4 things Home Assistant can't do (and what to use instead)

Published Nov 12, 2026, 6:30 PM EST Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Home Assistant really is incredible software. It's come a long way from its origins as a few lines of code that could turn on a smart bulb. There's very little that Home Assistant can't do these days, but there are still one or two things that even Home Assistant can't manage alone. Home Assistant can't tell you when it crashes An external monitor can inform you as soon as your smart home goes down I'm an enormous fan of smart home automation rather than merely smart home control. With true automation, your smart home reacts to you going about your everyday life, rather than needing you to manually push buttons or swipe dashboards. When you walk into a room, the lights come on if it's dark enough to require it, and when you leave, they turn off again. The problem with setting up an automated smart home is that if Home Assistant stops working, so does your home. It's not always immediately obvious when Home Assistant has gone down, so you may not realize it for some time. This isn't ideal if you have smart home devices such as water leak sensors set up that can't alert you unless Home Assistant is up and running. Home Assistant can't inform you when it's stopped running because, well, it's stopped running. Even Home Assistant can't perform magic. It means you need an alternative way to find out when your smart home has gone down. Uptime Kuma is a popular option. It's a lightweight application that can monitor self-hosted services and alert you when they become unreachable. I've been using Uptime Kuma for years; every time Home Assistant goes down, I get an alert via Telegram. You can run Uptime Kuma on a different device from your Home Assistant server, such as a Raspberry Pi, or even in a different container on the same device. This is more of a risk, however, since Uptime Kuma won't work if the host machine goes down. Home Assistant can't keep your smart home running without power A UPS can keep your smart home running temporarily in a power outage Another thing that Home Assistant can't do is work without power. Eventually, I'm sure an integration will be added that uses nuclear fusion to power your smart home in perpetuity, but until then, you need to have your smart home server plugged in. The problem is that if your home loses power, Home Assistant will stop running, and without a graceful shutdown, you might even experience some data corruption. There are a couple of things you can do to protect against this. The first is simple, but not ideal. You can run Home Assistant on a device such as a laptop that has its own built-in battery. If the power goes out, the laptop can keep running until the battery runs out. You then have to worry about other things, such as keeping the laptop running without ruining the health of the battery or having it turn into a spicy pillow. A far better alternative is to invest in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). This device can kick in if the power goes out and keep your Home Assistant server running for as long as its batteries hold out. It won't last forever, but it will protect you from short power outages, and some models can even shut down your devices when their batteries get low. You can't control Home Assistant remotely without a network connection LoRa allows you to control smart home devices even when the internet is down Another thing that even Home Assistant can't manage is giving you remote control when your internet goes down. There are plenty of common ways to securely access Home Assistant remotely so that you can control your smart home devices even when you're not at home. A Home Assistant Cloud subscription includes remote access, or there are other options such as using Tailscale, Cloudflare Tunnel, or a reverse proxy. The problem is that all of these methods require Home Assistant to be able to access the outside world. If your home internet goes down, your server can't send messages outside your home, and your remote access fails. One clever solution is to use LoRa, a long-range radio technology that can send small amounts of data over long distances. One Home Assistant user built a system to control their smart home remotely even when the internet is down. They connected one LoRa radio to their computer at home and carried another with them. A Python script can receive short commands sent from the radio and pass them to Home Assistant through its API. Home Assistant can send replies back through the same system. This allows the user to control their lights, check room temperatures, and even see if Home Assistant is currently running on a UPS due to a power outage, all without needing any internet connection at all. This method is limited by your distance from home, but it can still cover reasonable distances. Home Assistant can't unlock your door if the batteries are dead You need to ensure you have an alternative option This final entry is more of a warning than anything else. Home Assistant can control your smart locks, but only if they have power. If the battery on your smart lock runs out, you may find yourself unable to gain access to your home. You need to ensure that you have an alternative method of entry, such as a physical key or emergency backup power option, so that your smart lock can still be used if the main battery dies. Home Assistant can do a lot, but it still can't come to the front door and unlock it for you. Home Assistant can do (almost) everything In the course of writing this article, I came up with a lot of ideas for things I was convinced Home Assistant couldn't possibly do. For most of them, it turned out that with the right integrations or custom components, Home Assistant absolutely could do them. It's genuinely amazing just how much is possible with this free and open-source software.