Home Assistant has many official and community add-ons, some of them are absolutely mandatory if you want to have the best functionality for your smart home. We’ve picked the best of them for you!

Duck DNS

FREE DYNAMIC DNS SERVICE WITH LET’S ENCRYPT

Access home assistant when you are not at home

This addon will give you the option to connect your smart home to a free domain name of your own!
How does it works? You just need to install the add-on, register to duckdns.org – choose your domain name, some minor configurations and the add-on will do the rest for you! It’s also combined with Let’s Encrypt which is a private, open source certificate provider that will generate an SSL certificate so you can have the option of encrypted internet protocol (HTTPS) for your home assistant when you are not at home!

MariaDB

Upgrade your Home Assistant Database

Instead of the slow and heavy file-based SQLite DB of HA

MariaDB is an open-source (GPLv2) database which can increase HA performance and disc writes significantly, as HA DB is based on SQLite, which is a file based database.

SAMBA

Share files across different operating systems over a network

Access HA config files through your PC/MAC/Linux on your LAN

Samba share will allow you to share your HA files across your local network and also use your HA server as a home server. It will especially help you if you ever got the configuration wrong and your HA server refuses to go back up – you can just edit the config as a file which is very convenient.