As with most things “Computer”, it depends largely on your personal needs… And that’s why you won’t get a good answer to this question. Whatever you take, you have to match it to your components (now and future) to answer the question which hardware is right for your needs!
Maybe your question should be more like What hardware do others use, in comparison to their components?
I can tell you, my setup is very small, I have ten zigbee lights, a few sensors (door / temp), Sonoffs and Shellys and around fifty automations. Running on a Pi3 B+ without problems, highest load ever was around 80% CPU and around 70% RAM. But if you change just a bit in this configuration, you may need something more than a 3 B+. On the other hand, here are a lot of people, that even run HA on a Pi Zero. See, it depends on what you need, and the additional wants.
But you are lucky, you can just try it. If you have the hardware around, set up HA (in whatever way suits you) and take a look at the power it consumes.
Really, you can’t say what you need, it’s to specific to every installation of HA… For most users a RPi 3 B+ is more than enough, every NUC is better.
Hi there,
just leaving this here if someone, like me before i posed this question, is reading through old topics to gain new info (take with a grain of salt, all of the following is based purely on my opinions):
rpi4 is more than enough for anything I’ve thrown at it regarding home automation so far; I’ve installed abundance of lovelace-ui stuff from HACS, added about 30-ish, smart lights and another 30-ish other sensors/esps, running everything in a “mess over mess” system with multiple entries performing the same thing while lovelace is one big pile of trying stuff out, I’ve seen absolutely no performance issues when it comes to regular use, however! editing lovelace not from yaml file, but through the editor causes lags across platforms (this looks more like RAM limitation of editor devices than anything else, since CPU and RAM usage do not spike above 10% even in those instances).
start of HA takes about 10-15 sec from “stopped” in docker, which I think is quite reasonable
for the perceivable future, I don’t see myself needing any other platform and if anyone asked me, I would fully reccomend starting with a pi 4, since the price to performance I was able to observe is superb and sufficient for HA (as for now)
What version of the Pi4 do you have? 1GB, 2GB or 4GB of RAM? Nonetheless, this doesn’t seem like a RAM issue. I’d guess more in the direction of a new browser version on your PC / laptop… Check the system you’re working on, especially the used GPU power (doesn’t matter if on-board or dedicated).
4gb pi, tried it out on variety of devices, all have the same issue, but surely as i said, since pi reports low utilization, i expect the end devices to be the bottleneck.
Whatever you take, you have to match it to your components (now and future) to answer the question which hardware is right for your needs!
If you have the hardware around, set up HA (in whatever way suits you) and take a look at the power it consumes.
For most users a RPi 3 B+ is more than enough, every NUC is better.
