Works with Home Assistant becomes part of the Open Home Foundation

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Art by Clelia Rella

After two successful years of Works with Home Assistant, we’re continuing our work to improve this program. With this in mind, the program will move to the non-profit organization that owns Home Assistant, the Open Home Foundation, which will ensure it is always aligned with the values of the Open Home.

Read on to see how we’re making several small but important changes to add more clarity to the program, and ultimately working to build a better, larger hardware ecosystem of smart home devices.

What is Works with Home Assistant

When you want to add something to your smart home the choices can be daunting; we want stable, supported devices that are built on standards that last. We understood how hard it could be to navigate all this and set up Works with Home Assistant in 2022, clearly indicating to users which brands provided the best smart home experiences and will continue to do so into the future. While also encouraging brands to step up their openness, compatibility, and long-term support.

This program has been quite successful and now includes seven companies, including Leviton, Third Reality, Ultraloq, Jasco, Heltun, HomeSeer, and  HomeWizard. Our community regularly recommends the brands in this program, not only because they carry the “Works with” logo but because they just work. This seamless operation is because Nabu Casa tests devices and works with the brand to ensure their software meets our requirements to provide what we consider to be the best Home Assistant experience. They also guarantee when joining that they will address issues and maintain support with Home Assistant over time.

We have had lots of positive feedback from the brands in the program. First off, if you’re already doing things right, i.e. focusing on local control, supporting users, and keeping software compatible, it’s relatively easy to join. It is also significantly more affordable compared to other partner programs. We want to connect our users to good hardware and help reward the brands that make the right decisions: win-win.

Open Home Foundation steps in

This year we announced the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now owns and governs the Home Assistant project. It makes logical sense that Works with Home Assistant now sits alongside its parent organization, but there are other key benefits. Specifically, it is now clear that this program is not a commercial endeavor; it is solely here to encourage a better-supported hardware ecosystem for Home Assistant.

Nabu Casa, the commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation, previously successfully administered the program. By placing the program under the foundation, it provides another layer to ensure the program remains focused on its mission.

The update

While we’re making this shift from Nabu Casa to the Open Home Foundation, we’re also taking the opportunity to do some housekeeping, improving the program on several fronts.

From now on the program will be certifying individual devices instead of whole brands. Previously, an integration was approved for Works with Home Assistant, and all devices that could work with the integration could fall under the program. By making testing and certification device-specific, it becomes much clearer to users which devices they can purchase with confidence. We will soon start listing devices that have been certified specifically.

No brands have used the Cloud badge before, so no one is affected by its removal.

The cloud badge has been discontinued and this is due to our belief, and observation, that all cloud-based products are always doomed to stop working, some sooner than others. Considering the cases over the past year of cloud-based devices becoming useless after the cloud service they depended on was shut down, and the lengths needed to keep them somewhat functional, we no longer believe the Works with Home Assistant promise can be upheld by cloud-based devices.

Conclusion

We want to see Works with Home Assistant continue to grow, ultimately covering every smart home device category, allowing for a home completely made of products that will give the best experience. We’d recommend users to always consider these products first, and also encourage more brands to get in touch to join. Let’s build a more open hardware ecosystem together.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/08/08/works-with-home-assistant-becomes-part-ohf
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Given the issues with Ultraloq, I’m glad you are moving to individual device certification. You should also consider what recourses you can have for a device that no longer upholds the standards it once did. You need legal capability to revoke the badge.

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This is a great update!

Can you please clarify what “Works Locally with Home Assistant” means, compared to some of the other terms that reference specific technologies? Is it a substitute for more than one other technology to save space on packaging? Are there expectations for how brands should advertise the specific compatability mechanism of a device with this label/certification?

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Not trying to be negative, but Yeah…seems like all except cloud would be locally.
Bluetooth is mentioned, but no wifi? Ethernet? 433mhz?
Some clarification would be interesting to see.

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Im certain that “Works locally with Home Assistant” means that it can communicate via local polling home assistant integrations. I do see the confusion as to whether this is specific to home assistant integrations, or if its all encompassing, such as locally via mqtt, rest, etc.

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I’m certain that it means over the local network through an IP address, this would rope in both via ethernet and via Wi-Fi and im sue it would be very redundant to specify which of the two it is, philips hue comes to mind which appears to be “works locally with HASS via ethernet”

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The badge variants are intended to convey which additional purchases are required to use the device with Home Assistant. “Works locally with Home Assistant” indicates that it works out-of-the-box over your local network, through an integration in Home Assistant core that is maintained by the manufacturer.
Conversely, when it was still available, “Works via the cloud with Home Assistant” indicated that it would work out-of-the-box - but it would do so through cloud services. Both would not need any other purchases to work with Home Assistant.

