Integration v. add-on

After many a stubborn year sticking to a docker container, I’m slowly making the move to HassOS (VM).

Having not payed that much attention to the (formerly known as) hassio, I was a bit confused when I saw that OpenZWave was present both a “hassio” add-on (I know it’s no longer “hassio”, but that’s the “tag” I can choose for this topic), and an integration.

Is there any difference? And if not, why the redundancy? Is it “just” because the integration is beta, and the add-on will later be deprecated (in which case it might make sense to use the beta to avoid future reorganization)? Or is there more to it?

And if this is not the only addon/integration that appears twice, is it generally advisable to choose one over the other?

An addon is software that runs alongside homeassistant (in this case the openzwave software)

An integration is part of homeassistant that allows it to talk to your devices (in this case, the openzwave devices that your addon has connected to it)

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