, a Home Assistant app that gives you a local, visual flow editor and runner for Home Assistant automations, inspired by Node-RED but designed specifically around HA entities, devices, scenes, helpers, triggers, and service calls. It runs as a Home Assistant app with ingress, supports live entity status, motion/contact/Pico button controller flows, pause/resume per flow, run logs, run history, validation, starter examples, dark mode, and visual debugging so you can see what fired and where the flow went. The goal is to make automations easier to build, read, and troubleshoot without leaving Home Assistant and without fumbling around with any YAML!
Suggestion:
The install instructions are a bit confusing to new users. You switch between the term Add-on and App when referring to links on the HA page, and I believe all the links now refer to the term App…
Navigate to the app store in the Home Assistant UI: Supervisor in the left menu, then Add-on Store on the top tab.
HAFlow is a Home Assistant app for building and running flow-based automations.
Core App
Runs as a Home Assistant app through the Home Assistant Apps interface.
Connects to Home Assistant Core automatically through the Supervisor API.
Does not require a long-lived access token.
Supports Home Assistant ingress/sidebar access.
Discovers Home Assistant entities and services automatically.
Shows live connection details, including entity and service counts.
Uses versioned app metadata from package.json.
Flow Canvas
Visual node-based automation editor.
Drag and drop nodes on a canvas.
Connect nodes with branch links.
Run the current flow manually from the toolbar.
Run from the selected node.
Duplicate nodes.
Group selected nodes into same-screen subflows.
Select and align multiple nodes.
Use undo and redo keyboard shortcuts.
Auto-save flow edits.
Toggle dark and light mode.
View a canvas device status panel for entities and devices used by the current flow.
See live node runtime status, including running, completed, and stopped states.
See the latest trigger time in the toolbar.
Test the selected node and preview what it would do without running the full flow.
Add Comment nodes for readable canvas notes that do not change how flows run.
Flow Library
Create named flows.
Rename flows with duplicate-name protection.
Duplicate flows.
Switch between saved flows.
Delete flows.
Pause and resume individual flows.
Highlight paused flows in the flow picker.
Import and export a single flow.
Export and import whole-library backups.
Import starter flow packs.
Create new editable flows from guided recipes using real Home Assistant entities.
Create editable node skeletons from plain-language recipe descriptions, then fill in the exact Home Assistant data in each node.
Prefill described Recipe and Voice flows by entity ID when Home Assistant entity hints or matching entity names are available.
Show close entity matches as suggested dropdowns when a described Recipe or Voice flow cannot confidently choose the exact entity.
Use matched Home Assistant entity domains, device classes, current states, and value options to choose sensible trigger states and action service domains.
Adjust the current flow from follow-up recipe requests that add, remove, or change generated nodes.
Understand the full HAFlow node vocabulary when creating and adjusting described recipes.
Understand natural follow-up phrasing for trigger verbs, chained conditions, direct service calls, message text, delays, and schedule times.
Fill schedule day filters, Action brightness/color payloads, and Wait timeout values from described recipes.
Understand broader action commands such as open, close, lock, unlock, set thermostat temperature, set fan percentage, and otherwise/else branches.
Dictate described recipes in browsers with built-in speech recognition, including spoken number words and pronoun follow-ups.
Create blank flows or described recipe flows from Home Assistant Assist through voice pipeline API endpoints.
Pass resolved Home Assistant entity hints into voice recipes so generated nodes can target exact entity IDs.
Watch all saved, unpaused flows with the automatic runner, not only the currently open flow.
Voice Pipeline
Create a blank flow through POST /api/voice/flow.
Create an editable recipe flow through POST /api/voice/recipe.
Generate Home Assistant Assist YAML from the Voice Setup helper in the app.
Creating recipes is in Beta. Your feedback is welcome!
See VOICE_PIPELINE.md for Home Assistant custom sentence examples.
Runner
Listens to Home Assistant events when enabled.
Supports entity state-change triggers.
Supports Home Assistant event triggers.
Supports time and schedule triggers.
Runs matching flows in the background.
Runs start nodes, branches, and condition checks in parallel.
Caches runnable flows for fast event matching.
Cancels or replaces previous runs where appropriate.
Tracks node runtime state.
Stores persistent run history with trigger, result, duration, and touched nodes.
Shows a live run log with searchable expanded view.
Highlights activation, warning, and error log states.
Mirrors HAFlow run log messages to stdout for app log review.
Node Types
Trigger: starts a flow when an entity changes state.
Event: starts a flow from Home Assistant events, optionally filtered.
Schedule: starts or gates a flow by time, sunrise, sunset, ranges, and weekdays.
Condition: branches through true or false outputs by entity state or attribute.
OR: continues when any incoming path reaches it.
AND: continues only when all incoming triggers or conditions are currently active.
Direction: compares two active entities and writes movement direction to a helper.
Group: frames nodes as a movable, copyable, deletable subflow.
Comment: adds readable notes to the canvas without changing how the flow runs.
Delay: pauses for a fixed time.
Wait: pauses until an entity reaches a state or timeout.
End: intentionally stops a branch.
Action: runs Home Assistant services.
Notify: sends Home Assistant notifications.
Scene: activates scenes.
Debug: writes trace messages to the run log.
Action Features
Select one or more target entities.
Choose a Home Assistant service domain and service.
Build common service payloads with readable controls and prefilled dropdowns.
Configure JSON payloads.
Show shared attributes for selected entities.
Validate missing services, missing targets, bad JSON, and stale entities.
Verify turn_on and turn_off results after service calls.
Split mixed turn_on and turn_off targets by entity ID domain.
Control mixed lights, switches, and helpers from one Action node when each selected domain supports the on/off service.
Use entity IDs and domains for routing, not friendly names.
Notify Features
Select available Home Assistant notify services.
Use custom notify service targets.
Configure message and title fields.
Configure a data JSON field.
Include the latest Direction node result with {direction}.
Select Pushover priority from a dropdown.
Select Pushover sound from a dropdown.
Merge selected Pushover options into the notification payload automatically.
Schedule Features
Exact time schedules.
Sunrise schedules.
Sunset schedules.
Time ranges.
Overnight ranges.
Selected weekdays.
Schedule nodes can start a flow.
Schedule nodes can also gate a branch when reached from another node.
Condition And State Features
Compare entity states.
Compare entity attributes.
Configure multiple condition rules.
Use any/all condition modes.
Display human-readable binary sensor labels based on Home Assistant device class.
Show common binary sensor states such as Open/Closed, Detected/Clear, and Home/Away.
Preserve raw on and off values internally for runner logic.
Device And Entity Support
Build an entity catalog from Home Assistant.
Filter the entity picker by area, type, current state, and whether an entity is already used in the current flow.
Use area, device, and entity registry discovery.
Include device-only entries for devices without state entities.
Show live status for entities used by the current flow.
Support Pico/Lutron 5-button controller examples and grouped flows.
Match device-based state triggers against real Home Assistant entities from that device.
Support helpers where Home Assistant exposes services, including input_boolean for on/off and input_text or input_select for Direction output.