For the Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Bluetooth badges, these devices won’t work out-of-the-box if you do not have the respective standard in Home Assistant yet. Having separate badges for these standards makes sure users don’t accidentally purchase a device that is in the Works With Home Assistant program, but they do not have the suitable controller for.

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I like the program, but I miss hyperlinks on the logos on the website.
The thread here have the links, but it would be nice, both for users and manufacturers, to have the links on the website too, so you did not have to make an extra search yourself and risk ending up at the wrong site.
If the certification is per device, then hyperlink could maybe lead to a device list page with links to the specific products on the manufacturers website.

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Thanks for the clarification

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When I see a a ”Works Locally with Home Assistant” badge I assume that it means that the device works over your LAN ( Local Area Network) using the IPv4 standard via either Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Required network configuration flr the device must also assume defaults (no static IPs or DNS configured).

Reason for using the IPv4 standard and home network requirements is that the device will then be able communicate locally within practically any home LAN built within the 20-years and should continue to work in any LAN being built in the next 20-years as well as long as users LAN supports IPv4.

But more importantly, to me a ”Works Locally with Home Assistant” badge also means that if it uses a hub/gateway/bridge appliance than it should be possible to setup and use that with only a local account and not have the requirement to use a cloud account as many do.

That is, I mean something that is labeled with a ”Works Locally with Home Assistant” badge should even work to all set-up from scratch and all day-two operations should always work locally in an air-gapped black-site without ever having connection to the internet or any cloud sevices.

As such devices or hubs/gateways/bridges that require a could account and cloud setup even just once should not make to cut to get a ”Works Locally with Home Assistant” badge as then they only work locally after the initial setup or as long as you do not do any changes or add devices.

To get a ”Works Locally with Home Assistant” badge it can simply not be good enough to ”only” online registration on initial configuration or changes and then have a local API to control.

I believe all those ideas mentioned above also goes in line with the removal of the ”works with cloud” badge. Any requirements on any cloud is bad for device support in the long-term.

” The cloud badge has been discontinued and this is due to our belief, and observation, that all cloud-based products are always doomed to stop working, some sooner than others. Considering the cases over the past year of cloud-based devices becoming useless after the cloud service they depended on was shut down, and the lengths needed to keep them somewhat functional, we no longer believe the Works with Home Assistant promise can be upheld by cloud-based devices.”

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From now on the program will be certifying individual devices instead of whole brands. Previously, an integration was approved for Works with Home Assistant, and all devices that could work with the integration could fall under the program. By making testing and certification device-specific, it becomes much clearer to users which devices they can purchase with confidence. We will soon start listing devices that have been certified specifically.

@GuySie Device specific certification is an awesome concept! Hope that Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation will also adopt the idea of a publicly available database, preferably an open database that is a combination of the compatibility lists available from Zigbee2MQTT and Blakadder community databases for Zigbee devices as those can also often additional information like how to factory-reset and put a device into pairing/joining-mode, so please check them out here for inspiration:

Both of those databases are managed via Git repositores on GitHub which makes the process very transparent in the line with the Open Home Foundation principles, and seeing as to how Zigbee2MQTT is part of the Open Home Foundation it might be a good idea to maybe make such a database software agnostic too? That way you could perhaps also list community tested devices in one list and certified devices in a other list but they could share the same database? Please see here:

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Just like this Zigbee database initiative, would be nice to have a neutral clean ‘Works With’ lookup website listing all certified products (optionally users can rate it or give reviews) and make it searchable or filterable on protocol (zigbee, zwave, wifi etc), domain (switch, sensor etc) and optionally brand. Would be nice to have the introduction year registered and of course the date of certification.

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And geo details, like US, EU, UK, AU

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Yes please! Especially radio regions for devices operating on Sub-Gigahertz unlicensed RF bands.

That is a mess for Z-Wave devices as they depend on a combination of Z-Wave RF Region that is based on radio frequency used + residential voltage voltage and freqency used for main-power. Therefor they usually sell varients of the same product with different model/article-number for each global region.

Also note that while you can change Z-Wave Controller to different RF regions on newer Z-Wave Controller adapters in firmware via software it could still be that the manufacturer added filtering antenna that are only optimized to very narrow RF band of specific frequencies (i.e. the physical antenna on the board has filters that try to block all other frequencies), thus you can normally not nor should you change Z-Wave RF region on a brand new device that uses the newer Z-Wave 700 series or Z-Wave 800 series chips which could do support changing RF regions because the product probably/may use antenna filter on the device board.

