The Homelab Bench is an independent site for people who run Home Assistant and prefer hardware they control locally.
We cover the devices that make a self-hosted smart home work: Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter and Thread gear — coordinators, sensors, plugs, thermostats, locks — along with the small servers, mini PCs, NAS boxes and network kit that sit underneath it all.
How we choose what to recommend
Every guide starts with the same questions: does it work without a cloud account, how well does it integrate with Home Assistant (native, ZHA/Zigbee2MQTT, or a community integration), and what do people who actually own it complain about after six months? We read the GitHub issues, the community forum threads and the long-tail reviews, not just the launch coverage.
We don’t accept payment for placement. Some links are affiliate links (see our Affiliate Disclosure), which pay us a small commission at no cost to you and never influence what we recommend.
Who runs this
The Homelab Bench is run from Dublin, Ireland by a long-time Home Assistant user with a Proxmox host in the cupboard and more Zigbee devices than is strictly reasonable. If something in a guide is wrong or out of date, tell us — we’d rather fix it than be wrong: [email protected]