Smart Home

Home Assistant 2026.11: HACS Becomes the Marketplace

By Gabriel Egea Smart Home

Home Assistant 2026.11 is, in the team's own words, the biggest release they have ever shipped. The headline: HACS is now built in as the new Marketplace. On top of that, you can exclude devices from your automations, and entity naming has been completely rethought.

HACS is now the Home Assistant Marketplace

For years, HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) was where you found the custom integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates built by the community. Starting with this release, it becomes part of Home Assistant as the new Marketplace and joins the regular release process.

The goal is that, if you already use HACS, it should feel like only the name changed: everything you installed stays installed and keeps getting updates. And if you never tried it because installing it felt like a hurdle, there is nothing to install anymore: it ships with every installation type, Home Assistant Container included. Everything in the Marketplace is free, and that will not change.

None of this would exist without @ludeeus, who started HACS and donated it to the Open Home Foundation, and all the maintainers and developers who built that ecosystem.

How installing an integration works now

You will find it under Settings > Marketplace. As an administrator, you can browse the catalog and install integrations, cards, themes and templates, with no GitHub account needed and no manual downloading or unpacking of files.

Installing is shorter too. In HACS you downloaded, restarted Home Assistant, went to Devices & services and searched for the integration again. In the Marketplace you select Install and land straight in its setup flow, without a restart. Updates still need a restart for now.

Automations: exclude items from a target

You can finally exclude items from a target. For example: turn on all the lights downstairs except the one in the kitchen. And the exclusion stays smart: add another light to the kitchen next month, and it is left out too.

For homes with many zones and scenes, this makes automations much simpler: no more creating separate groups just to leave something out.

Entity naming: heads-up before you update

More than four years in the making, entity naming got a complete rethink: you name a thing once, and Home Assistant adds the context where it helps.

Be aware: this is a backward-incompatible change. After updating, some names on your dashboards will look different. If you have carefully built dashboards, it is worth reviewing them after the update.

More highlights in this release

The list is long. Some of the highlights:

  • Matter cameras, including the ability to talk back through them.
  • LoRaWAN support to reach the far corners.
  • Batteryless switches with Zigbee Green Power.
  • Backups and media stored on local drives.
  • Dashboard sections that fill themselves, plus copy and paste for sections.
  • Alert card without YAML and color control on light tiles.
  • New ways to find out why something happened: see what triggered it, follow a trace into the script it called, live logs per integration and a record of every action.
  • Remove bad readings from your history and zoom in on charts.
  • 38 new integrations.

Community: Month of What the Heck and Community Day

November is the Month of What the Heck?! again, and this year it is about everyone who lives in your home, including the people who did not set up Home Assistant. If your partner, kids or housemates get annoyed by something, they can share it on the forum.

Also, Saturday, November 7 is Community Day, with 97 meetups in more than 30 countries.

If you want to update your installation, try the Marketplace or review your automations and dashboards after the naming change, EgeaINC can help.

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