Difference between HA Supervisor and HACS?

Third party integrations
1

Hi all. I’m a few weeks into working with Home Assistant and love it so far. One thing that confuses me though is the difference between Supervisor with its various add-on repositories and HACS. They seem to be solving the same problem in slightly different ways. Are they competing? Is one a replacement for the other? I noticed some add-ons like Pyscript are only available in HACS, but I don’t know if there’s a technical reason for that or just a choice that the developer made. Any context would be helpful. Thanks!

2

HACS doesn’t have add-ons, it has custom integrations (unofficial integrations). Add-ons are additional pieces of software. Integrations are things that communicate with pieces of software or physical devices.

3

OK, maybe a better question then would have been what’s the difference between HACS and the Configuration -> Integrations page in HA? Same mechanism, but one set is officially supported and the other is community-based?

4

Yep, the integrations you see at configuration > integrations (and at https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/) are official integrations.

5

The term “Add-On” has special meaning in Home Assistant. Pyscript is not an Add-On, it’s a custom integration (a.k.a. custom component). Add-Ons and custom components are not the same.

6

Thanks. All this makes sense. The terminology was confusing me because Pyscript is distributed through HACS (making it an integration), but AppDaemon is a Supervisor add-on. They both enable similar kinds of features, though (i.e. Python scripting in HA). Maybe these are edge cases.

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7

No, it’s a Home Assistant Add-On.

No, HACS offers more than just integrations.

Similarity in function doesn’t dictate if it’s an integration or an Add-On. For example, python_script also provides ‘Python scripting’ and its neither an Add-On or a custom integration, it’s an official integration.

Integrations are either official or custom.

  • If they are official, you install them via Configuration > Integrations or, in some cases, by defining them in configuration.yaml.
  • If they are custom, you install them from the author’s GitHub repository or via HACS which is a convenient ‘store-front’ for custom integrations, custom Lovelace cards, etc.

Add-Ons are services distributed as customized docker containers. Examples include Node-Red, Mosquitto MQTT Broker, OpenZwave, MariaDB, Grafana, zigbee2mqtt, etc. There are official Add-Ons as well Community Add-Ons (developed by, obviously, Home Assistant users).

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