Zigbee Sub-GHz has also started being used among commercial/utility companies for energy metering because they offer impressive distance and less interference due to less noisy RF bands being used.

The Wi-Fi HaLow (WiFi 802.11ah standard) also operate using Sub-GHz so would have same issue.

Even some other Wi-Fi devices may support/use different WLAN channels in different countries.

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I am surprised I do not see Shelly there

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@GuySie I am suprised to not see Sonoff on the partner page today (or ITead which is the Chinese company behind the SONOFF brand) because spotted that they are using the (old) “Works via Zigbee with Home Assistant” badge and logs on their website (along with the Zigbee2MQTT logo and other logos smart home platforms too) in what looks to be an attempt to promote a suggest affiliation and compatibility that it covers all their Sonoff branded Zigbee device.

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and example on their Sonoff brand website for products like this one:

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I do not believe this is done in bad faith as I suspect it is just them misunderstanding your rules for who can use those Home Assistant badges for commercial promotion and how such badging is allowed to be used. Though the fact remain is that they are using Home Assistant logo and branding to promote their products. ITead is also the company behind other popular home automation related brands like eWeLink, Nextion, and Airspy. So suggest that you reach out to the ITead CEO about them becoming an official member of your partner program for real and get to certifying specific devices. Also see:

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I really do wonder about HA’s (or the foundation’s) intellectual property protections. I simply don’t know, and haven’t been able to find out, whether they have registered trade marks, or make any attempts to protect their trade marks.

Of course part of the problem is the inability to enforce any such rules in the main manufacturing base for iot products.

Largely curious, but also concerned about inaccurate adverts or endorsements.

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I do not know either if the “Open Home Foundation” have registered “Home Assistant” as a trademark and if so then in which countries. There is no mentioning of registered trademarks on Home Asssiant’s Terms of Service webpage, however it does mention “other trademarks”, but it does state that the ome Assistant logo and graphics are intellectual property and thus protected by copyright laws, see → Terms of Service - Home Assistant

So I believe that at least their logos/logotypes should be protected by copyright even if it they are registered trademarks and that that by itself gives the legal owner exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, and display it, and no one else can legally do so without the consent of the legal owners (that can be either the oritinal creator/artist or the person/entity that paid for the logos to be created) as it classified as artwork that is a type of intellectual property protected by copyright laws in most counties.

@GuySie @balloob suggest that you regardless check out and take inspiration from trademark policy and trademarks that the XBMC Foundation has for Kodi and related, they have most posted in their wiki here:

Also try to register “Home Assistant” with at least USPTO (United States of America and BOIP (Benelux).

By the way, I believe it can be harder to get registered trademarks for common words and word combinations, and impossible if they are a single common word (which is why Microsoft can not register “Windows” alone).

Again I do not think that ITead’s use of the Home Assistant badges and logo in their advertising of their Sonoff branded products is malicious or done in bad faith. I assume that instead their product managers and web designers/admins just copied those without considering that it might be copyright infringement and that consent must first be given to use others logos in the promotion of their products, in this case by joining the "Works with Home Assistant "partner program → https://partner.home-assistant.io

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Should add that ITead is also in a SmartThings partnership with Samsung and certified a number of their SONOFF branded Zigbee and Matter devices already for SmartThings, so it is not like they are unfamiliar with the concept of such partnerships or the need to get a device specific certification to use other companies logos when marketing their products → https://partners.smartthings.com/partners/sonoff

SmartThings’s “Works with SmartThings” partnership program follows practically the same concept and principles as the “Works with Home Assistant” partner program so suspect the former was an inspiration - > https://partners.smartthings.com/works-with-smartthings

@GuySie I think that would probably be a good idea to try to reach out to some of the companies that already are listed as “Features Partners” in the “Works with SmarThings” partnership program as their products can work with Home Assistant too and since they are already familiar with this type of partnership it could be low hanging fruit for partnerts there :wink:

Those “Features Partners” brands are currently; Somfy, Honeywell Home, Philips Hue, Google Nest, Eve (owned by ABB), and Yale (with Yale Home and August Home series being owned by Assa Abloy), as well as Ring (owned by Amazon) and Aqara (owned by Lumi).

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Some of those “Features Partners” are not on promoted on their product pages and compatibility lists and other promotional material but also on developer pages as well:

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PS: Also recommend check out and perhaps take some inspiration from SmartThings device list of certified devices → Security cameras, smart locks, smart light bulbs - Supported Devices | SmartThings

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Thanks for flagging that to me Hedda, I wasn’t aware of it yet. Will get in touch with Sonoff to get that rectified. They are not currently a Works With Home Assistant program partner.

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